Week 9 summary
Alice: Lessons Learned from Building a 3D System for Novices
Alice is a project aimed at facilitating users without a technical or mathematical background to create 3D animated content. The original system targeted 100 undergraduate students without any programming experience. The system was developed iteratively by observing these students and their interaction with Alice. The system was mostly built in Python and supports user scripting in Python. One of the major contributions of the system was building a 3D interaction system without an explicit global XYZ coordinate system. Instead all translations are described in relation with the object such as move up, down, left, right, front or back. All rotations are described with respect to surrounding objects. Many functions are overloaded with several keyword parameters to allow the users to specify arbitrarily complex operations but only when they feel the need to do so. The system uses implicit multithreading to support synchronous animations on multiple objects. The scripting language for Alice is case insensitive and all the bounded scalar parameters have the same range from 0.0 to 1.0, always. These are some of the decisions taken based on the author’s careful study over a period of 4 years.
I have worked on visual scripting tools built into Cryengine and Unreal Kismet built into UDK. These visual scripting environments are quite powerful yet easy to understand and work with. You essentially create flow charts for entire games from predefined functions and objects. These modern environments have taken cues from systems like Alice and made difficult tasks like game development more tangible for several users. I believe Alice was a step in the right direction and that more such systems would be commonplace in the near future.
DART: A Toolkit for Rapid Design Exploration of Augmented Reality Experiences
-Blair MacIntyre1, Maribeth Gandy2, Steven Dow1 and Jay David Bolter3
DART is a project aimed at bringing AR development to the designers. The authors observe that traditional AR development platforms are geared towards computer scientists who do not or cannot create interesting content. They believe that if AR is to become main stream then tools need to be developed catering to the production cycle of typical designers. DART is an attempt at one such tool. DART is completely built on top of Macromedia Director, a commercial full-featured content authoring tool. DART provides many tools for rapid prototyping using sketched 2D content while skilled artists develop equivalent 3D content at the same time. This also allows early testing of the overall user experience and changes can be made early in the project. DART supports capture and replay of video and tracker data allowing designers to replay use cases on multiple system prototypes. The marker tracking is done intelligently and return coordinates in respect to a stable world co-ordinate system as opposed to most other systems that return coordinates with respect to the camera position (eg Argon). Overall, DART is a commendable effort to make AR a viable media by bringing power to the designers.
The Effect of Latency and Network Limitations on MMORPGs (A Field Study of Everquest2)
-Tobias Fritsch, Hartmut Ritter, Jochen Schiller
This paper describes the recent surge in the number of online massively multiplayer games and the problems that it has uncovered with regards to server management. The paper studies Everquest a second generation MMORPG and describes some tests and corresponding results for this game. The authors observe that despite all the optimizations done in Everquest latency still remains an issue when managing the huge worlds supported by MMOs. Tactics like clients running local copies of the game can be used to create an illusion of low latency but these come with their own set of problems. In conclusion this paper studies, tests and draws conclusions on current architectures used by MMOs and suggests a need for better techniques to resolve the issues with current systems.
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