dave’s blog of art and programming

user generated content

One of the things you have to do if you work with foam is to write research reports. These are done at the end of a phase of work, and give a personal record of the decisions and path you took for an individual project. This is a good way to accumulate knowledge and compare different ways of working. This is my one for the groworld project and mostly comes from this blog actually, as well as a bit more detail about what was going on at the time.

Things are getting more interesting with the growth script. The resource map used by the lifeforms is now drained as they use up the energy available. This energy doesn’t grow back, and so puts a limit on the time a fixed world can sustain life. The nodes have another trick up their sleeve though – energy flows upstream along the connections, so older nodes (who have drained their surroundings) are sustained for a time by the energy captured by their dependants.

This is the same growth algorithm as the video I posted on Tuesday, but with a non-uniform resource – painted with a texture map. There is a bug meaning that failed connections aren’t deleted, but I like the way that islands are colonised. Posting here I just noticed the similarity with the hapstar graphs…

Some animation tests. Inspiration from geological and growth processes, and with any luck, eventually their interaction.

I’m trying to start the year catching up with documentation – here’s a new video of the latest version of plant eyes:

I’ve also added a page for it with some more information here.

I’ll be doing a presentation of groworld including some live demos of the game prototypes tomorrow at the christmas dorkbot london. It’ll also be good to see what Sarah Angliss has been doing lately with robotics, Alex’s acid sketching and the other good stuff being presented.

I’ve got plant growth working in the wilderness game world, and a lot of client server stuff in so players can see what other people have grown in the game. I’m basing my code from the excellent haxeChat example as it’s very unfamiliar territory for me. Unfortunately the remaining issue is how to get the server running securely, so it isn’t live yet, just a screenshot for now:

These are the plant sprites I’ve been using (drawn on a boring train journey this weekend). They are quite badly made homages of my favorite groworld patabotanical illustrations.

I’m not sure if this is another groworld game prototype or something else at the moment. Use the cursor keys to move around, when you get to the edge of the visible bit of world you can step into the next (as long there is not water on the other side). It’s a pseudo infinite wilderness, very much inspired by SpinDizzy, and feeling boxed in while playing FarmVille.

These are the tiles it’s using:

The original svg is with the code in svn.

I'd also add that selected ambient works is good listening while drawing sprites :)

A video documenting the froesjels event in Brussels last month:

I’m particularly a fan of Bart’s edible solar cells project

I spent last week in Budapest, the first half was a lirec consortium meeting. We spent Tuesday morning finding out about dog and human behaviour at the Department of Ethology at the Eötvös Loránd University. I think the most facinating part for me was the area of human understanding of dog vocalisation, as we have mutually developed a complex communication system with dogs over the last 100,000 years, with very little in the way of what we usually call language.

I also spent a couple of days at the wonderful kibu (or kitchen budapest) meeting up with Gabor and Agoston, doing a presentation about groworld and the resilients project with Nik, and talking a lot about fluxus.