[blog.nealen.net.]

i’ve been meaning to write a bit about video games for some time now. to my great surprise, it took a rebuilt version of an old classic to make this happen. pac man C.E. has taken up large batches of my spare (and not so spare) time lately, and i think it will continue to do so. toru iwatani and his team at namco have managed to revive the good old ghost eater in a style similar to newer games such as lumines and geometry wars, and the result is nothing less than painfully addictive. for more info, check out the excellent review on 1up.com.

other games i have recently played, enjoyed, and can wholeheartedly recommend are gears of war, god of war II, crackdown and guitar hero 2. guitar hero 2 is great for two reasons (a) it’s fun, and (b) olga is addicted to it. she recently beat my career score on the worldwide leaderboards, making it impossible for me to simply stop playing. this is rather unfortunate, since i am way too busy playing forza motorsport 2 and the recently fixed motorstorm.

my fm2 lotus elise 135r. both the paintjob as well as the screenshot were created using in-game tools.

eddy and i gave the motorstorm time trials a go during his recent berlin visit, and they rock. in any case, i’m all about the races these days, which is a nice distraction from all the first- or third person action games of early 2007. but not to worry, there’s so much more on the horizon. i’ll be in san diego and montreal in the first two weeks of august, only to be welcomed by bioshock when i get back home. bioshock is the spiritual successor to system shock 2, which, to my great shame, i have never finished. september will greet us with halo 3, and the recent multiplayer beta was significantly more fun than i had expected. october is gta IV month. i’ve played all ps2 incarnations of the series, and judging from the trailer (and yes, the hype) this one should be good. ubisoft has some year-end fun in store for us with assassin’s creed and splinter cell: conviction. the assassin’s creed video footage looks awesome and really nails the visual style. as for conviction: a very good friend of mine is working on their physics and animation systems, and i can’t wait to see the results.

all in all, i’d say 2007 is (and will likely stay) a great year for video games.

in closing, check out what most video gamers look like, and the king of kong. we are indeed a weird (and mostly competitive) breed. we also like the fun. and some even enjoy making games. i personally also enjoy talking about games. for a glimpse of both the talking and the making, check out the class on video game programming i have been teaching at tu berlin this summer term. finally, this link will clarify the title of this post. shine get!

got my first youtube video up. woot. it’s the video for our siggraph paper, which was a very collaborative effort of takeo, olga, marc and myself. i think we are all happy with the result, and getting accepted to siggraph, but check it out for yourself

we’ve made the paper(s), videos and the software available on our project pages. if you find it useful, drop us a line. feedback is always welcome. note though, that the software is a research prototype, and might crash. save often. cheers.

[update.] here some more research stuff. i present to you: silsketch.

we just got this work accepted to the workshop on sketch-based interfaces and modeling. my m.sc. student johannes will be presenting at the workshop. congratulations man!

Our submission made it to siggraph 2007… yay! I have been enjoying a few months of kinda downtime, and what better way to get back into the flow of things. kinda downtime, because i was not only doing random stuff as originally planned, but have been preparing the game programming course, reviewing a relatively large amount of siggraph papers, attending a workshop on pen centric computing, and also starting to write up my phd thesis (which i will submit on may 20th, at least that’s the plan).

sure, games were played, good friends hosted, and too much coffee consumed, but it seems i simply can’t purely slack anymore. what happened to those good old student days of blissful nothingness? ah well, good times nonetheless. if i find the time, i’ll write about it in some in some more detail. for now though, i’m looking forward to a beautiful berlin summer and a trip to san diego in august. cheers. [ps. we have made the software available. click on the image to reach the project page.]

or this new year? what i mean to say is happy new year, only a little late. so, what is new this year? i’d say, not very much. and who says that this “grand moment” between two consecutive years changes anything anyway? but thinking about potential upcoming changes, and what might become new this year… well. this sounds much more interesting to me. but: lets start with how i spent (parts) of the new year. olga and i visited (among others) her parents in israel for the holidays. since i once again do not live near much nature in berlin, i tried spending as much time as possible near the ocean. winter in israel isn’t overly warm anymore, but still very nice for strolling along the beach with a lovely person, a bit of sunshine and some great tunes. some impressions:

january has been 90% filled with preparing a siggraph submission, which incidentally constitutes the final (and most likely main) chapter of my phd thesis. once it’s written, that is. from approximately mid february on i will be on extended away time from the lab (> one month), and while i mainly plan to catch up on some reading, hanging out in berlin cafes and doing lots of something (i have a leisure todo list that’s a mile long), i will also get my thesis underway. needless to say, i am really looking forward to these months. it’ll be swell. thereafter, this summer term i will (finally) be teaching a course on game programming (yay). but after the summer term, and therefore after the phd? who knows. let’s just say this year is likely to have some surprises in store, making too much planning on my behalf very, very obsolete.

and how have you all been? don’t be a stranger and drop a line from time to time… except for you eddy, you i owe a long email. to be written as soon as i’m back from monaco next weekend. cheers!

i’m currently in kuala lumpur, living in the klcc (kuala lumpur city center) district, about 300m from the petronas twin towers. if i wasn’t as forgetful as i tend to be, i could post a picture. unfortunately though, i forgot to take my camera. i’ve been hunting for a new one here, but since they cost as much as in germany i’m going to pass. instead, check out youtube endeavors posted on the interweb.

i’ve been here for exactly a week now. it’s always warm and humid, the people are very friendly and overall i’ve had a better time than i had expected after arriving in the pouring rain last monday. hanging out with marc (a fellow cg dude from strasbourg) and meeting jenny and martin last night surely helped. the 0.66 liter tiger beers helped too, i think.

the graphite conference, while very well organized (and held at a cool venue), was a slight disappointment. and, surprise, it was not the quality of the papers that bothered me. many authors simply did not show up for the conference, and therefore for their talks. this is totally unacceptable and unprofessional in my opinion, and i think the publications should be retroactively nullified, should the authors not have notified the conference office in advance. small conferences such as graphite rely on all authors participating. publishing merely for the sake of the isbn number is pitiful. end of rant. aside of this annoyance, the conference and the networking was fun and informative.

kuala lumpur greeted me with lots of rain, fog and humidity, but after this week i can’t say i dislike it here. it’s actually kinda cool. far away from home, and quite a lengthy flight for a one week stay, but cool. still, it’s time to leave. tomorrow. now it’s time to get back to thom yorke and murakami’s kafka on the shore.

stefan visited us in berlin a few weeks ago, which generally leads to some hitting the town, and playing lots and lots of games. in this case i should rather use the singular “game”, since all we played all weekend was fight night. here’s us playing, the picture being heavily inspired by the penny arcade comic strip on the left.

i play games. lots of games. while i really enjoy many other activities, such as playing the guitar, snowboarding, photography, etc., nothing captivates my attention as much as a really good game. games are fun. period. online, offline, solo, with friends, whatever. i like games. and yes, i am an addict. in a good way, i think. and while this sometimes felt awkward in the early to mid 90s, when i’d listen to stuff like: “you’re a grown-up, why in the world do you play and/or like videogames?”, it has become fairly standard to indulge in the this pastime, independent of age. this development has even reached germany, although we’re still far from the craziness in north america and japan, which i guess is why they always get stuff first. meh.

and since it’s the title of this post, always remember that there used to be this great band k’s choice, and while they’re pretty much over these days, their old stuff is still great.

i’ve been kind of addicted to the concept of sketching in computer graphics in recent years, which is why i have chosen it as my (primary) phd topic. and sure, i love my nintendo ds, have a wacom cintiq in the office, and will very likely play the critically acclaimed okami as soon as it arrives in europe. but the possibility of actually creating your own furniture from 3d sketches? kudos to you adventurous people who take risks and actually make these things happen.

a few years back a friend of mine showed me a 3d spray paint application running in a cave. while it was not possible to model or deform the result, the thought of using your hands to mold and carve the shapes seemed very intriguing to me. after watching the above video, it’s obvious (and great) that i am not alone with these ideas.

watch the video to see tetris (and its maker) in all its glory. i just stumbled across this great bbc documentary, which was linked from my beloved kotaku. enjoy.

[update. unfortunately, the video was pulled from google videos. it is mentioned on the tetris wikipedia site]

as many others, i was totally hooked on this game back when it got packaged with the original game boy. for some reason i never tried it on any other platform since then, although it has been ported and re-released widely. easy to learn, difficult to master, i guess that’s what does it for me.

this is a few days old, but since i’m experimenting around with embedding all kinds of media into this new blog, i thought i’d add one of the funniest youtube videos i have seen in a while. this one here (including the post title) was pointed out by my good buddy eddy.

ah yes, the interweb. everything on demand. i like it.

we had a really, really enjoyable summer. berlin isn’t as bad as i thought in this respect, and we’re still getting lots of nice weather these days too. unfortunately, i caught a nasty cold and am coughing and sneezing away here in my office. meh…

olga and i are off to helsinki this weekend to give some talks at the university and visit our friends there. olga, who is totally underrepresented in my weblog of the past three years, is the delightful and beautiful girl in this picture, which was taken on the last day of takeo’s three month visit to our new lab, when we went to see schloss sanssouci (thanks marc). olga and i have been living together in the center of berlin since june, and we’re liking it. and, as i suspected a while ago, living in berlin is entirely different from just visiting it. at least for me. this is now our home and hideaway, and fortunately it feels that way, maybe thanks to modern soundproofing technology. our windows are awesome.

did you notice the address bar icon on olga’s website? i’m (very) slowly but surely getting her addicted to some games. muhahahaha. soon she will be one of us. to put it in monty burns words: excellent.