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Sorry that I have not had the chance to put any new posts up. As I had anticipated, teaching responsibilities this semester have put a slight damper on my development activities. In addition, I have also been investing more effort into the research side of the endeavor – and reaping the benefits! I have two…
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I have been playing with GIMP to create the textures for the fountain. Although not as “intuitive” as, say, Adobe Photoshop, I have found GIMP to be adequate for my needs. It is also free, which it great for an indie game producer/university professor with a tight budget yet big ideas. Using Blender to export…
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I spent Saturday afternoon playing with the procedural textures that ship with Blender to create the water pipes on my recent project, the fountain that will go in the center of the pedestrian zone. Thinking about how these pipes should look like, I thought that they would have been exposed to the elements for some…
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We spent a fair amount of time in our last class period fleshing out the NPCs for the DigiBahn game. Here are some images of the work that the students produced on the whiteboard: The students will be working in small groups over the course of the next week, working with library resources and databases…
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Since every Fußgängerzone needs a fountain, I’ve been busy these last couple of days modeling one in Blender in my spare time. Creating the basic shape was fairly easy, as was making an animation for the water in the fountain: And here is the original image on which the design of my 3D model is…
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Over the last few days I have been attempting to create a fusion of my research and teaching agendas by getting students in my intermediate German conversation class involved in the DigiBahn Project. In class we have discussed – auf Deutsch, sogar! – language as a sociocultural tool that we use to structure reality and,…
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A new screen capture of the DigiBahn game, including a new model of the church (St. Andreas Church in Weißenburg in Bayern): I also tweaked the camera to provide a more realistic human perspective; the point-of-view (POV) is much taller than in prior screen captures. In any case, we’re making great progress on the game…
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One of the features of Half-Life 2 that impresses me time and time again is the seamless sense of flow that the game narrative, virtual spaces, and ludic activity provides. Unlike many other games that front load a large amount of interface training thinly masked as plot development or avatar “education” (America’s Army 3 comes…
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One of the primary difficulties facing the DigiBahn Project is the development of realistic 3D models to simulate an authentic German environment. One workaround we have been employing is to mine the Google 3D Warehouse for models and exporting them into Blender as a COLLADA file. The workflow is fairly straight-forward: Download the SketchUp model…
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I have been busy since 3:30 AM this morning, working on getting a basic prototype of the DigiBahn game ready for the 2009 ACTFL Annual Conference. I know that it won’t be until November 22, but I’m afraid that once the semester starts the first week in September, I’ll get too busy with other things.…
