An interesting link between atmospheric and astronomical turbulence and Van Gogh’s starry night. In investigating astronomical structures, astronomers noticed some looked like the flows in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. In analyzing his paintings, as he struggled towards the end of his life, his paintings with turbulent characteristics more and more closely represented actual mathematical turbulent flow.
Links:
Danish indie studio Ultra Ultra released their sci-fi stealth horror game Echo back in 2017. It never got the acclaim of Dead Space, but it had some unique visual feedback elements.
The first is it’s use of flashing and cycling lighting in beautiful white marble world. The lights cycle and turn on/off in flows and waves through the environment to help you find your way along in the game.
The more interesting dynamic is it’s “hudsphere”. The player has a color-coded radar-like interface that hovers around her body like a ball.
During combat, a blue fractalized shimmer along the surface of the sphere indicates the presence of another humanoid entity. A yellow shimmer indicates the player is about to be noticed. A red fractal shimmer means the player is being targeted by an attacker. When attacked, a quick-time prompt appears so she can break free. Red spikes will appear inside the sphere, signaling that character is vulnerable to death.
The sphere can emit an area scan that sends out a pulse that tags all the elements in your vicinity. The sphere becomes the guns reticle and you can tag enemies by hovering over an enemy.
Give it a look (skip to 49:49 for example of the hud):
https://www.polygon.com/gaming/541810/echo-sci-fi-horror-dead-space-ui
Some great entries this year – the Trojan Bunny from Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail, a great corn on the cob entry, an expansion of the Cars animated series including Toe-mater, and a wonderful hunk of cheese driven by some mice, and a nice corn dog.
Here’s a nice walk through the pits
Plastic 195/95 is a 20mb demo made by a demo team on their picoEngine v2.1b in 2009
Not to be outdone, RGBA 195/95 is the same demo – done in 64k
These were shared in a presentation on lessons learned from Demo Scene coding:
A wonderful example of comparing how Hollywood portrays things and the way real life people who lived through the actual events tell the story.
Effulgence was just announced and brings some amazing 2.5D rendering to the table – not using blitting or rendering – but drawing text. Check out their Effulgence Steam page or Andrey Fomin’s YouTube channel for more cool looking development videos.
Here’s a room full of sunflowers for the Van Gogh exhibit in Chengdu China
The Obscuritory has done a 12 minute speedrun of the classic obscure game “The Labyrinth of Time“. I loved Myst and saved up my money to buy this game – only to find myself utterly lost as to what to do. It’s an obscure, but ultimately bad, game. The idea is interesting – an adventure that requires collecting items or changing the past to affect the future puzzles. It’s an idea that is probably ripe for a remake or a part 2 (that was hinted at at the ending of the game, but never written)
Back in the day, I actually contacted and talked with one of the programmers. He said that they were running out of storage space to fit the game on one CD-ROM, so they kept compressing and re-compressing the audio until it was barely acceptable quality. I believe his exact words were that ‘It was criminal’ how much they compressed them.
I remember that the sound track was pretty good. Ironically, it was mostly stock audio that could be licensed very cheaply. Some of my favorites were ‘Intrigue‘, ‘The Killing Ground‘, ‘Pastoral colours‘, and many others. Fans on the playlist linked above seem to have identified all the songs.
Here’s a longer, slower playthrough for the curious:
The Original Good Idea Girl notes there are more than 30 voice types (Fach types) in opera. I certainly had only a vague understanding of types. She does a magnificent job describing them with great actual examples.
Hanabira工房 makes insanely detailed miniature worlds on his Youtube channel. Here he puts a miniature world inside an old computer
He also did an interesting world building inside what appeared to be a working MSI computer build. This could becoming an interesting niche of computer customization up there with LEDs and custom colors.