So, I've decided that my current financial stability and semi-abundance of free time mean that it is finally time to build my own lightsaber. I've been designing different versions for a very long time now and I think I've finally got the design that I want to start with.
My whole design philosophy is that form follows function. A lightsaber is first and foremost a weapon. Weapons are not supposed to be flashy or highly decorative, they're supposed to work. They're supposed to be comfortable in the hand and easy to use. They should be robustly created and easy to maintain in less-than-ideal circumstances.
I also wanted to make something that looked "real" all the way through. I have a few replica sabers in my possession and they look pretty great on the outside, but once you open them up they're just battery packs and wires and PCBs and it ruins the immersion.
First, here are some pictures of some of the other designs I've come up with:
And these are just all from the last few months. As you might be able to see, I've been circling some basic concepts. One of my main inspirations is the shroud from the Aggressive Negotiations line from Vader's Vault. I also liked the concept of having a crystal chamber but nothing too flashy.
Since I don't live in a house with a garage or workshop space, I am limited as to what I can do. I decided to go with a main body built out of MHS (Modular Hilt System) parts from the inimitable Custom Saber Shop. Using their builder I played around with a few ideas and finally came up with a desing that I liked.
MHS Builder View
Then I modeled up those parts in Creo and assembled them so I could design the shroud.
MHS Parts
I then designed a shroud to cover the entire saber
Saber with Shroud
I ran into a real problem here, though. The shroud I designed is a hair over 14" long, and The Custom Saber Shop only sells 12" lengths of the shroud material. I tried to find another supplier, but couldn't find anywhere online selling aluminum tubing in the dimensions I needed. Finally I decided to contact Tim at TCSS to ask if he could get me a longer piece. He responded very quickly and said he had some 18" pieces that he would sell me. Perfection.
I ordered as many of my parts as TCSS had in stock, which turned out to be the main hilt piece, the switch box, the double female adapter and the switch box, as well as the shroud material. Everything arrived quickly and was completely perfect.
First Round of Parts
I have to say, TCSS has great quality items. The machining is clean and precise and the parts fit together perfectly.
I still have to wait for several more parts to come into stock, but I will keep updating this build log as I have news to share.
I don't even think I need the "I love space and space travel and space exploration" preamble at this point, so I'll forgo more than just that meta-introduction.
Nope, I'll do it anyway. It's important. I love space and space exploration and space travel. I crave the experience portrayed in shows like Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica. I love the single pilot ships from Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and Firefly and I also love the multi-crew ships depicted in those same shows and Star Trek. I like the idea of barking orders at a group of people or having orders barked in my direction. I like the feeling of camaraderie as multiple individuals work towards a common goal.
Now, there have been single-pilot games for decades. The X-wing series from Star Wars, Wing Commander, Freelancer, etc, all help to slake the thirst for that space feel. Some of them even allow for multiplayer co-operative modes, which is pretty fun. However, for a long time there was no game that captured the feel of being an officer on the bridge of a large ship. A year or so ago I found a game called Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator which promised that experience. You and 5 friends all take different roles on the bridge of a starship. Each of you sits at a networked computer depicting a bridge console, so it's a sort of live-action roleplaying game. Someone acts as captain, someone pilots the ship, someone fires the weapons, someone manages the communications, and someone acts as ship's engineer. Proper cooperation between all 6 members of the crew is important to the survival of the ship and the completing of the mission. I played this with my friends several times and always had an enjoyable experience.
Even more impressive than the game itself is the fact that the developer is one man, working alone in his spare time.
The game is a bit...limited, however. Gameplay is done is what is commonly called "submarine 3D", meaning your vessel can only turn left and right and change the "height" above or below the neutral plane of battle. The arena is MUCH shorter than it is wide and long, and the vertical component of the motion feels more like a gimmick than a tactical option. The arena is quite small, being only 100km to a side. It takes a minute or two to cross the arena at full warp, which means that warp speed is around 1200 km/hr, or Mach 1, which is pretty slow in space. The graphics aren't fantastic and the gameplay is limited. Users have the ability to script missions in HTML, but the scripting language is similarly limited and doesn't allow for robust use of variables or complex functions. The main mode of the game is an invasion mode where a certain number of enemies spawn and try and destroy space stations. There are settings for the match that can help to make for different experiences, but in general the game is basically the same each time. That's not necessarily a bad thing and there is a dedicated fanbase that loves the game, but for me it's not quite enough.
Today I found a game that's still in the alpha stage but already looks amazing: Pulsar: Lost Colony. Similarly to Artemis, it's a co-operative spaceship simulator where each player plays a different role on a starship, but it expands on the idea by quite a bit. First and foremost, the game is played from the first-person view. The player maneuvers a player character through the interior of a fully-modeled ship, complete with hallways, doors, crew quarters, lounges, and system rooms. Interacting with command consoles allows the player to control the ship. The ship maneuvers through 3D space with 6 degrees of freedom. Players can teleport down to the surface of planets to explore and gather resources and information. Apparently you can also teleport to an enemy ship, kill the crew, and take control of the ship. This means that you might have enemies teleport aboard your own ship, at which point you'll need to repel the boarders. Character permadeath is a feature. The ship has a system that creates a new body for any crewmember that dies, which I assume means that the player loses any skills or bonuses gained during the course of the game. If the cloning system is destroyed and all player characters die, the game ends and the save files are deleted. On starting a game, a galaxy is randomly generated so each new game is a new experience.
Basically, it sounds fairly fantastic. From the early alpha gameplay videos there are some interface choices that I don't really like, but in general, this game looks amazing. It contains plenty of elements that I wanted Artemis to have, all wrapped in universe that is visually appealing and, at least on the surface, quite compelling. Here: have some screenshots and videos!
Not real planetary exploration, unfortunately, but a game to which I was introduced by a good friend. The game is called Planet Explorers and, though it's still in the alpha stage, it's already incredible.
Now, some background on me. If you've read a certain post on here, you'll know that I love Terraria. I love exploring, finding resources, obtaining said resources, and using them to make new things. I also the sense of openness even though there is a sort of progression line. Now, Terraria is a 2-dimensional game, of course. Minecraft was the closest analogue to Terraria in the realm of 3D games, but I just couldn't handle Minecraft. I didn't like the aesthetic, I didn't like the controls or the lack of structure, and I couldn't play it for very long.
Enter Planet Explorers. Like Minecraft, Planet Explorers uses voxels, which are basically 3D pixels, except that Planet Explorers' voxels aren't cubes. Take a look at this picture of the landscape
As you can see, there are no cubes in sight. Let me try and explain voxels. Most everyone understands pixels, which are basically little points of color on a 2D grid. Voxels are basically the same thing, but in 3D. If you imagine a sheet of graph paper where every junction between lines is a point in space, and each point can have a "color" or some other attribute, you basically get the idea. Voxel-based landscapes are nice because you can create overhangs and caves and things that are impossible using a heightmap. They're also nice for mining games like PE or Minecraft, because each separate voxel can be a different material, similar to Terraria's block structure. The difference between Minecraft and PE is how they handle connections between voxels. Let's go back to the graph paper example.
Assume that the different colored dots represent different materials. We have PE on the left and Minecraft on the right. In this first image there are no connections between voxels.
In this second image we have connected the voxels. In Minecraft on the right, connections can only be vertical or horizontal, whereas in PE the connections can be made at any angle. The engine calculates the slope based on the location of all adjacent voxels and fills it in. This leads to more natural-looking terrain, as can be seen in the in-game screenshot above.
So, the aesthetic is much more pleasing to me, just from the first impression. Gameplay is basically identical in a lot of ways. You move a character around a world, gathering resources, chopping down trees, digging up dirt and iron and other materials, building houses, crafting tools and weapons and armor and the like. However the experience in PE seems MUCH better than in Minecraft. For starters, there are NPCs that offer quests that help the player learn to play and use the interface. These quests feel as natural as a hidden tutorial can be, and generally fit into the setting, which is that of a spaceship full of explorers that crashes on an alien planet. It's often difficult to combine mouse and keyboard movement of a character with a point and click interface, but by binding rotation of the camera to the right mouse button, Planet Explorers manages to create a functional interface.
Now, not everything is perfect, of course. It's difficult to differentiate between materials, for starters. A lot of the stone and iron and limestone all looks more or less the same. As much as I hate the cube aesthetic of minecraft, it did make it easy to tell which and often I would dig out a chunk of stuff without adding anything to my inventory. This seemed relatively arbitrary, but it might have been occurring when I dug up a section of a slope that wasn't large enough to be considered an entire voxel but instead was filling the empty space between adjacent points. I'm not sure.
Then again, this is an alpha, and the free download isn't the latest version of the alpha, either. I'm extraordinarily impressed with the quality of this game so far. In the 0.5 alpha version there are 3 gameplay versions: Story, Adventure, and Multiplayer. I've only tried the story mode, but from what I can gather the adventure and multiplayer modes are identical with the difference of the number of players. Adventure mode seems to be more sandbox-esque, where you have access to all crafting recipes and are free to just do whatever you want.
Another cool aspect of the game (which is quite unique, in my opinion) is the ability to generate your own custom crafting recipes. This utility plays similarly to a simplified 3D modelling program, where you basically sculpt a sword, gun, vehicle, or whatever you want. The program calculates the required materials, the weight, damage, etc of your final design, and then allows you to export it to the "real" world. It's a pretty fantastic aspect to add to the game, especially if people want to make a sword that spirals around and has tons of spikes sticking out at weird angles like I did. Eventually you can build complex vehicles with weaponry and everything. The interface takes a bit to learn, but once you've got it, it's quite powerful.
Bottom line: Planet Explorers looks and feels incredible already, and I've only tried the early alpha version. For $22 you can pick up the early access on Steam and get the 0.7 alpha which includes a lot of new features.
I downloaded the demo for Rodina, a game in development by Elliptic Games, and was quite pleasantly surprised. Now, for starters, this game isn't made to rival Skyrim in terms of graphics and environmental design. It is still in development, so better visuals may be on the horizon, but that's not really the point. The point is that Rodina actually delivers a fun, basic experience.
When you start the game, you find yourself on the surface of some asteroid. A small green circle hovers in your view, indicating the location of your ship. Using normal WASD controls and the spacebar to jump, you can navigate to your ship and approach the airlock.
Passing through the airlock leads you into the interior of the vessel, where you can wander through the halls and rooms until you find your way to the cockpit and pilot controls.
Once you sit down at the pilot controls, the game switches the view to 3rd person and you can control the ship. There are currently 2 speed settings: one for combat and landing, and another for travel between celestial bodies.
Flight between celestial bodies is pretty fun. I only ever saw asteroid-sized planetoids, but that's ok. As far as I can tell, the majority of the planetoids have a pile of random crates and barrels and some sort of electronic storage devices that either give you random snippets of logs from other pilots or upgrades to your ship's decryption protocols. Landing is a little tough right now, since there's a bit of Newtonian-style inertia and sometimes your ship bounces across the surface for a bit before coming to a rest. Once you land you can leave the pilot's seat, walk back through the ship to the airlock, and leave to explore the surface. The planetoids are procedurally-generated with fractal landscapes, and, as you can see in the picture above, they look pretty cool. As far as I can tell, different planetoids have different amounts of gravitational force, because it seems like you can jump higher on some planetoids than others.
There is combat and your ship has 2 weapons: some sort of projectile and a missile weapon. Every once in a while you'll find an enemy ship flying around one of the planetoids. The game has options on combat difficulty that I haven't yet played with, but I imagine it could change the amount of damage the enemy ship can give and take or something of that nature.
Now, everything is pretty simplistic, to be sure. The ship has rudimentary roll, pitch, and yaw controls as well as linear thrusters in 5 directions (no way to go down). The HUD doesn't have much information at all and there isn't any autopilot or anyway to map out a course. Exploration, for me, at least, consisted of pointing my ship at one of the objects that seemed to be the closest and switching to the faster speed. Often I would overshoot the object, since there was no distance indicator or heading. The difference between the combat and cruise speeds is enormous, so I often needed to get as close as I could to a planetoid, slow to combat speed to reorient myself, switch quickly to cruise speed and then back and forth between the two speeds in short bursts to cover the remaining distance. Combat is also a little simple. You have to switch between the two weapons instead of being able to fire primary and secondary at the same time. The missiles automatically track the nearest enemy, which is fine, since as far as I experienced, you only ever find one enemy at a time, but still a bit annoying. Additionally, the lack of first-person view for flying the ship annoys me.
After that list, however, there is something I need to mention:
There
Are
NO
Loading Screens.
Anywhere. Once you are in the game, you're in the game the whole time. The longest process you'll encounter is moving between the inner and outer airlocks, and even that is a much quicker process than real airlocks.
So that entire experience, from starting on the surface of some asteroid, finding your ship, climbing in, finding the cockpit, climbing into the pilot's controls, launching from the surface and flying to another asteroid, landing on that asteroid, climbing out of the pilot's controls, walking to the airlock, leaving the ship and finding random stuff on the surface is all one continuous action. There are no loading screens, no pauses, no breaks. The only shift in perspective comes in the pilot's seat, and it happens in an instant.
This leads to a phenomenally immersive experience, even though the graphics and gameplay themselves need polish. The fact that I can move my character up into the ship, take a wrong turn and wind up in a bathroom, backtrack and finally make my way to the cockpit, then fly from one asteroid to another, finding missiles and upgrades and people trying to kill me, all that is just incredible to me. That's exactly what I want in a game. There aren't any loading screens in real life, after all. I don't know how the developers accomplished what they did, but I am really excited to see what they do with this game.
A few days ago I talked about Etherea1, the plug-in engine for Unity 3D that allows you to create planet-sized planets in a universe-sized universe. Today I found out that there are actually several other companies working on the same thing, and, let me tell you, that makes me pretty freakin happy.
The first thing I found out about today is a game called No Man's Sky. I'll admit, their website doesn't show a whole lot, but they demonstrated their game engine at VGX earlier this month. The premise of the game is exploring a universe. Fairly simple start, but the thing about it is that the entire universe is procedurally-generated, supposedly from the atom all the way up to galaxies. The following video gives a glimpse of the power of this engine and an idea of the gameplay.
And how awesome does that look? Oceans, creatures, plants, terrain, space, everything procedurally generated and waiting to be explored. The creators claim that every star that you see is a real object, complete with the possibility of having planets, moons, and things to discover. Most space games use a skybox (a cube of images) set at a sort of maximum distance from the camera to give the illusion of infinite space. This game actually seems to be able to make the illusion real.
How about that scene near the end where he blasts a hole in that asteroid and flies through? In reference to my post from a few days ago, that is definitely one of the things I would like to be able to do when I play a video game of that particular genre.
The second thing I found from a comment that someone left about No Man's Sky is a tech company called I-Novae, who claim, rather boldly, that "The only boundary is your imagination". Apparently they've been around for a few years developing a game engine to, once again, procedurally generate enormous game environments. Take a gander:
This is their most recent post, but I-Novae has quite a few more videos on their Youtube page. They've been working on this engine for a long time, and they're getting ready to launch a Kickstarter campaign to get funding for their game Infinity: Battlescape. Their goal is to build a persistent universe online, and the game will bring players into this universe. This means that everyone that plays the game will be in the same universe.
I've been looking for something like this for quite some time. One of the things that bothers me about most MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online is that, especially at the early stages, the game feels like a single-player game. You follow a storyline that contains elements that should be unique, yet every other player is going through the same story. For example, I've played MMOs where you have to go collect the plants to create the medicine for some sick important person. As soon as you do that, he gets better, gives you cool stuff, and you go on your way. If you happen to look back, you'll see another dozen players collecting the same plants for the same sick person and receiving the same thanks and reward. With normal single-player games you know every other player is going through the same story, but at least there's a bit of pretense to try and make you feel like you're the only one. MMOs bother me because, by and large, they haven't been able to let go of the trappings of single-player-ness to fully embrace the possibilities of the medium.
Now, with games like No Man's Sky and Infinity: Battlescape, there will finally be a feeling of truly entering a realistic world where your actions have a unique effect. The ability to explore, find new things, new areas, new regions of space? So cool.
I leave you with some screenshots from I-Novae's game engine. Keep in mind that these images are completely computer-generated from an algorithm, not from a model that someone made manually.
Several days ago I posted about AR, specifically the gamut of new companies entering the head-mounted AR display market. META was one of those companies I mentioned, and they started with a pretty cool idea with some serious limitations. Their META.01 version is just a display and has some limited distance sensing and display capability. The other day, META announced a new version of their headset, called the META Pro.
Highway to the AR zone
As you can see in the image, this new design actually looks fairly cool, if you're into aviators. I hope they come up with some new frame designs for the rest of us that look much less like hotshot pilots and more like backwater law enforcement when we sport these kinds of eyewear.
New aesthetics aside, the Pro version boast some pretty impressive stats. Twin 1280x720 pixel displays with a binocular 40° field of view give you 15x the screen real estate that Google's Project Glass offers. The sensor suite includes a 9-degrees of freedom with an accelerometer, a magnetometer, and a gyroscope, allowing the glasses to know exactly where they're facing. Twin color cameras and 2 distance sensors allow the glasses to recognize your hands and your surroundings and gives you the ability to use gestures as an input device. The whole thing is powered by a smartphone-sized pocket computer sporting a quadcore intel processor, 4 GB of RAM and a 32Whr battery, enough to handle some pretty sizeable computing.
Take a look at the video, which was shot through the glasses themselves.
One of the things that becomes immediately apparent is that the gesture recognition has improved a ton since the original developer edition video. They keep making the reference to the Iron Man movies where Tony Stark has a holographic interface and I think the comparison is warranted. Yeah, it requires that you wear their glasses, but it's still fairly incredible. The ability to interact with your phone and laptop in a completely holographic environment is neat, but, as I mentioned in my previous AR post, this tech will let us do things in a completely new way. Why do we need the visual outline of a laptop or an iPhone when you could just have icons floating around the periphery of your display? Move your hand over to one side to tap a menu button that opens a list of available apps. You don't need a holographic computer, just have the info on a floating window. I suppose some people will prefer less change, but I'm all for exploring how much we can make this tech change our world.
The META software is designed to be used with Unity 3D, which, as I've mentioned before, is basically a video game creation program. I've played around with Unity quite a bit and I really like the interface. You basically can create 3D worlds without ever writing a line of code, though if you want stuff to move around and interact, you'll need to be a proficient programmer. But this means that it's not terribly difficult to start making applications for META, and there are so many possibilities. The video depicted the user shaping the cone of a rocket engine and adding it to an assembly. Already on the website there are hundreds of app ideas, and since META has decided to allow 3rd party companies to develop software for their device, we can expect 100s more as time goes on. Some of the ideas are pretty cool. I've always loved the concept of using AR for LARPing so you can have computer-controlled enemies, give the mages some actual magic, even produce a scene that can't be easily created IRL.
One of the ideas I had (and posted on the website) was to incorporate the glasses with a flight simulator. Many people build their own simulator cockpits with varying degrees of complexity, which is pretty neat, but there are still only two options, each with limitations.
First, you use monitors in place of windscreens. This allows you to see the interior of your cockpit, use cool digital indicators and the like, but the problem is that the image won't be 3D and even with decent head tracking, it won't mimic the feel of actually being in an airplane since looking around won't provide the same changing direction of view.
Second, you can use a VR headset like the Oculus Rift. This gives you a 3D image with good head tracking, but since you can't see anything besides what's on the screen, why even bother building a sim cockpit except to have the feel and the location of the controls? Plus you can't see your hands unless you wear motion tracking gloves and have the program show you an approximation, so you'll spend time fumbling for switches.
My concept allowed you to build a fairly simple sim cockpit with just the controls and the actual interior, but with a reference pattern printed on any surface designed to be a window or windscreen. Then the AR glasses display the rendered game image anywhere they see that reference pattern. That way you can still see your hands and the interior of your cockpit, even your instruments, but you also get a 3D view with proper head tracking. The software could render the exterior view in a sphere around the player location so you'd be able to look all around, even stretch or lean to the sides and see just like if you were in a real vehicle.
Obviously the list of possibilities is pretty long. This kind of tech opens up many new doors, even doors we didn't know existed, and that's absolutely fantastic.
I think by now it's sort of redundant to mention how much I love space exploration, video games, and space exploration video games, so I'll probably eventually stop mentioning it.
Lately I've been playing several sessions of the game FTL. If you haven't heard of it, FTL is a roguelike spaceship management simulator game. Kind of a mouthful, but the long and short of it is that FTL gives you the experience of being a starship captain in a procedurally-generated universe, tasked with the mission of carrying important information to your superiors, 8 sectors away from your starting point. The roguelike nature of the game means that if your ship explodes, that's it. You have to start over from the beginning. There are no checkpoints, no way to save the game in case you make the wrong decision and want to go back.
The game is actually fairly simple, on the surface. The interface is a top-down view of your ship, which is divided into different rooms and systems. You have a number of crew members that you can control, ordering them to man different systems, make repairs, or repel boarders. Each sector is divided into procedurally-generated systems of planets. You jump from system to system and at each system have a random encounter. Sometimes you run into pirates, sometimes you find people in distress, sometimes there's a sun or an asteroid field or a store. Combat consists of aiming and firing weapons, using different drones, or even teleporting to the enemy ship to fight it out face to face. As you go, you acquire material to make upgrades to your systems or purchase new equipment.
There's something extremely satisfying about ordering your crewman to man their stations while launching missiles and lasers at an enemy ship. I've also experienced a visceral pain as I've watched a particularly good ship and crew break apart under the onslaught of an enemy ship. Like I said, immersive. Even though the interface and graphics are simplistic, the gameplay, story, and random nature of the game makes it feel quite real.
One thing I don't recommend for gamers that tend to get very immersed in games is naming your crewmen after people you know, unless you want those people to die horribly. Crewmembers can and will die in fires, from boarders, by suffocation, from space diseases, and just from a straight-up direct hit from a missile to the room they're currently inhabiting.
I think the takeaway from this is that it doesn't require the latest and greatest graphics technology or a 3D virtual reality headset and tactile interface to make a game immersive. I've felt more immersed in a book or a well-made movie than I ever have in Skyrim or similar current-gen games. The real immersion comes from creating a believable universe, an experience that is plausible enough in and of itself that you don't doubt it while you play. FTL manages this, and while I'd love to have a similar experience with a more complex game, but until I find that more complex game, FTL serves to temporarily scratch that itch.
