techno game dev forum

If you'd like to see a movie of the indian rope trick (a pencil levitating upwards to stand on its point) then let me know right here.
Its in Basic, but is trivial for you to rewrite in another language.

The secret is to be REAL. Real things are NOT linear - despite all the nonsense we are taught at school
All it takes is a bit of vibration and the pencil stands up!

Things that interest me (and I have programs written for over the past 50 years) are:

Trying to understand and find out “what would happen if”

Intelligence, human animal and machine

Design and building amplifiers and oscillators, electrical, chemical, mechanical

Sports car racing: design and race performance optimisation by simulation. Supercharging.

Lasers, pattern recognition, electro-optics, displays, sensors microwaves, infrared, ultrasound

Liquid crystals, thermochromics, holography, recording 3- 4- and more d images

Motion of many bodies mutually influencing each other: chaos, Saturn’s rings, Trojan orbits and stability

Equilibrium. Stability VERSUS change. Never-repeating motions

Simple things with complex results

Travelling Salesman type problems: efficient networks.

Particle accelerators. Thermonuclear and fission reactors.

How a child learns: how a foetus develops. The plan, factory and materials and energy.

When is a knot not a knot: how to draw, tie and untie knots. Knitting, crochet etc

3-d modelling and sculpting

Use of the ear-brain and Sndraw in analysing data

Design of guitars and resonance (feedback) in musical instruments. Coupled oscillators.

How to invent and discover new things by using what we know of things that we have been "educated"" to believe are totally irrelevant and belong to a "different specialisation"
I invented chemical oscillators this way by thinking of whistles and music and radio transmitters anf flip-flops
The history of one subject teaches much about "what may be discovered next" in other seemimgly totally different subjects.

well, theres this program called lego digital designer that combines legos and 3D modeling, google lego design by me and you can buy the sets direct from lego

I'd like to start and run this group and will do so if anyone is interested

Basically with sculpting you produce a 3-d statue (thing) by chipping away stone and revealing that what you wanted was indeed there inside it!
To make a realistic human head takes about 2 months
(There are many other ways to start and preceed - such as clays and low temperature ceramics)

With 3-D printing you get infected with the irrational idea of making it by glueing the pixels together one by one.
Think of .001" size Lego blocks!
It is VERY slow, of course
To make a human head (full size) about 2 months!

3-D printing is today's ultimate hot-air topic on the web
Less than 1% is worth reading BUT some FANTASTIC 3-d models (printed layer by laver) were recently on show at the V&A museum London.
You can actually print things IMPOSSIBLE to carve (e.g. ruffled feathers)

The most successful technique is by laser fusion of powder
The powder is spread layer by layer and a laser x/y scanned to sinter/fuse the pixels. Then the loose powder is washed or blown away and you have your magnum opus.
Less successful and most popular is the feed of a plastic filiament as it melts on passing thru a heated nozzle. The adhesion between layers is often poor as hot plastic is placed on the cold layer below.

A vaital step in most schemes is to have a "3-d cloud"
This is basically a LIST of millions of x,y,z locations that are the exterior surface of the thing you want to make
You feed this list layer by layer in whatever manner your print mechanism demands (a "format" problem).

The vital question, once you have your "3-d cloud" is what to do with it!
Feed it to the printer is easier to say than do.
Free download progs like Catch and Sculptris claim to allow you to create the "3-d cloud" but NEVER in a format accepted by your printer. You have at THAT stage to pay someone to do that for you and clean up any mess that Catch left behind.


Please reply with your ideas and suggestions as to the type of Sculpting and 3-d Printing section you would like to see here, or help create!
John

Hi all,
    I have an old text book called "Teach Yourself Game Programming in 21 Days" by Andre LM. It has a chapter on text games. Would you like me to scan it and make available a zip file of its contents Axlyon?
OlDosLover.