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Germination X graph of problems
During the Germination X focus test I asked the participants a set of questions in 4 areas based on work we had done at SICS mobile life in Stockholm. This was useful as although there was a lot of information (and a load more free form feedback after the questions) – at least there was…
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Betablocker @ SC2012 livecoding night
I’m travelling to London this weekend to appear as a guest performer with Till Bovermann at the SuperCollider Symposium livecoding night, alongside livecoding all stars Benoit and the Mandelbrots, Thor Magnusson, Alo Allik and Yota Morimoto. Till and I will be collaboratively performing using the betablocker virtual machine, Till running it at audio rate inside…
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Fast HTML5 sprite rendering
After quite a lot of experimentation with HTML5 canvas, I’ve figured out a way to use it with the kind of big isometric game worlds used for Germination X which are built from hundreds of overlapping sprites. There are lots of good resources out there on low level optimisations, but I needed to rethink my…
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Germination X: More on platform independence
More detail on yesterday’s HTML5 canvas version of Germination X. The game engine it uses (known in the source code as “truffle”) is carved up into several layers in order to allow it to make use of HaXe’s cross platform abilities. This is exactly the same concept as used with console games – you set…
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Germination X in HTML5 canvas
I’ve spent a couple of days on an experimental not-quite-working-yet port of Germination X to HTML5. Port is probably a slightly misleading word, as it’s actually running exactly the same HaXE code, it’s just compiled to Javascript rather than swf with a load of extra Javascript filling in the stuff needed to replace Flash. The…
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Hapstar version 0.7
Hapstar has achieved some popularity in the genetics community, the paper has currently racked up 13 citations, including one for it’s use to create a figure for a Nature paper. This version addresses some requests from users, including the ability to save graphs midway though balancing. This means it’s easier to run them for long…
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Germination X at Loading Bar, Falmouth
Where better for doing a game focus group test than in a games cafe? We had a fantastic turn out last night – we actually ran out of space! This was the third Lirec focus test using Germination X, but the first I’ve been physically involved in, and the biggest public event about this game…
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GX: Ancient oaks and tutorial info
Three hundred multicoloured oaks have been scattered around the Germination X world. These trees are all that remains of an ancient forest and require multiple players to find and sow plants around them in order to rejuvenate them into their former glory. This provides a simple additional community activity as well a first attempt at…
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GX: Spirit personalities, asking players for help, twitter
Another Germination X server update happened yesterday, concentrating on the plant spirits. We needed to log the emotional state of the spirits, so I thought twitter could be used for this, similar to the Naked on Pluto cleaner bot. In this case though, all three plant spirits have accounts, so they can have little conversations…