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The Kiwi's TaleWitchBlasterDerelict Blow Stuff Up

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Monkey Demo: Six Degrees of Freedom

New monkey tech demo! Use A/Z to move, and cursor keys to rotate. This could be considered the first public demo of the "BattleSuit" project.

This is an experiment with six degrees of freedom (Being able to freely move relative to X, Y and Z axes, as well as being able to freely rotate on the X, Y and Z axes) perspective rendering, ZBuffering and doing a space backdrop.

I honestly struggled a lot with this, and it took a lot longer than I care to admit. Part of the problem is that I was using tutorials from a bunch of different places, each with their own co-ordinate system and rotation order. Fortunately, it transpires that the Blitz3D source code that deals with geometry is freely available. It would have saved me hours if I knew that when I started! (Cheers Mark)

Also, the weirdness with space and the characters flipping around suddenly is due to issues dealing with 'singularities' when rotating near the "North and South pole" of the co-ordinate system. Not sure if I can really deal with it, if I can think of a solution I'll post an updated version. I'll probably also add this to the Monkey Tech Demo's collection sometime.

Once upon a time

Once upon a time there was a small country called 'Greece'. 

The people of Greece were overjoyed when their country was selected to host a massive International sporting event - The Olympics - even though their country was the smallest to host the games in recent history. 

The right wing Government at the time of the Olympics borrowed heavily, keeping their comparatively generous welfare state afloat and gambling on the hopes that the Olympics would usher in a huge economic boost from increased tourism.

Unfortunately, due in part to a major unanticipated disaster (the 9/11 attacks) the revenue generated by the Olympics was far lower than originally anticipated. The hoped for economic boost never came, and following a global recession the Greek people have wrestled with crippling debt and austerity measures ever since.

 

Once upon a time there was a small country called 'New Zealand'. 

... Okay, I think you know how this one ends.

A sample from Christopher Lee's concept Metal album

"I shed the blood of Saxon Man!"

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Thoughts on increasing Government revenue

My thoughts on how to increase Government revenue without increasing debt, inflation, taxation or nationalising anything.

  1. Establish a website that allows easy donations to the Government from both individuals and corporates. (Note: Some countries do currently allow direct donations to public debt, but few people know this).
  2. Allow donators to earmark exactly what their donations are used for, be it the military, education system, healthcare system and so on.
  3. Allow the donators to, with their consent, have their name and amount published.
  4. Make it extremely easy to view granular "High Score" tables from the site. For instance, it should be easy to view the top ten individual donators for Veteran's Benefits from Sacremento, California.
  5. Apply pressure. For instance, arrange a boycott of purchasing cars from Ford if they donate less to the Environmental Protection Agency than GM does, and vice versa. At a lower level, brag to your neighbours if you're the biggest donator in the local community.
  6. Profit.
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Not on Google Plus yet?

Knock yourself out.

Wait, is it against the TOS to share invite links with the public? Eh, who cares.

Frij and Andrew play Grand Theft Auto 4

Two of my old mates demonstrate glitches in Grand Theft Auto 4's Physics engine during a LAN game. Easily the funniest pure gameplay videos I have seen in a long time.

Frij's video:

Andrew's video:

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Spacescape

Spacescape is one of those neat little tools that just takes a few parameters, and then uses rules and randomisation to produce something magical.

It's excellent for producing "sky boxes" of space scenes. In essence, it generates six textures that can be applied to the front, back, left, right, top and bottom of a 3D scene to create the illusion of space. You create the textures simply by making layers of stars and noise (for nebulae etc).

Although it's certainly possible to do very indepth stuff with it, I ended up just making a few tweaks to one of the examples to use as the new sky box for Derelict and Firestart. I have to say, it has made looking through the windows in both games far more spectacular.

Spacescape is both free and open source, and can be downloaded at the author's site here.

Incase you didn't know

There's an RSS feed for comments on this site, if you want Google Reader notification of what's being said.

Also, as of writing, the Mode 7 demo has claimed the top spot at the Monkey Coder's application list. Sweet.

Astrobunny at Overload

An anime fan who goes by the handle of Astrobunny attended Overload this year and wrote a blog post about his experience. A quote:

A bit of good loot from the event. Overall it was fun for about the first hour of being there, but after that I just became preoccupied with finishing Earok’s games at the booth, and then proceeded to also finish their other unpublished but very fun games.

I can't remember how many times I beat the various games in co-operative mode with people there, there was even one time I played through almost all of Derelict with someone.

Astrobunny has also posted a photo of me playing someone at Witchblaster, and a copy of the Earok 2011 collection amongst his Overload haul.

Hat tip: Anthony

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Earok's Monkey Demos are out

Just a brief note to say that the source code for my recent Monkey Demos are out. I think this is pretty much the first time I've open sourced anything.

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