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Habitat

February 12, 09 //
3

Ear­lier this week I picked up the book Rogue Lead­ers: The Story of Lucasarts by Rob Smith. There’s an inter­est­ing his­tory that cap­ti­vated me from the get-go, pri­mar­ily because I’m a part of this fas­ci­nat­ing lineage.

Lucasarts & Quan­tum Link

Habitat coverLucasarts (then called Lucas­film Games) was founded by Peter Langston, a musician/game designer who hand-picked a group of young and eager game design­ers to cre­ate orig­i­nal game properties.

In 1985 Lucasarts was work­ing on a Com­modore 64 vir­tual com­mu­nity game (cou­pled with a 300-baud modem attach­ment) called Habi­tat.

In the game you were to cre­ate an “avatar” (yes, they coined the term in this con­text), pick­ing from a selec­tion of col­ors and clothes using the “GET” and “PUT” com­mands and then chat and inter­act with other peo­ple within a some­what graph­i­cal UI.

They part­nered with a com­pany called Quan­tum Link to pro­vide the on-line ser­vice com­po­nent and dis­trib­uted a beta test. How­ever, the game itself proved to be too pop­u­lar and their servers couldn’t han­dle the load, so it was can­celed never mak­ing it to retail.

Mean­while the tech­nol­ogy was sold to Fijitsu in 1989 and was later renamed Club Caribe.

Post­mortem

Lucasarts went on to cre­ate many orig­i­nal gam­ing prop­er­ties (suc­cess­ful adven­ture games like Maniac Man­sion, Grim Fan­dango and Day of the Ten­ta­cle) and Quan­tum Link even­tu­ally changed their name to Amer­ica Online.

The rest is history.

Addi­tional reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Quantum-Link
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Habitat-(video-game) 

Joost!

April 24, 07 //
122

Update: Thanks to the gen­eros­ity of Joost allow­ing unlim­ited invites every­one who added a com­ment and those who leave a com­ment from this point on will receive an invite.

Joost [logo]For weeks on end I’ve been patiently wait­ing for a Joost beta invite. Why am I so excited about some­thing that on the sur­face seems like Tivo™ for the web?

There’s an easy answer for that, so let me spill it. Before I do that how­ever, I’d like to thank Paul for send­ing me the invite.

Joost Oozes With Quality

It doesn’t take a spe­cial decoder ring to fig­ure out what Joost does. The offi­cial site describes its func­tion­al­ity quite perfectly:

The magic of tele­vi­sion, with the power of the inter­net built right in. Joost puts you in con­trol, and TV will never be the same again.

This could be con­strued as a bold claim, as if the creators/developers/masterminds (the peo­ple respon­si­ble for Skype and Kazaa) behind this oper­a­tion could not pos­si­bly con­vince them­selves otherwise.

Yet, when you con­nect the dots, eval­u­at­ing the whole enchi­lada for a ser­vice like this (brand­ing, web site and tech­nol­ogy) you can’t help but be enthralled by the polish.

Spec­trums, Rain­bows and Magic

Have you ever looked through a spec­trum? There’s a infi­nite amount of col­ors that appear if you hold one up to a light source. It’s inter­est­ing that the cre­ators of Joost chose to theme their ser­vice around the con­cept of spec­trums and color vari­ety. Although, I must admit they do look a bit like col­ored Kryp­tonite, not that there’s any­thing wrong with that.

Ear­lier today I was doing my best to describe the pro­mo­tional video on the What’s Joost? sec­tion to a friend. Halfway into explain­ing how cool it was I real­ized it’s just one of those things you have to see for yourself.

At first glance the demon­stra­tion video seems a bit awk­ward, or at least it did to me. After watch­ing it I real­ized it seems famil­iar and that’s because it’s some­what like a med­ley of Bat­ter­ies Not Included, Cocoon, The Last Starfighter and Tron. Like I said, you need to see it first­hand because my descrip­tion just won’t cut it.

Beta Means Slim Pickings

I would say that my only beef with the ser­vice is that the chan­nel offer­ings are slim at best and the video out­put ranges from near DVD qual­ity to sub par Youtube qual­ity. One moment it looks great, the next it just dis­tracts from the over­all expe­ri­ence but I’m sure in time it’ll improve.

As far as the con­tent is con­cerned other than watch­ing some “vin­tage” Ren & Stimpy car­toons with my daugh­ter and a cou­ple Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel spe­cials on lions and pyra­mids, there’s noth­ing else that peaks my inter­est for the time being.

That will change as Joost con­tin­ues to sign con­tent providers but in the interim there just isn’t a lot to con­sume at the moment. Although, this is still in beta so that’s just par for the course. Joost has promised to con­tinue sign­ing con­tent providers; for instance, they just added a vari­ety of shows from providers like Com­edy Cen­tral, VH1 (the chan­nel you switch on when you’re bored, or, at least I do) and MTV.

Beta Invites

If you haven’t expe­ri­ence Joost yet, well, that’s just not right. I’ll tell you what, leave a com­ment and I’ll use the magic of the inter­nets (and a handy script to ran­domly select a num­ber) to choose three lucky peo­ple to send an invite to.

Ready, set, go! 

The Legacy of Matthew Carter

December 12, 06 //
1

Matthew Carter [profile]Matthew Carter, born British but now resid­ing in the Boston area, is the cre­ative force behind many widely used fonts today includ­ing Ver­dana, Tahoma, Geor­gia, New Cen­tury School­book and Hel­vetica, to name a few.

Carter began his career as a tra­di­tional type­face designer, study­ing under Jan Van Krimpen’s assis­tant P. H. Raedisch, where he learned the dis­tinc­tive craft of punch cut­ting and even­tu­ally tran­si­tioned into using dig­i­tal meth­ods to cre­ate his fonts, a more expe­dited method than tra­di­tional processes.

In a pre­sen­ta­tion given to mem­bers of the AIGA (New York Chap­ter), Carter reflected on his many expe­ri­ences with devel­op­ing the fonts he’s so famously known for and revealed that many, if not all of his cre­ations, were inspired by actual type­faces from his­tor­i­cal architecture.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, Matthew Carter “co-founded the Bit­stream type foundry in 1981, which he left in 1991 to form the Carter & Cone type foundry with Cherie Cone.”

Bit­stream, Inc. was a first of its kind, a com­pany formed solely for the pur­pose of the pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of dig­i­tal fonts and their respec­tive licenses. Unlike tra­di­tional type foundries, where the typog­ra­phers would sell wood and metal type­faces, Bit­stream dealed exclu­sively with dig­i­tal fonts.

If not for the hard work and impres­sive efforts of Matthew Carter, design­ers would be lim­ited as far as font selec­tion for print and web.

Whether he knows it or not, Matthew Carter has left behind a legacy that will con­tinue to thrive in future gen­er­a­tions, all because of his desires to pre­serve his­tor­i­cal typefaces.

 

Teachers, Wii and Spore

May 18, 06 //
8

Here are a few ran­dom thoughts that I’ve had through­out this week, that on their own could poten­tially be expanded, but for the time being will remain in crys­tal­lized form:

Ele­men­tary Schools and Teachers

ChalkboardEver since I accepted a posi­tion work­ing as a cleaner (jan­i­tor, cus­to­dian, slop mop guy) at an ele­men­tary school I’ve gained a new per­spec­tive and greater appre­ci­a­tion in regards to every­thing that occurs behind the scenes.

Prior to work­ing at an ele­men­tary school, I had a very one-dimensional view of how schools actu­ally ran, see­ing as though my last encounter with a pee­wee edu­ca­tional fortress was many years ago.

Yet, when you pull back the cur­tain and real­ize that teach­ers have flaws, library shelves do in fact get dusty and there’s a bit­ter­sweet human ele­ment to it all that’s hard to describe, only then do you real­ize why schools con­tin­u­osly run themselves.

All of this boils down to the teach­ers them­selves, who in turn are modi­vated by their student’s achieve­ments, which fuels their inner pas­sion to edu­cate, look­ing past the spit­balls and dirty looks, know­ing full well at the other end there will be a result.

On that note, since we live in the era of Google, I was think­ing how much smarter a teacher can seem if he or she has access to a com­puter in their room. With Wikipedia and Google at their fin­ger­tips, said teacher can instan­ta­neously look up unlim­ited sub­ject mat­ter, print or project, and con­tribute end­less amounts of infor­ma­tion to the edu­ca­tion process.

It’s really fas­ci­nat­ing, con­sid­er­ing when I was younger all we had is an Apple II and maybe, depend­ing on if you were good or not, Ore­gon Trail with buf­falo shoot­ing action all at a gru­el­ing pace.

Wii!

For weeks on end I’ve been think­ing about Nintendo’s recently unvieled and renamed con­sole, Wii. I’ll admit that at first I was a bit taken back by the name (shocked even), see­ing as though the con­sole and it’s premise sounds kind of silly.

How­ever, after think­ing about it some I’ve grown to actu­ally love “Wii” and all it has to offer. Espe­cially after see­ing the slew of E3 demos that have popped up on sites like YouTube and Gamespot.

There’s just no deny­ing the fact that you’re no longer just play­ing, but par­tic­i­pat­ing in a game using their Wii-mote, which looks like your aver­age TV remote but rec­og­nizes 3D space and move­ment. How cool is that? Way cool!

Spore

With sites like Total Spore appear­ing out of thin air, there’s some­thing intrigu­ing and unde­ni­ably mouth water­ing about Will Wright’s newest sim cre­ation, Spore, that has the media and blo­gos­phere and maybe your neigh­bors in a gam­ing frenzy.

Spore isn’t just going to change the way peo­ple look at sim­u­la­tion games, it’s going to turn the gam­ing realm upside down. From the pre­views to demo footage and demon­stra­tions given by Wright him­self, it appears to be a mish mash of evo­lu­tion, cre­ation, old school gam­ing, clay mod­el­ing, strat­egy and sci-fi (amongst other things) all rolled into one.

I haven’t been this excited about a video game in years, not since I first laid eyes on Sim­c­ity and Populous. 

Game Pixel Art

December 17, 05 //
16

I’m often fas­ci­nated how some­one can cre­ate illus­tra­tions out of tiny pix­els. To me it’s no dif­fer­ent than a more technologically-advanced form of Lite Brite art and it’s some­thing, albeit jagged in appear­ance, that I’ve come to admire through­out the years.

Pixel art, now a full-blown art scene and expe­ri­ence depend­ing on who you ask, was some­thing I became famil­iar with in the early-80s (post Pong era) while play­ing video games in the arcade and on the Atari, where I clocked in sev­eral hours play­ing Frog­ger and Dig Dug. At the time it seemed a bit sur­real that just a hand­ful of green-colored dots rep­re­sented Frogger.

Toss in a lim­ited color palette and you (as Frog­ger) were faced with all kinds of ene­mies includ­ing speed­ing cars, hunger-surpressed gators and logs a plenty. Now it seems quite pri­ma­tive and even then it did as well, but still, it’s noth­ing less than admirable to think that we’ve (and by we, I mean those who enjoy gam­ing as a past­time) been star­ing at col­ored squares for years on end.

In later years pixel art became more detailed and at times, depend­ing on the game, there were sequences where I would be blown away at how beau­ti­ful the onscreen art­work looked. Games that stood out in my mind, even to this day, were the Castl­e­va­nia, Con­tra and Super Mario series on the Super Nin­tendo as well as Another World and Flashback.

I’m sure there were oth­ers, but those games in par­tic­u­lar inspired me to cre­ate my own pixel art after pick­ing up a copy of the now defunct Klik and Play by Maxis (even­tu­ally resold to Click­team), which I believe has since been rolled into other soft­ware pack­ages after being acquired by another com­pany years later.

Accord­ing to the pack­ag­ing, Klik and Play was the “ulti­mate game cre­ation soft­ware for the PC” and allowed any­one, so long as you were will­ing to accept the rather steep learn­ing curve, to cre­ate your very own 16-bit games with the aide of sim­ple pro­gram­ming and pixel art.

Hon­estly, I paid less atten­tion to the game cre­ation aspects and instead focused on cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful pixel art. Within a few moments of exper­i­ment­ing I real­ized that it wasn’t as easy as I had ini­tially thought. Despite what I had con­vinced myself prior, this wasn’t the same as pick­ing up a brush, dip­ping it in paint and spread­ing it across a canvas.

On the con­trary, cre­at­ing pixel art takes a great deal of patience and an under­stand­ing that what­ever you’ve set out to cre­ate dig­i­tally is only a few hun­dred (thou­sand, mil­lion) pix­els away. Yet, you need not let that deter you because once you’ve reached that goal and are able to look at some­thing that’s com­plete, it’s a feel­ing like you’ve just been climb­ing Mt. Vesu­vius and finally reached the peak. 

Firefox in the Ghetto

May 6, 05 //
5

Firefox in the Ghetto (hi-res)

A lit­tle bit of time, patience, imag­i­na­tion and a copy of Pho­to­shop CS2 cre­ates play­ful results like this. At the time I believe I was chan­nel­ing East L.A. (Cheech Marin would be proud). 

Adobe CS2 Woes

April 8, 05 //
14

Creative SuiteI recently pur­chased the entire Adobe Cre­ative Suite about two months ago, pat­ting myself on the back for invest­ing in soft­ware which helps aide in my cre­ativ­ity. A few weeks later, as prob­a­bly every­one is aware, Adobe announced a new update — avail­able in May — to the Cre­ative Suite, dub­bing it CS2 (or appro­pri­ately Cre­ative Suite 2).

One of the coolest fea­tures included in the update is the Van­ish­ing Point, a tool which allows you to dig­i­tally “clone, brush, and paste ele­ments that auto­mat­i­cally match the per­spec­tive of any image area.” Since I had pur­chased it in Feb­ru­ary I fig­ured I’d qual­ify for the free upgrade which Adobe calls the “Post Announce­ment Upgrade”.

Appar­ently the only peo­ple who qual­ify for the upgrade are those who’ve pur­chased CS 1.3 between April 1st and July 31st, 2005. What con­fuses me is the fact that noone would pur­chase the orig­i­nal CS when they could have the Cre­ative Suite 2 for the same price, so I pro­pose that Adobe revise their free upgrade pol­icy, allow­ing those who’ve pur­chased pre­vi­ous ver­sions of their soft­ware within 90 days before the announce­ment to qual­ify, not the other way around. Accord­ing to one of the sales­peo­ple I spoke with at Adobe their pol­icy can account for a cer­tain amount of time before the announce­ment date, but they aren’t allowed to dis­close that information.

Adobe, I love your soft­ware but your upgrade pol­icy needs some tweaking. 

Half-Life 2

November 17, 04 //
28

Half-Life 2 Review Teaser 

Green and Purple Tentacles

October 18, 04 //
6

Day of the TentacleThe year was 1993. My brother and I were brows­ing the soft­ware sec­tion at Com­pUSA, thumb­ing through var­i­ous CD’s, see­ing if any of them caught our eye. Off in the cor­ner of the store I can remem­ber a kid play­ing Prince of Per­sia 2 and my brother and I stand­ing behind him in utter amaze­ment. As an observer, the game looked extremely dif­fi­cult and com­pletely dif­fer­ent than your stan­dard Mario adventure.

We decided that while it looked cool enough, we needed some­thing with less action and more humor and game­play. Since we were fans of the King’s Quest series, we opted to search for an adven­ture game in the same vein as the Roberta William’s clas­sics and yet some­thing with spunk. Sev­eral min­utes of search­ing finally yielded some­thing of inter­est. The game, enti­tled Maniac Man­sion: Day of the Ten­ta­cle stood out like a sore thumb.

On a side note I should men­tion that most of the time I pur­chase a prod­uct based entirely on the pack­ag­ing, which is both a good and bad thing. In this instance, the pack­ag­ing for Day of the Ten­ta­cle had a great color scheme (deep pur­ple con­trasted by “slime” green) with what appeared to be a pur­ple ten­ta­cle, ray gun in hand, chas­ing a nerd off the bot­tom right cor­ner of the box. It was pack­ag­ing genius in the purest sense of the word and after scan­ning the box we real­ized it was the sequel to one of our favorite Lucasarts adven­ture games, Maniac Man­sion. At that point I think we both turned to one another and real­ized we were hold­ing some­thing spe­cial and how right we were.

Day of the Ten­ta­cle, also known as DOTT, was the brain­child of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, bet­ter known as the duo respon­si­ble for the orig­i­nal Maniac Man­sion released in 1988. Maniac Man­sion was pow­ered by the Script Cre­ation Util­ity for Maniac Man­sion, SCUMM for short, devel­oped by Ron Gilbert and Aric Wilmunder. In later years, SCUMM would serve as the foun­da­tion for sev­eral pop­u­lar Lucasarts titles includ­ing the Mon­key Island series, Sam & Max Hit the Road, The Dig and another Schafer cre­ation, Full Throttle.

In recent times, thanks to the rec­ti­fi­ca­tion and per­sis­tency of fans, a group of devel­op­ers have cre­ated Scum­mVM, a vir­tual machine for clas­sic Lucasarts adven­tures. In a nut­shell, it allows you to run older Lucasarts adven­ture games on mod­ern rigs (PC and OS X), emu­lat­ing to the ‘T’ the SCUMM engine with­out so much as a sput­ter. Due to the fact Scum­mVM is released under a GPL license, the soft­ware has been ported over to run on the Dream­cast con­sole, not to men­tion other gam­ing machines, hand­helds and cell phones even. 

Panorama Llama

October 6, 04 //
16

A client of mine recently con­tacted me in regards to putting “inter­ac­tive” panoramic videos on their web site, sim­il­iar to those typ­i­cally found on realty sites. The prepa­ra­tion for this kind of job isn’t extra­or­di­nary nor is it dif­fi­cult but it is time con­sum­ing and in this instance patience is cer­tainly a virtue.

First, you have to decide whether or not you’ll be using a con­ven­tional or dig­i­tal cam­era. Depend­ing on what you use, the results will vary in qual­ity clar­ity, and res­o­lu­tion. Using a tri­pod is rec­om­mended and impor­tant in order to line up your pho­tos and mea­sure your shots incrementally.

For 360 degree images, it’s sug­gested that you take between 12–15 pic­tures depend­ing on the lens of your cam­era. The eas­i­est way to accom­plish this is to think of the num­ber posi­tions on a clock and take each photo at these posi­tions, sim­il­iar to the mil­i­tary tech­nique of plot­ting points on a landscape.

Each photo should over­lap about 15% 33–50% (thanks Erik) and with a decent tri­pod it’s just a mat­ter of mea­sur­ing and esti­mat­ing. Most panoramic soft­ware will blend these images seam­lessly and allow you to line up (using an onion skin effect) adja­cent pho­tos. Some­times this is referred to as “stitch­ing” and depend­ing on the soft­ware you use this is either han­dled auto­mat­i­cally or man­u­ally, but you’ll find that no mat­ter how per­fect it seems you’ll most likely have to fid­get with the pho­tos in order to pro­duce the desired effect.

If you’re savvy enough with Flash and would much rather not pur­chase off the shelf soft­ware, you could always use Action­script to pro­gram a panoramic viewer. For the less tech­ni­cally inclined or for those who have a shorter time frame you’ll find that most panoramic soft­ware, like Panorama Fac­tory will out­put the results in the Quick­time for­mat, which has built in VR capa­bil­i­ties (zoom in, zoom out, pan).

That said, have you ever cre­ated panoramic pho­tos and if so, what soft­ware did you use? 

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