Tag Archives: Ideas

Sep 15 2010
Myst Projects

Myst Project II: Riven Photosynth

The next in my series of Myst Projects.

This one is very theoretical, because I have no idea how it would work, except manually, but it would be very useful, and cool.

You have probably heard of Photosynth before, Microsoft’s tool for stitching together photos to make a virtual re-creation of the place or object in the photos. It lets you swivel around an object, or virtuallyy explore commonly-photographed landmarks. It’s all very cool.

Now here’s the Myst connection. If there was some kind of tool like this, but for Riven, it could take Riven screenshots and stitch them together based on the objects in the game, creating easy-to-use 360° views.

“What good would that be?” you ask. Well, consider the submarine on Jungle Island. If you walk up to the place where you first find it resting, you can see these 3 views (and others in between these) on the way there:

That’s all well and good, but what if you want to see the back of the submarine? Of course it’s possible to see it:

But how do you get there? Here’s how:

So I trust you understand now why this would be awesome. Of course, I don’t plan on doing this project myself, because I have absolutely no idea how it would work. I just had the idea, and figured I should tell people. If you have any idea of how it would work, let me know and maybe we can try to get it working. For now, file it under “hypothetical”.

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Jul 18 2006
Life in general

Ideas on Dreams

I used to have a dream theory, which stated that the instant you realize you are dreaming is the instant you begin to wake up. This made perfect sense, because as you begin to regain conciousness you become aware that you were dreaming, so I figured they were connected.

Well, it appears I was wrong. I learned yesterday about Lucid Dreams, which are dreams that you can control. This occurs when you’re dreaming and you realize you’re dreaming. You are then in control of your subconcious mind, allowing you to do virtually anything in your own little dream world! This idea really appeals to me, because I think it would be extremely cool to do anything I wanted and not be restrained by physics or laws or any other restraints in the physical world.

The Wikipedia article lists ways of having Lucid Dreams, such as reality tests. These involve doing things in the awake world which usually do not happen in the dream world, such as pinching youself and feeling pain, reading text properly, etc. The idea is that if you do these tests enough in real life (where they will always pass, you feel pain if you pinch yourself and text does not change by itself), you will eventually dream about yourself doing one of these tests, and of course the test will fail in your dream (where you feel no pain and text can change itself at will). When you see the test fail, you realize you are dreaming and are placed in control. Very cool.

To help myself try to become Lucid and have better dream recall, I have started a Dream Log to record any and all dreams I have in. Congratulations, you can now read my subconcious mind. Freud would have a field day 😛

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May 25 2006
1 Comment
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GodMod – The Game

Ok this is the “second draft” of the post I lost…

While I was sitting in school getting bored (what else is new these days?) yesterday, a great idea struck me for a video game. It would be called GodMod – The Game. It’s a flash-based two person online game, mostly text based but with a few animations.

I made this mockup image to help explain:


(yes, those avatars are temporary placeholders, not final 😉 )

The idea is this. You have 1 minute to type the most godmodding (see excerpt) description of your opponent’s death you can think of. This can involve anything you want, from Seppeku to dinosaurs to landmines to just plain fire to rabid hamsters. So you type it in Area 1, then after one minute has passed the entries are submitted (regardless of whether you’re done or not).

This is where the code kicks in. The program scans the entries for keywords (such as Hari Kiri, Dinosaurs, Flames, etc.) and key phrases, and scores each entry according to how many keywords were used and how descriptive they are. The winning entry is displayed in Area 2.

As a bonus, the winning entry is then animated in Area 3. The losing character acts out the description (approximately), according to what keywords/phrases it found in the winning entry. For example, if the word ‘fire’ was found, it would burst into flames. I think that the game would be hard to make, but very rewarding.

Godmodding refers to when a player describes the outcome of their own actions against another character. For example, player A stating, “A strikes B and B takes damage” would be considered godmodding on the part of player A in most situations. In the game, you wouldn’t include yourself in the description, just the outcome.

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