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Archive: Gaming

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November 13, 2007

Sculpty Earth: topographic globe with dynamic weather in Second Life

New World Notes posted an interview with Zora Spoonhammer, a Second Life hacker who created an enormous in-world earth model, complete with dynamic weather that's pulled from real world weather sources:

"Come back up here!" Zora Spoonhammer shouts after him, before he disappears over the horizon. "He's my husband in real life. He's silly that way." She's a developer in the game industry, she explains, "and I think some of it is women in games don't get a lot of recognition in the industry as is. So he's sensitive to that." On the other hand, few men have wives who build dynamic planets in their spare time.

Sculpty Earth's model is generated by a C++ program, using USGS elevation data to define the model's geography. The Earth's textures are processed and down-rezzed from NASA's Blue Marble images, and there's a semi-transparent shell that surrounds the globe, displaying an animated cloud texture. The cloud texture is generated from real-time data and displays the last 24 hours of real life weather history.

Zora talks about a lot of the data sources that were used and links to a few resources for building your own SL models and software. Definately worth a read if you are interested in mapping applications or developing apps in Second Life.

SL Topographic Globe With Dynamic Weather - Link
Blue Marble - Link

October 21, 2007

DSMidiWifi - Nintendo DS wireless MIDI controller

The DS Music Interface (DSMI) is a collection of tools that will allow you to use one or more DS devices as wireless MIDI controllers. Using the touchpad on your DS, you can control a MIDI capable music instrument or MIDI-driven visualization software. Using DSMI, the DS can also receive MIDI events. This can be used to drive the built-in Gameboy sound generator, or as control input in your homebrew applications.

The Nintendo DS hardware offers a variety of possibilities for creating music as well as interacting with music. TheRain first had the idea of using the DS as a MIDI controller and created the DSMIDI, a DS cartridge that adds a standard MIDI port to the DS that can be used by homebrew DS software.
But since making a DSMIDI requires soldering skills and is rather dangerous, we came up with another idea: Using the DS as a wireless MIDI controller. The MIDI signals are sent to the computer via Wifi, and a server program forwards them to MIDI applications.

Later, support for natrium42's, DSerial was added, enabling MIDI input and output via standard oldskool MIDI cables.

The project's primary applications are a touchscreen-based keyboard and a 2d "Kaos" pad. These are built using the included libdsmi library, which you can use to add MIDI controller or MIDI client capabilities to your own homebrew DS apps.

Wireless and wired MIDI for the Nintendo DS - Link

September 25, 2007

Using the Wii Remote to correct perspective in digital photos

Daniel M. German found a way to automate perspective correction and projection adjustments for his wide angle photography. He does this by using a Wiimote to record the pitch and roll of the camera at the time a photo is taken. This information can then be fed directly into panotools, instead of manually entering control lines and processing the images to calculate these tilt values after the fact.

I modified an open source DarwiinRemote to record inclination. It happens that if you keep the WiiR in a stationary state, its three accelerometers can be used as two inclinometers. Fortunately most of the time, when one takes a handheld photo, one keeps the camera steady. Steady enough to read the inclination of the WiiR.
I also modified the driver to record the reading from the accelometers, the estimated inclinations, and the timestamp. I would then use the timestamp to match the images from the camera to the readings from the WiiR.

This is a cool idea. I would not be surprized to find high end cameras internally recording and stamping this information into photographs in the near future. A lot of consumer cameras already support panoramic stitching, so with digital accelerometers and tilt sensors being as cheap as they are, why not internally support adjustments like perspective correction or projection remapping?

Using the Wii Remote to correct perspective - Link

September 20, 2007

Run GTA2 on Linux

Rockstar released a few of their classic games as a free download, including the original Grand Theft Auto series. The games are distributed as Windows executables, but you can still enjoy a little top-view criminal activity in Linux by running them under WINE.

Revive your Inner Carjacker: GTA2 on Linux - Link
Rockstar Classics (download the games here) - Link

September 15, 2007

Gameboy Advance GPS

Here's one of my favorite portable gaming hacks, the GBA GPS. It's a project that always comes to mind whenever I hear about some piece of homebrew development hardware falling under legal scrutiny.

People are always creating amazing things when closed hardware is hacked open for amateur development.

I own Magellan meridian GPS, many efforts were done to create custom maps for the receiver (see Links to my Magellan GPS page). But most of the mapping receivers (Magellan, Garmin) use vector graphics, this is very good for scaling, search, and huge amount of data. But sometimes much more convenient to have raster map with the current position on the map. I developed this GBA based mapping receiver to use scanned maps with GPS the way I like. This was done for fun, but I found this device very useful. I am using this device as a car navigator in the city.

The GBA GPS - Link

September 12, 2007

HOWTO: Make a Wiimote peripheral - wireless Nunchuck anyone?

The Wii Nunchuck communicates with the Wiimote over I2C, constantly sending little 6-byte packets that describe the anolog stick, accelerometer, and button values.

You might remember that Brian posted about how you can hook the Nunchuck up to an Arduino board and read accelerometer data from it. Chad from Windmeadow Labs, who was responsible for this hack, also put together a howto describing how you can use an Adruino to mimic a Nunchuck, interfacing directly with the Wiimote.

So, you can connect an Arduino to a Nunchuck to read data from it. You can connect an Adruino to the Wiimote to send data to it. If only you could make those two Arduinos talk to eachother... Hold the phone! I posted about a $14 RF serial module from SparkFun that will let you do just that!

It'd be a little clunky because of the size of two chubby Arduinos, but if you can't wait for Nintendo to release a wireless Nunchuck to help you with your WiiSports Boxing habit, all the bits and pieces are here for you. You can get Freeduino bare bones kits pre-assembled from Modern Device for $22 each, so the total would come to just under $60.

$60 of purely awesome wireless Mii punching fury.

There is one caveat: the RF link would not be fast enough to communicate sample data from the nunchuck as fast as it is read by the Wiimote. There's a possible solution, though, for those of you who'd like to give it a try. The Nunchuck board can sample the button and accelerometer data and send it over the air at 2400 baud. The Wiimote-connected Arduino can store the last-received state and just keep sending that same data to the Wiimote at fast I2C speed until the next update is received from the RF connection. I'm not sure how noticeable the sensitivity loss would be, but you should still be able to have a resolution of about 40 sensor updates a second.

Anyone with a couple spare Arduinos want to give this a shot and share the details?

Connect an Arduino to the Wiimote as a perhiperal - Link
Hook your Wii nunchuck up to an Arduino - Link
RF-enable your microcontroller projects - Link
Nunchuck communication details - Link

August 22, 2007

WiiCade Wii Remote API

This nice folks over at WiiCade Labs have put all the necessary Javascript and Flash glue together and released a complete Flash API for the Wiimote. It supports 4 simultaneous remotes, cursor position and rotation data, and there's even rudimentary support for the buttons on the nunchuck.

WiiCade Labs Wii Remote API - Link

August 16, 2007

Browse on the Wii in full screen

The updated version of the Wii Internet Channel web browser that was released in April has a feature that will allow you to "auto-hide" the navigation bar. It's not enabled by default, but with a quick change to the settings you'll get back some of that precious TV real-estate. Here's how:

go to the start page in Internet Channel
click "Settings"
under the "Toolbar Display" heading, select the "Auto-hide Toolbar" radio button
click the check icon to save

Once you've saved your settings, the navigation bar will hide it itself when you are using the web browser. Just point the Wiimote at the bottom of the screen to pull it up.

July 29, 2007

Measure your 0-60 time with a Wiimote

Here's how you can use the Wiimote's built-in accelerometers to measure your ride's G forces and 0-60 time:

I got this idea after seeing some physics class use the wiimote in some kinda pendulum experiment.
Why not use the wiimote's built in 3-axis accelerometers to measue g-forces, acceleration and even calculate my own 0-60mph times!

So I did. I wrote a script to dump all the g-force readings from the wiimote to a comma separated value file, then did some post processing in MS Excel, and voila, I can see every bump, every curve, my acceleration and braking, and even calculated my current speed using high school physics (v=a*t)

I wonder how much weight you could strip off this thing to get it to its bare essentials. A LiPo battery a gumstix board and maybe this could be extended to model rocketry or autonomous helicopter applications.

Wii Remote Accelerometer Measurements - [via] Link

July 18, 2007

WiinRemote: Wiimote as a Windows input device

I wish I had a Windows box handy at the moment, as I'd like play around with this. Using WiinRemote, you can have the Wii Remote control your PCs mouse. Tilting causes the mouse to move up, down, left, and right. In addition to a mouse click, the remote's buttons can also be assigned to various key combos.

This could really come in handy for presentations or classroom instruction. With a standard laptop/projector setup, this would let you run a slideshow or demo an application while being able to move about freely. On the down side, you'll have one less reason to hide behind the podium.

WiinRemote - Link

June 20, 2007

HOWTO use the Wiimote buttons in Flash

A while back, WiiNintendo posted the keycodes that are detectable by Javascript when the Wii's buttons are pressed. With this ability, you can create Javascript games that will play on your Wii. Unfortunately, even though the Wii browser ships with the Flash plugin, those keycodes cannot be detected natively in the Flash environment.

Quasimondo came up with a really clever hack that solves the problem. You can create a second flash movie and use Javascript to resize it to specific widths for particular keycodes. Even though Flash cannot detect the keycodes, it does receive an onResize event. When it receives this event, it then retrieves its current width, which was set to the value of the keycode. This second swf file can then use Flash's LocalConnection to communicate that value to the primary swf.

How to Make the Wiimote Work in Flash - Link
Aral Balkan's discussion on using the Wiimote in Flash - Link
Wiimote Key Codes @ WiiNintendo - Link

June 11, 2007

Crreate a Wii media server

Wii Media Center X is a Java-based web media server that you can have up and running in about 15 minutes. After downloading and unzipping the application, just run the following command (from the mediacenter folder) to start it up:

java -jar MediaCenter.jar

Run this on any machine that your Wii can see and you can use the Internet Channel web browser to access your media center at http://x.x.x.x:8192/.

I've noticed a few problems with playing audio files and the video isn't sized optimally (you can zoom to adjust for this), but this shows a lot of promise. With this running on my primary desktop machine, I can encode/download FLV files that I want to watch and MP3s that I want to listen to. You just drag them to the Video/videos and Music/music folders. You can do this during the day as you come across things, and then you can view and listen to media in your living room whenever you like.

With a little spit and polish, this could be like having all the AppleTV or Windows Media Center functionality right on your game console.

Red Kawa Wii Media Center X - [via] Link

June 8, 2007

Hook your Wii nunchuck up to an Arduino

Chad of Windmeadow Labs posts on the Make discussion board:

I was able to get an Arduino board to read in data from a wii nunchuck. You can read the joystick, buttons and accelerometer data. Using the nunchuck is even cheaper than buying an acceleromter by itself.

Chad has posted a complete write-up on the hack, with photos and code - Link

May 30, 2007

Turn your PS3 into a science lab

The beginning of an interesting series has appeared on IBM's DeveloperWorks:

The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor has attracted a lot of fashionable attention for applications involving game playing and network data processing. However, there are many other, arguably more entertaining uses for this technology.

In this series of articles I will be using a Cell/B.E. processor -- resident within an off-the-shelf PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) -- to build a Linux-hosted piece of laboratory equipment...

By the time the series is finished, the author will have documented how to build a simple audio-bandwidth spectrum analyzer and function generator using Linux and the PS3 - [via] [image from] Link

May 4, 2007

Transfer and edit your Mii files

Mii Editor is a cool flash application that can edit and save Mii binary files. You can transfer your Mii to and from the Wiimote with MiiTransfer, edit it with the Mii Editor, or take screenshots and share your Mii file with friends.