So... it's been a while...

And we haven't really worked. Oops. Both of us had to work on graduating, and then working over the summer. I presented that paper in Halifax, and all went well. Oliver's moved to the SF Bay area and is working part time on SETI@home, and I'm going to Stanford soon to get a Ph.D. in computer science.

But the good part!

I'm working on a project that will solve all our woes. Actually that's not true at all, just the woes that stem from having to hard-code all the behavior of our graphics. It's like a smart scene graph that can do math processing and such. I'm really excited about this idea, because it basically takes all the tedium of coding graphics and special effects away from the game programmer, and puts it in the hands of the artist/"technical director". Neato.

If all goes well, this will start working beautifully, and we'll have a cool gadget and a bunch of libraries to work with. Then we can start working on Star Havoc 2 and Duncan and Squire without as much burden on programming the graphics content.

Kris' paper got accepted to Graphics Interface 2003 and will be going to Halifax in June to present it. Check it out here!

Now that Kris' girlfriend went to Spain, he's had more time to work on the graphics engine, hopefully getting shadows and terrain functional some time soon. There's still a lot to work on before this can be a playable game, but we'll work.

Whew, it's been quite a while since the last update. Both of us are quite busy with our studies, work, and research, and sadly we have not had that much time to work on Duncan and Squire. Little by little, things are getting done, but for a while it looks like we'll not have a large chunk of free time to work on it. Graduate school is coming up, and both of us want to go to University of Washington for their graphics program. If we both get in, we'll be able to collaborate better on D&S.

Recently I've been working on a project of interactive physical simulation of deformable characters, where you can toss, bounce, poke, and otherwise molest jiggling objects. We've submitted a paper to Graphics Interface 2003. A link to the project page will be available shortly.

Here's another update! Things are going quite smoothly, as we are 99% done with our level editor, and have a powerful scripting language already created so we can get into the business of creating levels. I (Kris) will now be doing special graphical effects (for example radiosity and dynamics), while Oliver will be busy making a spiffy interface. We'll also be trying to put together some test levels to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Also, I've put up some pics of the real-time elastic deformation that I'm working on. You can find them here.