WebQuest underway

Started work on my WebQuest for Uni. Initially I had thought about developing a WebQuest on lateral thinking as I had recently finished listening to an audiobook on the subject by DeBono. It seemed messy and contrived though. Close to the end of the first e.Learning assignment one of my comments on the boards regarding the reasons for a standard operating environment brought with it another thought...
School Internet Access.
I could easily build a WebQuest on that topic and I could see immediately how all the pieces would fit together. Students would first look at why they can't have access to everything by looking at the problem through different people's perspective (such as the teacher, the school, the parent or the IT Administrator). From this they can then look at whether any changes to the internet policy are recommended. They can then present these recommendation to a school panel to see if there are indeed changes to be made. Hopefully they will come up with some legitimate ideas that have a positive benefit to the school.

Infiniverse

Aave posted in rec.games.roguelike.development about his new project, Infiniverse. Looks like it might be a great candidate for Temporal ROAM.

Meet Emily

This is a pretty amazing tech demo.
What is Image Metrics? You're watching it...

Finally Kongai

Was feeling tired last night, but as i was packing away the plethora of web windows I had open I got sidetracked again. Eventually ended up back on the Kongregate website, and ran into an old game; Kongai. I had originally been interested in the game after reading Gamasutra's analysis of Kongai, but at the initial launch you had to play LOTS of Kongregate games to even get a starting deck. It now looks like you get 3 cards to start off, so at least you can jump in and see what it's actually like.

I really like it.

I've been using the R/P/S example for so long about game balance by metagame, now sirlin has formalised the metagame into a definable set of yomi states. Yomi; knowing the mind of the opponent. Excellent word. Kongai is full of Yomi.

GameLog 51 & 52

1 year of GameLogs stutters by as uni assignments take their toll on my gaming. Another combined report with little to show in 2 weeks.

UnAngband (15h) - VRBones XXII, 24 Rohan Paladin - My furthest push yet into the depths of UnAngband. The pally played better the second time around as I concentrated on archery to get me out of known non-melee battles. Eventually died to a pack of wights down the bottom of barrow downs.

Football Manager 08 (7h) - Gateshead Season 4, 3rd - Past the 1/2 way point in the league and we're a solid 3rd. We had a brief stint in 2nd, but Grimsby is way out in front. The team is playing well now and we're leading the goal scoring, even though we're losing some every now and then.

Nodiatis (4h) - Free online MMO. Plays like t.r.e.a.c.l.e.

TrackMania Nations Forever (3h) - StLukes CCG plus a little racing to keep in the points.

Fallen sword (2h) - Free online MMO that I tested with Ben

World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade (2h) - BundyBow, 12 hunter - Enough to get into Darkshore and start the grind. Even playing the hunter with carbonite isn't enjoyable enough to keep going.

Track King (1h) - Horse racing management online MMO. Bit too simple when FM08 is still sitting around waiting to be played.

It's WAR!

After reading that Warhammer is going to have an Aussie server, had a check to see if I had missed my beta invite. Nope. But a couple of hours later it did arrive, so I can only guess that all aussie betatesters were delayed until the news release.

Couldn't wait to get home and test the login. I knew the file would be big and I'd be unlikely to play tonight anyway, but I wanted to get it started right away. Then I saw it was a torrent. Eww. I like torrents as a theory, but being a torrent means it will take ~6 times longer to download. Then i saw the size.
9.4Gb.
OMFGWTFBBQ!!@!
I'll be lucky to be playing by the end of the week ... :(

Hidden information minigame

Had a dig through the GoodGame forums and found some suggestions for ways of attacking your rivals in the upcoming Office Wars game. One suggestion prompted me to build it into a hidden information game akin to the Prisoner's dilemma.

*You and a rival are both invited by your boss to visit his health club and play a few rounds of golf or tennis. Obviously the idea here is to lose convingly enough to boost the boss's ego, while showing up your rival. This could be a mini-game, (in which the object of the game is to challenge your boss and beat your rival but not play well enough to beat your boss), but a simpler idea would be to slip your rival some kind of perfromance enhancing substance, or special sports equipment, so they inadvertantly beat the boss really badly in the game, humiliating them boss and making him angry at your rival.

This could be an interesting blind information game if both you and your rival have to choose beforehand how well you will play (as well as what sabotage to do either to increase or decrease your opponent's ability). To do this you can have the boss challenge each of one individually without the other watching, then he watches both of you play each other. you can't play better in the second match as the boss will then know you went easy on him and ruin his trust in you. The object then is to lose as badly as possible to the boss for maximum boss ego boost, but still beat your rival when going head-to-head so you're seen as second best, not a complete loser.

Presented as a logic puzzle it would be:
Choose a number between 1 and 50 as your start skill and a number between -10 and 10 as a modifier for your opponent. Reveal both numbers simultaneously. The winner is the closest to 25 without going over. Score = amount under 25 you chose minus 10 if you were the lowest number, or minus 25 if you go over 25.

River basins by triangle slope

Doodled around a bit with the river basin algorithm to see if there was a way of embedding both mountain chains and river basins as never-touching trees. Somehow it warped into rivers passing through the side of a triangle while the vertex defined the mountain.

From the doodles it looked like there would always be only one exit from each triangle (almost 100% in real life too) so I hacked up some diagrams in Office to then check out if we can use the slope of the triangle to represent implicitly the exit points. Seems like it works, but certain initial heights will preclude different configurations from forming. Not sure whether it's terminal or not yet ...

Bargara Streetview

Andrew mentioned that Streetview now covers Brisbane, but lo and behold, it's also covering Bargara!

Other places:
Olsen's place
The Basin
Bargara Pub
St Lukes
St Johns Church & School
Bruce Hwy crossing Kolan River
CQUniversity
Matt's turnoff
Greig's Place
Andrew's Place

VR - The way TO the Future

Ever since I made up my handle way back in Uni for a new phenomenon called IRC, I had been taglining my emails with 2 short sentences:
VR - The way OF the Future
VR - The way TO the Future

The capitalisation was important as it outlined my pet philosophy at the time. Virtual reality is definitely going to be the way of the future, unfortunately is still taking longer than I thought. The second part is a little more in depth and I had cornered many a traveller into a conversation about virtual reality as an education medium that is able to change the world as we know it.

At Uni we have been looking at a collaborative assignment on E.Learning futures with a view to submitting the final paper to the Australian government as ideas for Rudd's Digital Education Revolution. It triggered memories of my old philosophy and with a bit of dust blowing I managed to write down my thoughts for merging with the rest of the document. So here's the latest on
VR - The way TO the Future