The actual physics behind light aren’t all that complicated, as long as you’re only concerned with how bright objects look and you don’t care about what happens when light goes through tiny holes or passes through irregular media. (Answer: weird stuff.)   The reason programmers put a lot of work into lighting algorithms is that computing the effects of light on a scene can take a lot of time. Real-time lighting algorithms generally rely on tricks that allow programmers to ‘get away’ with not actually computing everything properly.

In my Philosophy of Time course, we recently discussed relativity and its implications as to the meaning of time. While sitting in class yesterday, I remembered an idea that I first had while taking modern physics several years ago.  All computer lighting algorithms of which I am aware treat the speed of light as infinite.  It’s not a bad approximation because from the perspective of your typical human being, it might as well.  Does playing an upperbound on the speed of light allow you to ‘get away’ with anything computationally?

I’m pretty sure the answer is yes.  The speed of light is also theorized to be the speed at which forces are transmitted. In other words, if the sun were to ‘dissappear’ right now, we wouldn’t see the sun dissappear until about 8 minutes after it happened.  The same is true of the sun’s gravitational pull – the earth would continue to move in a circular orbit until about 8 minutes after the sun explodes.

If you had a giant computer simulating the interaction between the earth and the sun, the interaction could be parellelized quite nicely, because any change at the sun won’t be able to immediately effect anything happening on the earth. If the force of gravity were transmitted instantaneously, however, as soon as the sun exploded you’d have to recalculate earth’s orbit.

I want to do more thinking on this subject, and lorenz contraction / expansion (the tendency of objects to change drastically in size as they approach the speed of light) and how it could possibly be used to speed up a computer simulation. If it turns out that lorenz contraction does allow you to compute things faster, it would be more evidence for me that the world is, in fact, a computer simulation.

I remember the game being exciting. For some reason it did absolutley nothing for me yesterday. I figured I’d be a little rusty but I got into the swing of things right away. I used the Browning Automatic Rifle like I’d been doing so since birth. After about two minutes, I remembered how to use cover and protecting myself from snipers. I remembered how to trick people into running out of buildings into my line of fire. In short, I had all the skills I needed to be better than the people I was playing with. And that made it boring, I think.

This reinforces my view that video games are only fun when there’s still something to learn. Once you’ve mastered the game it’s no longer entertaining.

The point of ‘tower defense’ is simple. You have a little base to defend, and some distance from this based is a portal, out from which large monsters will periodically emerge. They try to make their way to your base, and you try build up your towers to kill them before they get there. Every time you kill a monster, you get a little bit of money, which you can use to build more towers, or upgrade your existing towers. Every time a monster gets through to your base, he disappears and you use one life; once you lose your allotted number (usually around 50), the game is over for you. As the game progresses, the monsters that come through the portal get tougher and tougher.

After playing and losing a couple of times, I realized that in order to succeed you have to set your towers up into a maze, increasing the distance the monsters have to travel to get to your base, and therefore the amount of time your towers have to shoot at the monsters before they are killed. Every time I played the game, I’d do a little better than I had before, and I kept tweaking what I thought the ‘ideal strategy’ would be.

I never tired of it though – long after everyone else was sick of having played the same map over and over, I wanted to keep going. I figure this is because I still had ideas that I wanted to try out. I find myself to be this way with pretty much any type of game – I feel the need to keep playing it untill I understand the dynamics of the system, at which point I get bored with it. Once you know how the thing works, it’s no longer entertaining. Could it be that I find video games so entertaning because they’re just another form of learning?

If you want to play it, you can get it here.
Let me know what you think.

Who knows; maybe later I’ll feel like playing Daemal, the foul gnome whose tiny black heart knows nothing but evil and hatred for the world of azeroth and its foolish inhabitants. Untill then I guess I’ll just see what the real world has to offer in the way of entertainment.

Seriously, though, I accquired a copy of Mac OS X Tiger for Megan, so that she could play World of Warcraft with me (I am the luckiest guy ever) and her computer got to a point where when you turned it on, it did nothing but show you a white screen. I had no idea why it was doing this, but I had a hunch that the OS was corrupted and when the BIOS couldn’t find anything to boot to it just sat there. That’s exactly what it was; she was able to get the thing to boot to the install DVD, and from there I was able to find out that there’s a legacy version of OS 9 installed to run old mac apps. She told me that when her friend had the same thing (the computer would only boot to a white screen) the apple guys replaced her laptop, which had files she needed for school. That’s terrible.

We then began the process of attempting to get her data off of the laptop and onto her desktop PC. I was able to get the Mac’s web server running (I was suprised that this was built in to OS 9) but there was no convient way to move a ton of files at the same time. I tried getting the mac to start its file-sharing protocol, but it would just sit there saying it was ’starting.’ I then tried getting the mac to connect to her desktop via the samba server but that wasn’t going through either. I borrowed Jeremy’s USB Hard Drive (Thanks!) but OS 9 doesn’t support USB devices, and the OS X DVD wasn’t having any of it either (Bummer!). We then began the process of taking all the stuff she wanted to save and partitioning it into 650 MB folders. 14 of them. Then we started trying to burn the data onto CD-RW’s, which took about 20 minutes per CD. I’m going to bring some CD-R’s over there tonight; hopefully those will burn a little faster.

I haven’t updated this blog in a while for many reasons, one of which is that I’ve started playing World of Warcraft again. I play a foul, black-hearted gnome warlock named Daemal. Warlocks are mages who delved too deeply into the arcane magics, and learned to summon demons in their quest for power. They are hateful beings with a contempt for life and goodness. They cast painfull spells to damage their opponents, and when a warlock’s victim is near death, he casts a spell to drain the victim’s soul. Warlocks store these souls in glowing gems which are used to cast spells and summon demons. Here I am in action:

I’m the little chap with a mining pick in the corner. I’m busy mining for silver bars, while my demonic slave Jhomtaz is fighting the trogg whom I just cursed and set on fire. Using a demonic slave summoned with a stolen soul to torture a primitive being while robbing the earth (or Azeroth, really) of precious minerals – you just can’t get much worse.

I really enjoy playing Daemal. Markp the mage, my first character, was fun, but really frustrating at times. Daemal can do more damage than Markp could, has much greater survivability, doesn’t spend thirty seconds drinking water to recover mana after each fight, and is generally just much cooler. For example, instead of being able to turn an unwanted opponent into a sheep like Markp could, Daemal can curse his opponent, set him on fire, and then send him screaming in terror. It’s entertaning to do this to some in-game monster, but there’s nothing quite as fun as incinerating the foolish shaman who dares to cross your path. Enjoy the graveyard run, pal! Kek indeed!

I’m looking forward to playing through the single player, but mainly I anticipate the multiplayer. Call of Duty has the most enjoable multiplayer of any FPS I think think of, except for maybe Halo; and even that’s contingent on being in a room full of friends.

Edit:

Damn, that was $20 I just wasted. It was OK, but Call of Duty is much better.

I am just totally amazed. It’s got everything I need to make an awesome 3d game. It looks easy to use (I’ve already looked at some tutorials) and it combines all of the benefits of a C++ based engine with the ridiculously awesome programming capabilities of python. To anyone who has started to do work on my game, don’t worry – this doesn’t really mean anything to you other than that the probability of this game being finished has just shot up. Well, really, I should have defined a probability function that maps a given time to a probability of the project’s completion by that date, and the area under the above curve has increased significantly.

This is going to be great.