С Новым годом!

Дорогие мои ребята! 

С волшебным праздником  вас!

Чтобы школа делала, если бы не 9 Б. (Благодарность учителей за новогодние праздники).

С новым годом!

Девочки и мальчики! :)
Так и тянет написать: "От всей души поздравляю Вас с Новым годом!". :)
Не сопротивляюсь этому желанию.
Вот знаете, моя Машка уже подросла и знает, что, чтобы зажглись огоньки на елке нужно покричать: "Елочка зажгись!", - и вставить штепсель в розетку. При этом само зажигание огоньков вызывает у нее такой восторг. Она знает механизм и все таки видит в этом чудо! Такой потрясающий симбиоз. Нам взрослым хочу пожелать, хоть мы и знаем природу многих вещей (или думаем, что знаем), всегда оставлять место для чуда :)
Всего Вам самого хорошего! Чудесного :)

Sweet Stampin' Challenge

Our challenge this week is - New Beginnings, which can be New Home, New Baby, Wedding etc.  Our sponsor this week is Angel Crafts with a prize of an embellishment pack.  Don't forget your entry must include a stamped image.

For my card I have used an image from Pink Gem, coloured with Promarkers and a mixture of papers from Pink Gem and Cuddly Buddly.

I am entering this into the following challenges;

Pink Gem - Sketch
Di's Digi Designs - Something New
Secret Crafter - Anything goes
Crafts and Me - Anything Goes
Bunny Zoe's Crafts - Fancy Fold or Shaped Cards
Aud Sentiments - Anything Goes

New Years Resolution Subway Art

download svg file

Download printable png file

Free New Years Subway Art from Custom Printables Online

I was going to make my own, but came across this great subway art printable online. Here is the link so you can download it too!

http://www.customprintablesonline.com/Freebies-Downloads.html

Joy through Sorrow

Yesterday was just a blue day for me. I woke up feeling sad and then several things happened that added to that sadness. I was thankful when the Holy Spirit directed me to Psalm43:5 The cure for my depression, my sadness was to put my Hope in HIM!!! I WILL PRAISE HIM!!!!! After making this I was encouraged. I am thinking of sending this to a friend who is struggling with a lot of issues right now. I am also uploading it to Word Art Wednesday.

His Strength

This card was made for this week's Word Art Wednesday. I choose to focus on this sentence. "I love you O Lord my strength." There are so many days when I am not strong. I am barely surviving. If I was having to rely on my own strength, I would be a failure. I was encouraged by 2 Corinthians 12:9... "My grace is sufficient for thee;for my strength is made perfect in weakness." What a paradox. I am strongest, when I am weak and let God use His strength. I choose to use this crocus image. A flower isn't the first image in my thoughts when I think of something strong, but any flower that can push up through the ice and snow and bloom when there is a chill in the air is a Strong flower. I made this card for a single mom in my church. She is a strong lady in a lot of ways. It takes a special person to be both mom and dad to her two kids. She doesn't ever complain. This week she was struggling with overwhelming sadness. I hope this card will encourage her. The inside of the card reads... I see better days ahead.

Videos and executable demo of Brigade 2 GUI and animation test

Some videos of the GUI that I developed for Brigade 2, showing real-time changing of materials with simultaneous animation and physics simulation. The GUI is still a work in progress, but being able to tweak any material on the fly is so much more easy to get the look right.

480p (320x240 render res, 4 spp, max depth 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_L_At_mAk

480p (640x480 render res, 4 spp, max depth 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65t2_FKd4Ds

The Ogre (model from here) is just simply rotating for now. The mesh consists of 51k triangles of which the BVH is dynamically updated every frame (as are the BVHs of the car and the stack of blocks which are physics driven). 

The executable demo is available at 

http://code.google.com/p/tokap-the-once-known-as-pong/downloads/list

(all CUDA architectures supported)

Further experiments will include: 

- skeletal animation

- first person camera and gun

- cam following the vehicle

- architecture 

Праздник

Kizoa slideshow: 29 desember - Slideshow

Ссылка на это слайдшоу

Маленькая девочка

Она правда такая малышка. Просто Кнопочка :)
И лейка пригодилась :)


Материалы: вискоза, стальной гранулят, опилки, шелковые ленты.
Рост 16 см.
Тонирована художественным маслом.



Ищет свой домик вот тут.

Daisy Doodles Ryan the Footballer/Soccer Birthday Card

This is my third card for Card Crafter’s Circle Design Team and I made this card for my son’s birthday which isn’t until November, but this is much better than making one at the last minute….. like I usually do!These are his club colours and I laid out his shirt and used my Copic Multi liner .3 to add some extra lines in to his shirt and a background. I haven’t got a colour printer yet or I would have used the grass that comes with this Digi called Ryan the Footballer. I used the digi paper with all the soccer words on the background using Yellow Cardstock in my printer and I’m so happy with this card and of course used my Copics to colour him in. I also added orange boots, these are my son’s favorite boots and added a Nike tick on side of boots because he won’t wear any thing except Nike boots for his Soccer. I love the Justin B haircut, my son loves to flick his hair..just like the digi. Soccer should be my middle name too because all conversations in this house revert to Soccer, as I have not one but two Soccer Tragic’s in our house!! I just hope I can find this card when it’s his birthday!

This week I used  Ryan the Footballer from Daisy Digi Doodles

I’d love you to come and Join our Challenge this week at

 Card Crafter’s Circle 3rd Challenge

ANYTHING GOES

and the Sponsor this week is Daisy Doodles

and the Winner’s Prize is 3 Digis!

 

Challenges I’m entering with this card:

• http://cookingitupwithkatie.blogspot.com/2011/11/cooking-it-up-86-anything-goes.html Anything Goes
• http://mymumscraftshopchallenges.blogspot.com/2011/12/challenge-37-anything-goes.html Anything Goes
• http://www.scrapbooksisters.blogspot.com/2011/12/card-challenge-66.html Anything Goes
• http://simonsaysstampschallenge.blogspot.com/2011/12/simon-says-anything-goes.html Anything Goes
• http://bearlymine-challenges.blogspot.com/2011/12/bearly-mine-challenge-26.html Anything Goes
• http://kennykkraftygirlzchallenges.blogspot.com/2011/12/anything-goes-challenge-74.html Anything Goes
• http://www.sarahhurleychallenges.blogspot.com/2011/12/challenge-56-sponsored-by-limited-runs.html Colouring
• http://audsentimentschallengeblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/challenge-44-winner-of-43-and-dt-call.htmlAnything Goes

Have a great weekend

Trish Munro

GUI test in Brigade 2

I've been working on a IMGUI (immediate mode GUI) for Brigade 2 based on SDL, which is working pretty well and is quite responsive when the framerate is more than 5 fps. There are sliders for specularity, transparency and RGB values of the diffuse color of the material. Every material in the scene can be picked and updates in real-time + you can navigate the scene, control the vehicle and let a physics simulation run, all simultaneously while chaning materials. I will upload an executable demo and some videos of the GUI in action tomorrow.

Screenshot of the GUI while tweaking a glossy Ogre (almost 50k triangles, model from Javor Kalojanov's real-time raytraced animation demo):

szczyglo74 (CG artist/architect) also provided me with a modern half-open architectural structure (Altana model from Januszowka) which is great to test indirect lighting and which I will turn into a demo soon (screen rendered on 8600M GT): 

Paper + video of "Real-time bidirectional path tracing via rasterization"

Available here: http://www.square-enix.com/jp/info/library/  (thanks to selfshadow)

It looks pretty damn good and the technique seems to be a very likely candidate for implementation in next-gen games because it fully exploits the rasterization hardware. One of the limitations (as mentioned in the paper) is that it doesn't work well for highly glossy and perfectly specular surfaces (sharp reflections) for which ray tracing is proposed as an alternative.

Birthday cards

Download 16 card

download 17 card

download 18 card

christmas frame

download frame

Sugar Nellie Candy

You have got to be quick as this ends at 7pm

http://sugarnellie.blogspot.com/2011/12/come-and-get-itchristmas-candy.html

Been getting in a bit of a muddle trying to change my blog layout.
Think I have done it now - Phew!

Royal Blood. Tower of Elves – The Riyria Revelations comes to Poland

I can’t say enough fantastic things about my foreign rights agent. Not only has she done a great job finding new markets for my books, but has a superb eye for picking “the right” publishers.  As I recall there were three publishers in Poland who had expressed an interest in my books and I couldn’t be happier with having signed with: Prószyński i S-ka. They recently (October 2011) released Theft of Swords as: Royal Blood. Tower of Elves. Yeah, interesting, huh?

Much like Orbit, Prószyński i S-ka is intererested in more than just  “putting a book out there.” They have placed my short story,  The Viscount and the Witch in one of Poland’s Fantasy Magazines and are also releasing some of my writing advice blog posts as well.

I’m sure that readers here in the US may not be familiar with Prószyński i S-ka, Polish Publishers doesn’t often come up in idle conversation. But they have some great US titles such as: 11/22/63, Stephen King’s latest book on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and in the fantasy genre they represent Terry Prachette, Ursula K. Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, and fellow Orbit author, Gail Carriger. 

So, as authors are often known to do I googled: Królewska krew. Wieża elfów. And to my genuine surprise I found hundreds of hits returned (More than 100 pages). I did a bit of exploring using the translation feature of my browser and discovered:

• Many book reviews by online fantasy sites and individual book bloggers
• A number of forums that were discussing the books
• Multiple places where excerpts were posted
• Tons of on-line booksellers with the book for sale.
• At least one site where the book made a “Top 10 List”
• A Goodreads-esque site (lubimyczytac.pl):  where people are reading and rating the book (21 ratings, 10 reviews,  71 people marked to read)

In summary…the same type of thing that can be found in the US. While I shouldn’t be surprised at this I was. Prószyński i S-ka is obviously working hard to publicize the book and from every indication I can see they are doing a great job of it.

So I’d like to thank  Marcin Zwierzchowski (my contact person for Poland) and Mark Edward Szmigiel (translastor) and all the other people at Prószyński i S-ka whose names I don’t know but who have my heartfelt gratitude for all the hard work you have done, and are doing, on behalf of my books. I really appreicate your efforts and hope you find working on this project fullfilling—or at least amusing. How well do Royce and Hadrian jokes play in Poland?

О продлении сроков...

Здравствуйте, дорогие наши читатели!
Мы решили продлить нашу конфетку-задание "Драконы" до 15 января 2012 года!

Вы еще можете успеть поучаствовать и выиграть шикарный приз - машинку для тиснения Boutique Embossing Machine. Или можете успеть подкорректировать уже сделанные работы согласно правилам :)

Правила опубликованы тут. Основной Мистер Линки закрыт, записаться вы можете в дополнительном окошке Мистер Линки в этом же посте.

Желаем всем удачи!

Творить, мечтать, вдохновлятся.

Каждый день с МаркаДекор!

Gingerbread Christmas House

I wanted to make a Gingerbread house since last year when I saw a huge array of Gingerbread house designs at a French Bakery, for the first time.This Christmas my daughter Anita and I knew the timing was right and we spent the morning making our first Gingerbread Christmas House, after we opened our presents! Anita and I had a lot of fun making this together.

Icing Mixture:

• 1 Egg White
• Small amount white vinegar or lemon juice
• 250g Icing Sugar (sifted)

Merry Christmas

Trish Munro

Real-time bidirectional path tracing via rasterization

This is the title of an upcoming I3D 2012 paper by Yusuke Tokuyoshi and Shinji Ogaki, see

http://graphics.ics.uci.edu/I3D2012/papers.php

The title reminds me of "High-quality global illumination rendering using rasterization" by Toshiya Hachisuka from 2005, which described a technique to obtain photorealistic images on a typical 2005 GPU (like the Radeon 9700) in mere seconds, extremely impressive for that time. Shinji Ogaki is also a co-author on the Progressive Photon Mapping paper by Hachisuka and Jensen, so this new paper is definitely going to be interesting.

If the paper lives up to the title, this could be quite interesting. Both researchers work at Square Enix and there seems to be a connection with the recently unveiled photorealistic Luminous engine which uses high quality offline baked lightmaps (see this page for more details). A paper about the rasterization-based lightmap baking in Luminous can be found here and the real-time bidirectional PT technique probably works very similarly (i.e. ray bundles computed with rasterization by parallel visibilty tests):

Quote from the "Fast global illumination baking via ray bundles" paper (describing the tech behind the Luminous engine):

7 high-quality light maps are rendered in 181 seconds with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580. The resolution of ray-bundle is 2048x2048 pixels, and 10000 directions are sampled. The performance of our renderer is over 200 M rays per second on a commodity GPU.

Assuming everything scales linearly, this means that it would take about 16 milliseconds (60 fps) on a GTX 580 to compute a GI lightmap with ray bundles of 512x512 pixels and 100 ray bundle directions (= 100 directional samples) which should still yield great quality real-time global illumination. This tech could potentially be used for making real-time photorealistic games on current GPUs. It doesn't work however for objects with highly glossy and perfectly specular materials.

Творческий день

МЫ с подружками давно собирались устроить творческий день или, как мой муж называет, шабаш :)
Это ж нужно чтоб все звезды сложились: все дети здоровы и желательно по садам, все работы улажены, материалы закуплены, погода, давление, настроение и т.д. В-общем, полное лунное затмение проще дождаться :) Но мы из терпеливых :) Таки дождались и собрались.
Темой творческой сходки единогласно была выбрана икеевская лейка.
Сначала, для затравки, хвастаюсь :)



Это то, что вышло у меня.

Это Танин незаконченный вариант. Так быстро стали вечером собираться, что законченный вариант я не сфотографировала.

Чем хорошо творить совместно, так тем что каждый привносит свой незаменимый опыт в процесс сотворения. Это, конечно, помимо веселья, чаепития и болтовни без конца и края :)
Я вообще декупаж на металле делала в первый раз. Если кто решиться повторить наш подвиг рассказываю по пунктам.
1. Нужно обезжирить лейку. Просто мы протерли ее ваткой, смоченной в спирте.
2. Загрунтовали лейку. Использовали акриловый грунт фирмы "Сонет". Я первый раз им пользовалась. Очень понравился: хорошая покрываемость, высыхает быстро. Дали грунту высохнуть. Попили чаю :)
3. Покрасили лейку в цвет трещинок. Думаю, большинство уже наслышано о кракелюре, но на всякий случай поясню. Поскольку мы делали старинную лейку, то нам нужно было имитировать на ней трещинки. Для этого мы использовали кракелюр. Я о нем позднее напишу поподробнее. Сам принцип: он растрескивает верхний слой краски через который проступает нижний слой краски. То есть такой эффект будто сто раз уже красили и краска облезает. На данном этапе мы закладывали цвет трещинок. Я красила в темно зеленый еловый цвет (цвет краски на последней фотографии). Таня красила лейку пятнами в разные яркие цвета. Эффект в последствии получился очень красивый. А Юлин цвет трещинок у лейки хорошо виден на фото.
Даем слою высохнуть. Пьем чай :)

Чудесный заголовок, да? :)

4. Покрываем кракелюром. Тут сразу хочу пояснить: кракелюры бывают разные. Бывают двух- и однофазные, бывают те, что наносятся на верхний слой краски и растрескивают его, а у нас был быстрый кракелюр однофазный, который наносится между контрастными слоями краски и растрескиает верхний слой.
Вот такой:

Тут остается только читать инструкцию, чтобы понять какой у вас кракелюр.
И еще такая тонкость: кракелюр не любит, чтобы его два раза наносили на одно и то же место. А поскольку он прозрачный, то сделать это весьма непросто :) У меня на лейке сразу было видно, где я не нанесла его. Но дело это не испортило :) Скромно написала она ...
Даем слою высохнуть до состояния "не липнет". Пьем чай :)
5. Дальше наносим основной цвет лейки. У меня был "теплый белый" Warm White 988 американской фирмы FolkArt. Краску купила в "Леонардо". Тоже очень понравилась: густая. Акриловую краску всегда можно развести водой, а вот загустителем пользоваться нужна сноровка. А эта по консистенции в самый раз: ни разводить, ни использовать загуститель не пришлось. Краска и маленькими баночками продается, но мы решили побольше купить :) Что нам мензурки: не наш формат :)
Смотрите краску по названию цвета, код маленькой баночки и большой отличаются, хотя цвет один и тот же.
Опять таки, чтобы появились трещинки не елозим по одному месту 2 раза. Это может повредить слой кракле.
Даем высохнуть. Если влезет, то пьем чай :)
6. Покрываем битумом (смотрим последнее фото). Это очередное открытие для меня. Таня привезла битум фирмы Idea №710. С помощью тряпочки на хорошо просохший слой краски очень очень аккуратно начинаем наносить битум. У меня четкая аналогия с тонированием мордочек маслом: тряпочку окунаем в битум, обтираем основную часть битума об газетку, и только когда на тряпочке совсем чуть-чуть этой штуковины осталось (чуть мажет), начинаем втирать в лейку.Битум дает такой коричневый оттенок состаренности. Без него совсем не то было бы. Даем высохнуть.
7. Теперь непосредственно декупаж. Выбираем мотив на салфетке и тоненькой мокрой кисточкой обводим контур. Обрываем салфетку по мокрому контуру. Я раньше просто обрывала по контуру, но иногда бумага рвалась не в ту сторону, задевая рисунок или захватывая ненужный край. А когда обрываешь по мокрому, то рвется именно так как контур проведен. Еще лучше: часть контура провести, оборвать, потом еще часть, опять оборвать.
Я больше люблю обрывать, чем вырезать. Тогда край не такой резкий. Хотя иногда лучше вырезать, если сам фон салфетки сильно отличается от фона, куда вы приклеиваете салфетку. Как, например, на Юлиной лейке.
Аккуратно отделяем верхний слой салфетки. Накладываем его на лейку и от середины салфетки кисточкой начинаем аккуратно покрывать кистью декупажным клеем. Прямо поверх салфетки пока вся салфетка не окажется в клее. Стараемся сделать это побыстрее, чтобы салфетка не разлезлась от намокания. Даем высохнуть.
У меня обычный декупажный клей фирмы Decola. Мне кажется, что это тот же ПВА, только погуще.
Пункты 6 и 7 можно поменять местами. Таня, например, делала наоборот. Но великой разницы нет.
8. Можно дорисовать рисунок акриловыми красками. Чем заняты Юля:

и Таня:

А я пью чай :)
9. Осталось только покрыть на 2 раза акриловым лаком. Это можно и на следующий день сделать, когда уже все хорошо просохло.
Я в свое время из перепробовали видов дцать. Еще в пору увлечения пластиком. Большинство липнет потом к рукам :(
Единственный акриловый не липнущий, который я нашла - это Тикурилла Kiva (на фото видно какой именно). Правда этого ведра хватит на всю оставшуюся творческую жизнь :)

Уфффф. Теперь все готово и можно попить чаю.
Спасибо всем, кто добрался до финала :)

Поздравляем Алёшу!

             Ещё поздравляем Алёшу с тем, что он отправляется на губернаторскую ёлку  в числе 8 учащихся  Куйбышевского района  как победитель районной олимпиады по русскому языку среди учащихся 4 классов. Так держать!

Joy! It might be closer than you think.

On Tuesday of this week, I woke up to a grey, drizzly, foggy day. My husband, a long haul truck driver, had been gone for 4 weeks. I woke up just feeling sad and sorry for myself. Happy and Joyful were not words to describe me as I was driving my youngest to school so that he could be there by 7:00 a.m. for a science club meeting.The rain was coming down and I had the windshield wipers on as I was driving around the corner of my house. A little blue bird who had been sitting on the road flew up right by my window as I drove by. The thought that struck me as I saw him, was I had almost missed seeing this little bird who was right in front of me because I was distracted by the rain and my own thoughts. Sometimes Joy is like that little blue bird. It is there in front of me, but I don't see it because I let other, unimportant things distract me. The scripture that I used on this card is one of my favorites. I have it on my bulletin board to remind me that joy is coming if I don't feel it now. I experimented on the background. I printed the sheetmusic on tissue paper, by taping the tissue paper to a piece of printer paper, and running it through the printer. I then ink spray smashed the tissue paper. I then crinkled the tissue paper up and glued it to a piece of cardstock. It is hard to see in the photo, but there is a crinkly texture.I then printed the verse and ink spray smashed it as well as a scrap of lace. The little bird is a Mark's Finest Papers bird. I think he is a chickadee on pussy willows. But for my card he is a little blue bird on a branch with leaves. I stamped the pussy willows twice to add some depth. Some are glued straight to the tissue and some are curved and not attached to the background. It is also hard to see, but the scripture strips are also curved. The center parts are up about 1/4 of an inch and are only touching at the ends. I am sharing this card with Word Art Wednesday.

Merry Christmas to everyone! I pray that you have a wonderful blessed day celebrating our Savior's birth!

Minecraft

This post isn’t about writing, my books, fantasy books, or books at all. It’s a little about me, but mostly not. It is semi-historical, perhaps a bit informative, but mostly it is a review…but not of a book. In short, this post is something out of left-field. There are two reasons I am writing this post. The first is that it’s the Christmas season and often that means toys, and this post is about a game. The second reason I’m writing this, is that my wife asked me to. Robin feels that if I admit to playing games, it will make me appear more human. Robin is obviously under the impression you all think I’m an alien.

I can guess that many of you are wondering what this is all about, while quite a few others have been nodding at the computer screen since reading the title. Let me explain and to do that we need to go back in time to the era when MTV was as big as Twitter, HBO was brand new, and no one knew if VHS or Beta would win the war. 

I got my first computer in 1983. It was a Compaq (because the Apple Macintosh wasn’t invented yet, and thus I was trapped into using Windows machines for the rest of my life) with a floppy drive, separate monitor, and a ruby monochrome screen that ran DOS. I wrote novels on this using SAMNA a now forgotten program that was ahead of its time and so much better than a typewritter. I also played a few computer games, but I cannot stress enough how different computer gaming was back then.

Zork

In the early days there weren’t even graphics. Everything was just text. Glowing green or, in my case, orangish text on a black screen. It took years before the most rudimentary images appeared. At first they were flat monochrome. Later they developed color. If you’ve seen the Tom Hanks movie Big, you have an idea what they were like. The game in the movie isn’t real but mimicked games like Ultima and Wizardry. This was the silent movie era of computer gaming. But starting in the 1990s, gaming shifted into high gear and took off. The 1990s became the golden age of computer video games and gave birth to a large number of game developers and publishers such as Activision,  EA, Blizzard, and ID.

SimCity was released in 1989. Kings Quest V (with VGA graphics) hit shelves in 1990 ensuring graphic adventures would continue in the golden age. In 1991 came Civilization (perhaps the best game ever invented) and Lemmings. Alone in the Dark was released in 1992 a forefather of survival horror games. Wolfenstein 3D  and Doom were released in 1993, which while they did not invent the first-person shooter, if you lived back then, you might have thought so. Also in 1993 X-Wing, one of the greatest space combat simulators ever, was released. 1994 saw Warcraft one of the first real-time strategy games, and System Shock. In 1995 came Command and Conquer, and Half-life arrived 1997.

Game from the movie Big

What made this the golden age was the speed of technical advancements coupled with game desgin innovations that worked in tandem to drive each other to greater, more creative heights. There were no rules and it was as if there was this primordial soup back then where anything was possible. Every year game designers came out with something totally different. Some were crazy, some silly, some awful, but some were utter genius.  God games were breed with real-time strategy to make things like Dungeon Keeper where you got to be the bad guy while a band of heroes tried to invade your dungeon and steal your treasure. And action games mixed with adventure games to create games like Outcast,  a mystery, graphic adventure captured in an action strategy environment. 

Over time however, the possibilities began to coalesce. Like planets in a new solar system, genres were born. The Puzzle game, the Simulator, the Shooter, the Turn-Based-Strategy game, the Dungeon Crawl, Graphic Adventure, the Real-Time Strategy game, the Role Playing game, and finally the Massive Multiplayer Online game, and the Squad game.  Real-time strategy, and shooters dominated in the late nineties, but then the persistent world games like Everquest and later World of Warcraft appeared and a sort of balance was finally reached. Over the course of the next decade, games got prettier as technology continued to allow for better graphics and smoother game play, but the frothy maelstrom of inventiveness cooled.

Skyrim

I think part of this is that in the old days, graphics didn’t matter much. Games were simple. As time moved forward, players expected better graphics and this required artists, time, and lots of capital. One guy in his bedroom couldn’t put out a lush game like what we see today in the form of Skyrim, and simple-looking games could not hope to compete. Games became the territory of corporations, and businesses need to pay the bills. They can’t try crazy stuff because they think it could be really cool. They need to focus on putting out what is proven, and then just incrementally polish that.

This is why I stopped playing computer games back near the end of the 1990s early 2000’s. It was all just the same thing. Either it was a shooter, a RTS, or a treadmill online game, and while they all looked a little better and felt a little tighter, it was the same game I played a hundred times before. Only now they were designed for the largest audience which meant they were, in a sense, dumbed-down—slick, but lifeless.

My favorite games had been Civilization, Half-life (1-2,) Age of Empires, System Shock 2, Outcast, and Everquest.  And for more than a decade I never saw anything as good, nothing new that could capture my interest…until now.

When I first played DOOM, it was revolutionary. I was amazed at the game play, and yet it always felt like only part of a game, like a chase scene is part of a movie. Sure it was exciting, but it needed context. And even as I played it, I imagined how it could be great if only they added a story, a goal beyond survival, one that was integrated into the game rather than revealed in cut scenes. Id came out with DOOM II and later Quake, but they never did what I wanted. Then Valve came along and made Half-life. It was a huge hit and exactly what I’d hoped for.

Everquest

I had the same thoughts when playing Everquest. I wanted to get rid of the treadmill, and be able to permanently change that world. I wanted to be able to cut down a tree, use its wood to make planks and then build a house of my own design. Strip back the grass and plant crops, raise farm animals. Build a wall to defend my land, create my own roads, bridges. I wanted eating and drinking to be required to survive. I wanted to suffer from the elements and freeze if I didn’t have warm clothes, or couldn’t start a fire in winter. I wanted to die of thirst in a desert if I did not have enough to drink, or was stupid enough to wear steel armor. That never happened in the MMOs. And as they advanced they offered less rather than more—less freedom.

That was always the problem. From the very start most all of these games were long corridors that you, as the player, were forced to walk down. There was no turning from the path set before you. Occasionally a game like Elder Scrolls pretended to provide freedom by including tons of repetitive villages and repetitive side-quests that let you deviate from the main storyline. And some allowed for multiple endings, two or three if you were lucky. But the games still locked you in, a prisoner forced to play how they wanted.

With multi-play games that problem was helped as the games became merely settings where live opponents came to compete, but that did nothing to benefit those who weren’t onto competing, those who enjoyed exploring, creating, and more contemplative games. Each year offerings sported slicker, more photo-realistic graphics like in this year’s Skyrim, (which looks beautiful) but it is still the same old game.( I have to admit I have not yet tried Skyrim, though I have watched my son play it.)

I had all but given up, believing that since corporations were in charge nothing revolutionary would happen. Then a year ago my son was in the car with me. We were driving a friend of his home and on the way they were talking.

“I went to sleep in my own house and I was killed,” my son’s friend said. That right there will catch your attention. 

“You had a door right? And it was closed?” My son asked. 

“Yeah.”

“Did you have torches? You have to make a small room and put your bed in it then circle it in torches or they find you.”

They? I thought. This wasn’t the typical teenage conversation and it caught my attention. When I inquired what the heck they were talking about, my son explained it was a new game he had downloaded called Minecraft. When we got home my son showed it to me.

I think I might have actually laughed at the pathetic graphics. It was all blocky and crude. There was no detail, and it had none of the lovely atmosphere and realism of the newer games. It looked like a children’s cartoon where people had square heads and dots for eyes. Then he showed me how it was played and I stopped laughing.

This was it. This was something different.

It wasn’t made by a corporation, which explained the graphics. Minecraft is an indie computer game originally written in java by its single creator, Markus Persson, or “Notch” as he is known. It is what’s called a sandbox game, in that there is no point to it—no goal, no finish line, no levels to achieve, no classes, skills or races, no opponent to beat—anymore than there is a point to playing in a sandbox. For the most part you make your own fun, which might seem a cop-out on the part of the game designer...until you try it.  

Player made castle in Minecraft

The thing with Minecraft is that you exist in a world that is completely transfigurable . You can dig a hole in the ground and use that dirt to build a wall. You can cut down a tree, turn the wood into lumber to make a house, or tools like a hoe that you can use to clear land and plant seeds. You can divert rivers, set trees on fire, create stoves. You can kill pigs then cook pork chops in that stove you made or smelt iron ingots from iron ore and use that to make armor or tools. You can even create rudimentary electrical circuits to power devices. You can, in fact, virtually do anything you want and the world works in a very logical manner. Put sand in a hot stove and you will get glass. Jump off a cliff and you will die. And you have to eat, or you will also likely die. It is good that things are sensible because the game has no directions—no manual. You have to figure everything out, or go online to do research, which surprisingly, is part of the fun. Although, honestly, it is best to watch an introduction video or better yet, have someone show you the game as this is not WoW, and Notch doesn’t hold your hand at all.

Nature in Minecraft

This is gaming the way it used to be when people of vision and little money took crazy chances to make things that made you forget the crappy graphics because you were having too much fun playing the game. And actually, after just a little while, you imagine the graphics as being oddly beautiful. Minecraft is a throwback to the golden age of gaming, an Indian summer popping up in the 2010s. 

There is one more thing, and this is where the spice comes in. In this world of Minecraft, there are days and nights. This cycle works just like it does in the real world except that a day lasts only ten minutes, thankfully so does the night, because at night, monsters come out. They come in a variety of types. Zombies, skeletons (who use bows and arrows,) spiders that can climb walls, Creepers that have a nasty tendency to sneak up behind people and explode. Most monsters catch fire in sunlight like a Buffy vampire, but not all, and the challenge of the game is to create a defense against the night. So as the game begins you are Charleston Heston in Omega Man and have ten minutes to build yourself an adequate shelter before night falls. After that you’ll be left blind and defenseless in the darkness as monsters roam the world. This is no easy feat for the newbie, as just learning how to gather resources, make simple tools, and construct a hut can take more than ten minutes.

Award Winner player made building

The best materials like iron, red stone and diamond are found by digging down into the earth, but underground it is dark, and in the dark, the monsters live. Sometimes you stumble on monster’s lairs where if you kill them you can take their horde for your own. There are also abandoned mine shafts alternate dimensions like the Nether and the End, and special hidden strongholds which can be found by creating Eyes of Ender, letting them fly and following them. 

Player built mine?

So adventuring and exploring are important parts of the game, but an equal, and perhaps greater part is creating—building homes, farms, towers, villages even whole cities. It is as if you were dropped on a new planet all alone and had to learn how to survive. The game is at its most entertaining when you are trying to do a simple thing. You want to add something to your house, you need a to make a tool to do it, to make the tool you need to get a mineral that is found underground. 

You dig and find an abandoned mine. You’re curious so you explore—just a little, then you fall. You plummet four stories. You’re still alive, but you’re in the dark and only have a couple torches. You only have a stone sword and not much food because you never expected to be trapped in a mineshaft. The adventure you go through just trying to get home is epic. You have to fight through nests of posion spiders, figure out how to build a stairway up. You get lost but discover a random chest with some food to keep you alive and steel to make a better sword. You fight zombies and skeleton, and it is a heartpounding thrill ride, but perhaps the best part is that you know this isn’t scripted. This isn’t some preordained plot. This is all just the result of an accident—your own foolishness, and that makes the game more real than the most photorealistic graphics ever could.  

 

The game can be played singularly, or on a server with others. I visited one where the players had created an entire working city with skyscrapers, paved streets with signs, banks and libraries. Others have wars where people create armor and swords (or in some cases guns,) and attack each other. And as the game has an endless supply of randomly generated worlds, and as each world is infinite (you can just keep walking and it will just keep getting bigger,) so there is plenty of replay value.

The kind of city people make on multiplayer servers

I started playing a year ago when the game was in beta. This past November the game was officially released. So besides distracting me from writing, and proving, as my wife wanted, that I am human with other interests, why mention this here? There’s a certain kinship factor. Minecraft is an indie produced game—self published if you will. Persson made it himself and it caught on. With no publisher and no commercial advertising or backing, he sold the alpha and beta versions of his game by word-of-mouth and (at this time) he’s sold around 4 million copies. This has allowed him to start his own gaming company while he continues to refine and add to the feature set of Minecraft.

So, in return for providing me with something new that I can talk with my teenage son about, I felt Notch deserved a plug, even though his audience is way bigger than mine.

At present, my son, his friends, Robin and I all play together on my own server. At least I know where my son is on a Saturday night, and exactly the kind of monsters he’s likely to meet. He also has dreams of being an architect and I can think of no better past time for that.

So if you’re looking for that last minute Christmas gift that someone will smirk at, roll their eyes and say, “Are you kidding?” and then disappear playing for years to come. You can buy a gift code for Minecraft for $27, and they can download the game Christmas morning (which usually takes five minutes.)  Setting up your own server so you can play together can be a herculean odyssey, but that too is part of what the golden age of gaming was all about.

Happy Holidays