I’m still trying to sort it all out, but I am making some headway.

1) Don’t collapse on the couch when you get home.
This sounds a bit odd, but the moment your ass hits a soft cushy sofa, thats usually the end of your day. Motivation is usually killed at that moment where you lean back and let out a big yawn. I’ve found that the moment i get home if i set up infront of my laptop and crack open maya and start right away i can actually stay in gear from work and continue for a couple of hours before the sirens calling from my sofa win and it draws me in.

2) Cancel cable tv.
Seems like a lame luddite panzy tree hugging statement, but really. your tv is for your xbox, nothing more. time spent on watching jersey shore is better spent practicing home brain surgery. The effect of both will do the same amount of damage to your brain, but at least with one you might have learned a bit about how your brain works.

Since ive tossed out my tv, ive learned how to weld, sew, run a cnc machine, program in f# and c#, ive started a few fun side projects, one of which made it to a working game demo on the nintendo DS, and I’ve written a book on unreal and its on sale on Amazon. If i had a tv i might know more about why everybody loves raymond, not that i want to.

3) Talk about the project with people at work.
Having your co-workers ask how your progress on your side project is going is motivation to actually make progress. Its also a good indicator if your game is interesting or not. if you tell your friends about your game and they never ask about it again, you can assume they think its a lame waste of time and dont want to talk about it. Consider doing something more interesting, its likely you are wasting your own time as well.

There are other bits of wisdom but they start to become more personal, and unique to each person. Much of space vikings is influenced by listening to bolt thrower and slayer. Music as a motivator is good, but I dont expect to share my grooveshark playlist with someone making a game about befriending dolphins.

In reality lets think about what a motion controller is compared to a D-pad. A D-pad is a hand held device with buttons and potentiometers. The xbox has twelve buttons and 4 axes of movement and two more analog triggers. The Playstation has the same twleve buttons, but ten axes of motion as well as two more analog triggers.

The sony move with the second controller has ten axes of movement, and ten buttons. the kinect, using the human skeleton has twenty points in 3d space of which ten are truly usable providing as many as thirty axes of movement, voice control and a color camera. what makes these easier to control?

its my belief that its the game itself which make the experience easier or harder, not the controller. what is the real difference? in all of the focus testing ive seen with the kinect everyone has coordination problems trying to use their body as a control device. thats because people dont know how to use their own body as a controller.

to make up for the fact that people are un coordinated (awkward) the publisher always asks the game developers to make changes which allow for this lack of coordination, but still provide an experience where the player doesnt feel stupid.

the end result is a game where you take coordinated body movements out of the equation and allow for clumbsy people to be successful, and not learn to use their body as a controller. i see this changing in the future.

when games were first introduced we had a wheel to turn to play a video game, pong was a 1 axes of movement game. some people caught onto this easily, some better than others. playing pong was a skill, an easy skill, but a new skill no less.

with a joystick we got two axes of movement, then with an atari we had two axes and a button. mpre and more games started coming out with more and more complexity. controllers from nintendo started with an a and b button as well as a plus shaped two axes control pad, sega added another button, a b and c.

the escalation of the controller got crazy with the first sony playstation controller, which defined a couple of generations of game consoles with two analog sticks. at what point did things get to a point where gamers were the only ones who could understand how to use these controllers?

the wii was introduced replacing one of the analog sticks with an ir camera to point, and electronics to read hand movement. effectively hiding some buttons, but not adding complexity to the controller, brilliant.

while its true that there were suddebly more people buying games and playing motion controled games, but was it only because of motion control? could it be that the games that were selling with the new controller were just easy to learn and easy to play, and that low barrier of entry into games is what sold the wii?

the point being that i can write a game that uses the wii controller or kinect or move in such a way that you must be a tai chi master, and a true yogi, as well as a gamer to play the game. ive written game interfaces which require precise body positioning to perform specific moves in the game. these body positions require practice, a lot of real practice to pull off.

mere descriotion is not enough to tell a new player how to throw a fireball in some of the interfaces ive written. after some actual training, in real life, i can teach people how to throw a fireball. its not easy, and its a real skill. its much harder to do than half-circle + a.

im expecting a generation of hardcore kinect and move games. games which require style, form, and practice to play. im writing such a game, im hoping to convince the hardcore gamer that the kinect is not for casual games, and neither is the sony move.

i think with thirty axes of freedom, you can make a seriously hard game to master, but still keep the base controls easy to learn. its just up to the game developer to write their game in a way that has easy to learn basic control, but depth is discovered by the player by learning how to use the controls, ie their body.

all of this points me to thinking that forcing such a complex and deep control system into a casual format is self defeating. coordinated human movement is a skill, ask any dancer, martial artist, or yoga expert, its something you must learn.

microsoft and sony are limiting themselves by limiting how coordinated you must be to play a motion control game, and many developers are running away because the dont understand they are being faced with a controller which requires real coordination.

its time to look the kinect right in its laser matrix eye and the moves high res high speed camera and go toe to toe head to head and fist to fist. fight the idea that motion controls are for panzy gamers, and tackle the real issue and force yourself to move in a coordinated way and write games for the hardcore, and prepare for game-fu.

TS-239 Pro II+ Turbo NAS

tonight I’ll be setting up my TS-239 Pro II+ Turbo NAS for my UDK project. I’ll be getting Mercurial HG setup as well for project sharing. Wee! fun.

The setup and use will be going into my next UDK book.

As a kinect game developer, this is something that’s really useful. I can tell when the arms are bent and to what angle they are bent, then after a certain angle change something in the game. So in unreal script I’d get three points, one for the shoulder the elbow and the hand.

So I want to make a function that returns a value. If it’s something I can read, even better. so I’ll start with this code and I’ll explain the parts later.

[box type="shadow"]

function float CalculateAngle3Point(vector P1, vector P2, vector P3)
{
local vector V1, V2;
local float Angle;

V1 = Normal(P2-P1);
V2 = Normal(P2-P3);

Angle = Acos( V1 dot V2 ) * 180/pi;
return Angle;
}

[/box]

So to start our function we use “function float” this means that this function will return a floating point number value. so we can actually have “myAngle=CalculateAngle3Point(Shoulder, Elbow, Hand);” and myAngle would be something like 45.8940 if we log it. and our arm is bent up. This is rather useful no?

then we add in two vectors each one will be the elbow –  hand, and elbow – shoulder. this will give us two new directions away from the elbow. if we log V1 we might get a small number for x,y, and z because they’re normalized to just giving us a direction. Each one will be pointed away from one another.

To get the angle between these two vectors we use Acos( V1 dot V2) this will return a number between 0 and 3.1415 or Pi. to get a number like degrees out of this we multiply the number, which happens to be a raidan by 180/pi. then we simply use return to give the function an outgoing value.

cheers!