Musings on science and game design by James Furness.
There is a tradition in my family that every year everyone takes a turn stiring a secret wish into the christmas pudding as it is being mixed. It's important that the wishes remain secret to the wisher or the pudding magics wont work. Ever since moving to America I've made a yearly game of implementing a new way of hashing my wish so it can be stirred in via text message without the stirrer…
I ve recently added a new tool to my Scientific Tools page. It is a python module that evaluates an accurate set of orbitals for spherical atoms. I have found myself using it a lot recently while searching large parameter spaces during functional development and needing fast, accurate densities with which to apply the new functionals. [ ]
At a recent meeting in Philadelphia I heard about the Sound Science Podcast Contest Read: The intersection of sound and science being held by the US Department of Energy (DOE) titled, described as [ ] an opportunity to share the excitement and mystery of science using sounds. I had a quiet hotel room evening ahead [ ]
With Probus finished I ve started out building a new game to keep me busy at the weekends, “Project: Tanks”. I m sticking with the HTML5 canvas platform again, but aiming at PC web browsers this time. I m hoping to play around with supporting player made content in this one, so I set out on making a [ ]
A lot of the challenge of good procedural generation is in appropriately setting how much of something should be included as a function of something else. Getting this blending right can be a tricky business, and I ve been slowly collecting a library of mathematical functions that have interesting properties suited to this task. I thought [ ]