Author: Chad Weisshaar

Experimenting with Bluetooth

One of the challenges writing games for the touch-table is handling hidden information. So far we have used two solutions: Physical blinds that rest above the sensor and block the view of the other players, and a touch-to-reveal system where the player blocks the view with their hand and touches the screen to reveal their cards.

Many of our users have smartphones, and I thought that it would make sense to let them use their smartphone for the display of the hidden information. In the past, have experimented with a web based system where the game is hosted on a webpage and played on browsers. This works, but when the game is written in C++ for the touch-table, the game has to send data to the web-server so that the clients can display it. This creates extra overhead and lag.

Instead, I thought it would work better to send the hidden information directly to the phones over bluetooth. So I set out to write a C++ server that would use bluetooth to broadcast data to Android clients. This ended up being more difficult than I expected, but I did get it to work and wanted to post what I have done.

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Dead iMac

We got an iMac in January 2009 to compile Hackers of 2073 for iOS. After finishing the game, we used the Boot Camp feature to set up the machine as a Windows box and set it up in the kitchen for recipes and web browsing. The machine worked well for this use and we really liked that it was nearly silent.

A month or so ago, the hard drive died. Unfortunately it is not included in the list of defective iMac’s which were sold after October 2009, so I wanted to replace the bad drive. This is something that I have done many times on my PCs. I knew that it would be harder on the iMac since it is an all-in-one machine. I imagined that it would be like fixing a laptop. Continue reading “Dead iMac”

Integrating Awesomium into Torque

Battle Home, one of the games that MCG is developing for Mesa Mundi, has a lot of options which dramatically change the rules to the game. For previous games, we have created instructions by making one or more graphics in Powerpoint or Photoshop and displaying that  graphic on the screen. For this game, each combination of options was going to require another set of images. It would be much easier if we could create the instructions dynamically based on the options selected.

Enter Awesomium, a C++ library that lets you put the Chrome/webkit web renderer into your application. While it was not trivial to integrate Awesomium into torque it does allow us to display any HTML or public webpage within our games.

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New word game for the touch table

I have almost finished a new game for the touch table. The game is based on the board game “Keesdrow” and is similar enough that I am not going to be selling this game. “Keesdrow” is a word finding game somewhat similar to Boggle, but the board is much bigger and each letter can only be used three times. The first time a letter is used it scores its base value, the second time it scores double and the third time it scores triple. This makes it very important to find words that have repeated letters and use letters that have already been used once or twice.

The most interesting part of this project was the AI. I expected it to play significantly better than it does.

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Geocaching in City Park

We went Geocaching with Lucas, Jessie and their kids on Saturday. We did an elaborate multipart geo cache in City Park in downtown Denver. The geocache had a fantasy, chose your own adventure story behind it. We printed out the story and spellbook and set out on our adventure. You can see all the pictures here.

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Electric game for touch-table

We have mostly finished a new board game for the touch table. The game is inspired by Power Grid, but is intended only for use on our own table and will not be for sale.

I am pretty happy with the result. The game plays very fast since you don’t have to worry about setting up, distributing paper money and manipulating the cards. In the original board game, we often needed ‘thinking money’ that we could arrange in piles representing planned expenses. To meet this need in the electronic version, we included a calculator in each player’s area. Hopefully this will be adequate.

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Trip to Belgium and The Netherlands

We took a two week trip to Belgium and The Netherlands with my brother, his wife and my parents.

Since returning from the trip, I have spent a bunch of time going through pictures. I took  ~2200 pictures and trimmed it down to ~1750. I caption, geo-tag, people-tag and do some basic tuning for each picture. The pictures are finally available on this website here.

We stayed in four cities: Amsterdam, Delft, Bruges and Brussels. From there we did day trips to see: Hoge Veluwe, Haarlem, Enkhuizen, The Hague, Rotterdam, and Antwerp.

We primarily spent our time touring: going to museums, cathedrals, seeing the sites, etc.

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Violin Recital

Last night I had my first violin recital. I started taking lessons in September of 2009 and have been playing for a bit more than three years. I have kept track of my practice time and have now played for 1940 hours.

The recital was pretty informal. Half of the students were beginners and four of the six were adults. We started by playing music from Suzuki book 1 as a group. Then each student played one piece. Most of the students acted like they played worse than they expected, or at least worse than they do normally. I felt the same way; I was nervous and made more mistakes than usual. I had a particularly hard time with the timing. It could have gone much worse though. The accompanist was extremely good and I never had to stop and re-start.

Overall it was a positive experience. It forced me to put a lot of time into a single piece. I wasn’t patient enough to do that without the pressure of a performance. And it was fun to meet the other students.

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Rooting my Android phone

This morning I rooted my android G2x. The main motivation was curiosity, but there were a few things that I wanted to improve about my phone. T-Mobile didn’t pre-load too much junk onto the phone, but there was the T-Mobile app-pack and Mall, Nova and Tegra game stores, and the lite version of TeleNav. Also, to get a good ad-blocker you need to have root access.

So I took the plunge and rooted the phone. There was a point when I thought the phone was bricked, but it all worked out in the end.

Even without the mistakes that I made, I would say that the benefits do not justify the effort (at least for my phone). I am glad that I did it, but more for the experience than the end result.

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Southern Trip

We took a road trip through the south to visit friends. You can see all the pictures here. We had a good time and really enjoyed meeting N.R. and his family and visiting with Ian and Ingrid and meeting their daughters.

We traveled 4500 miles and tried to stop for a lot of roadside attractions. I wish that we could have spent more time with N.R. and Ingrid, but two weeks was already a long time to be on the road.

Here are some of the highlights:

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