[Collecting Lapses]

During the past year, I was so busy with different stuff in my life that I rarely found the time to work on personal projects, specially for making videos. But with my college finished, and all the distractions almost over, I’m finally getting the free time I need to work on lots of different creative projects. I’m coding the game I mentioned in my previous blog post right now, and to make up for the time I was away from the camera and editing tools, I’ve decided to dedicate a portion of my time to capturing time lapses from various places.

This photo is from a time lapse of a beautiful sunset I shot yesterday in the city. It was so gorgeous that got me so tempted that I was going to just upload this one single clip here so everyone could enjoy it, but I decided to wait instead and stick a couple more time lapses to it and make an awesome clip off of them.

The problem of shooting video in this time of year is that it is currently winter and everything looks a lot boring, also the pollution often makes landscapes look awful in winter. Finding cool time lapse subjects in this time of year is very difficult, but I’m going to look for them anyway.

Let’s keep looking!

Doing Art All By Myself.

During the past couple of years (yes, YEARS!) I got used to ask a lot of people that did paintings and could draw, to draw some art for my games. They all had a “Sure, I’ll do it” attitude at first, but none of them even began to draw a single sprite for me.

What is the problem of a person who is relatively good at drawing images physically, with doing the same thing only on the computer? I had never put any effort in drawing in my life, and I was horrible at it when I had to do it when I used to go to school; Therefore I had no idea how difficult or easy drawing a bunch of simple game sprites would be.

So a couple of days ago, I began doing an experiment by opening Adobe Illustrator and trying to just draw a human figure. I spent some time with Illustrator, and finally came up with the character below:

For a person like me, who has practically done no serious drawings in my entire life, coming up with these images, leads me to a number of conclusions:

• It is definitely not at all difficult to draw computer based illustrations.
• Most people just don’t want to cooperate. If you see someone hesitating even a little bit, DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME ON THEM.
• Self-confidence is the most important thing in trying something new. I’m sure even if I offered these people a huge amount of money, and gave them high quality drawing tablets, they still couldn’t pull off the job. Because most people lack self-confidence. They don’t show it, but they really do.

So from now on, I’ve decided to draw my sprites by myself. I’m going to use these frames and a couple more in an experimental platformer game to see how they look.

No preview in Magic Bullet Looks Builder?

I have had a very annoying problem with LooksBuilder for a long time. Most times, when I opened LooksBuilder to edit a look from Premiere Pro, it showed a black screen, or a frame from another clip in my project. This maked using Magic Bullet Looks very annoying and almost impossible, because I had to practically edit my looks blindly and with trial and error. I looked for it on the Internet, but did not find anything helpful. Someone said this is a “Licensing Problem.”

Today when I was editing a relatively complex sequence, I finally found a trick to make this problem go away. First, Let me tell you my system specs. I’m using Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks 2.0.4 with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 on a dual display system (With different aspect ratios) running a 64-bit version of Windows 7 powered by an ATI Radeon HD 5770 GPU. I have installed the latest update of MBL and my LooksBuilder looks like this:

 

So the problem is sometimes when I click Edit from the Effect Controls panel, the Looks Builder shows a blank or an irrelevant preview frame. I think it tries to load the last rendered frame from some place on the memory and often times the right frame isn’t on that part of the memory.

 

 

Whether this is the reason for showing an invalid frame or not, the problem can be solved by simply clicking on the Looks name (The name of the effect) on the Effect Controls panel, wait for the frame to render, and then click the Edit… button. It’s simple as that!

 

Speech and Skeletal Tracking in River Raid X

I’ve been experimenting with Speech SDK lately and was trying to find a way to control games with sounds. In this video, you can see me control River Raid X with Kinect skeletal tracking and voice.

Helper classes for both Speech SDK and NUI (Kinect Natural User Interface) are implemented in the latest changeset of Neat Game Engine’s source code. Implementing voice commands in games for simple tasks such as starting the game, pausing and resuming it, etc. is not a difficult task, because Speech SDK easily handles these stuff with Grammars and other classes. What’s really interesting in controlling games with sounds is finding a natural place for them inside games. Things like finding the position of the sound source in 3D and finding use for “meaningless” voices inside the game is what makes voice integration in games really fun.

I’ll keep on experimenting more with voice and speech in games and keep here updated!

Testing Speech SDK

I am planning on using Microsoft Speech SDK and Kinect’s Microphone Array in one of my future projects codenamed “Kintouch.”

I wrote a few lines of code to test the speech recognition engine, and I am not yet satisfied with the results:

In this video, I am standing around 2 meters away from the Kinect, in an almost quiet room.