Animation via Behavior: Killer Game Programming in Java

[Phil Henshaw-2]

I can't knock the incremental improvements when the increments seem
substantial, but... I don't see how either next generation OS helps
reconceive the tool that computers offer us, if that's what anyone
expects with continual explosion of computing power.   What's needed is
for systems design to respond to new questions.   Things like what Owen
was talking about, a new synthesis of modeling concepts, would count if
it were real, for example.   Another would be if your PC would keep
watch and tell you when something new was happening in your personal
worlds of interest.   That functionality would only require that it
monitor standard measures and recognize changes in state.   First
attempts would naturally be first attempts, but that's one direction
where there's lots of room to grow.


Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040                      
tel: [phone]                
e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com          
explorations: www.synapse9.com    

 

>
> What do you think is more impressive,
> advanced and useful, the new..
>
> ..Mac OS X Leopard with "Time Machine",
> "Spotlight" and "Ruby on Rails"..
> http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/index.html
>
> ..or the new
> Windows Vista
> with Aero, WPF and WCF ?
> http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/ 
>
> -J.
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>

[Alfredo Covaleda]

Owen:

- I have used KDE and GNOME. But KDE is the desktop I use most
- I consider Mandrake 9.0 has been the best distro ever. The second one is
Debian-31r0a-i386. I will give you a third and is Red Hat 6.2
- I ran Mandrake and Debian on PC with a processor Duron of 850 Mhz with 256
MB in ram memory and with a motherboard MSI. MSI Motherboard damage and I
replaced it with a very cheap motherboard ASRock. Then I used a processor
Intel 2.4 Ghz, Intel Motherboard and 512 MB in ram. I ran Red Hat on a 486,
Sys Board and starting with 8 Mb in ram

On Friday 20 October 2006 11:27 pm, Owen Densmore wrote:

> OK, Doug has brought up a point I've wondered about.
>
> Friamers .. another question .. well three actually .. for you all:
>    - Which Linux desktop distros have you used?
>    - Which distro do/did you like best?
>    - What hardware did you run it on?
>
> Years ago at Sun I was a RedHat + Gnome user .. indeed in 2000-2002,
> it, on the Thinkpad hardware, had taken over SunLabs.  We even put it
> in our JavaCar and found it worked with most of the weird drivers we
> needed.
>
> It was a bit hard to get going on laptops, however.  Audio was quite
> difficult, requiring rebuilding the kernel with new drivers, and
> getting the Sleep function to work correctly was tough.  But all in
> all, RedHat + Gnome + Thinkpad was quite successful.  Gnome was even
> available on Solaris, so the interoperability was great between the
> Sun servers and the laptops.
>
> So anyone else out there taken on the Linux desktop challenge?
>
>      -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
>
> Begin forwarded message:
> > From: "Douglas Roberts" <doug at parrot-farm.net>
> > Date: October 20, 2006 6:26:33 AM MDT
> > To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group"
> > <friam at redfish.com>
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Leopard vs. Vista
> > Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> > <friam at redfish.com>
> >
> > Mandriva 2007 'la Ora' with KDE 3.5.4 (and a slew of whatever other
> > packages you prefer)..
> > http://www.mandriva.com/en/linux/2007
> >
> > On 10/20/06, fromm <fromm at vs.uni-kassel.de> wrote:
> > What do you think is more impressive,
> > advanced and useful, the new..
> >
> > ..Mac OS X Leopard with "Time Machine",
> > "Spotlight" and "Ruby on Rails"..
> > http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/index.html
> >
> > ..or the new Windows Vista
> > with Aero, WPF and WCF ?
> > http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/
> >
> > -J.
> >
> >
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Doug Roberts, RTI International
> > droberts at rti.org
> > doug at parrot-farm.net
> > 505-455-7333 - Office
> > 505-670-8195 - Cell
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Douglas Roberts-2]

I started with Slackware back in '92 or so, building it from 18 or so
floppies on an old NEC DX2-50 laptop.  Later, on a different laptop I
encountered a pcmcia cardbus driver bug in RH5.0, so I patched it & sent the
patch in, which ended up staying in the kernel for a while.  As a result I
was offered the early option on RedHat's IPO, which I kicked myself for not
jumping on at the time. I can't remember the details, but I believe RH
developers were given the option of buying in at ~$10 per share, and the
stock instantly jumped to $45 in the first few minutes of trading.  A couple
of months later it dropped back to ~$5, and so I felt better about the
missed opportunity. RH is trading at about $18 now.

Since then I've installed & worked with RedHat, CentOS (a RH 64-bit
recompile for AMD-64), Slackware, Knoppix, Helix (a forensic-specialized
version of Knoppix) , SuSe, and Mandrake.  I've pretty much settled on
Mandrake, mostly because it typically has better hardware support than the
other distros because it is updated more frequently, and because I like its
urpmi updater.  I do like the Debian-based Knoppix DVD live distro and
installer, but a couple of the packages I use (mplayer, for example) are not
as readily available for Debian as they are for Mandrake.  All told, I've
used Linux as my main desktop environment for about 12 years.

To satisfy the work-based Windows requirement I run VMWare & XP.  I like
having that little "x" button in the upper right-hand corner of the VMWare
Windows frame that I can click on whenever XP decides to misbehave.

--Doug

On 10/21/06, Alfredo <agbioinfo at gmx.net> wrote:

>
> Owen:
>
> - I have used KDE and GNOME. But KDE is the desktop I use most
> - I consider Mandrake 9.0 has been the best distro ever. The second one is
> Debian-31r0a-i386. I will give you a third and is Red Hat 6.2
> - I ran Mandrake and Debian on PC with a processor Duron of 850 Mhz with
> 256
> MB in ram memory and with a motherboard MSI. MSI Motherboard damage and I
> replaced it with a very cheap motherboard ASRock. Then I used a processor
> Intel 2.4 Ghz, Intel Motherboard and 512 MB in ram. I ran Red Hat on a
> 486,
> Sys Board and starting with 8 Mb in ram
>
> On Friday 20 October 2006 11:27 pm, Owen Densmore wrote:
> > OK, Doug has brought up a point I've wondered about.
> >
> > Friamers .. another question .. well three actually .. for you all:
> >    - Which Linux desktop distros have you used?
> >    - Which distro do/did you like best?
> >    - What hardware did you run it on?
> >
> > Years ago at Sun I was a RedHat + Gnome user .. indeed in 2000-2002,
> > it, on the Thinkpad hardware, had taken over SunLabs.  We even put it
> > in our JavaCar and found it worked with most of the weird drivers we
> > needed.
> >
> > It was a bit hard to get going on laptops, however.  Audio was quite
> > difficult, requiring rebuilding the kernel with new drivers, and
> > getting the Sleep function to work correctly was tough.  But all in
> > all, RedHat + Gnome + Thinkpad was quite successful.  Gnome was even
> > available on Solaris, so the interoperability was great between the
> > Sun servers and the laptops.
> >
> > So anyone else out there taken on the Linux desktop challenge?
> >
> >      -- Owen
> >
> > Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
> >
> > Begin forwarded message:
> > > From: "Douglas Roberts" <doug at parrot-farm.net>
> > > Date: October 20, 2006 6:26:33 AM MDT
> > > To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group"
> > > <friam at redfish.com>
> > > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Leopard vs. Vista
> > > Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> > > <friam at redfish.com>
> > >
> > > Mandriva 2007 'la Ora' with KDE 3.5.4 (and a slew of whatever other
> > > packages you prefer)..
> > > http://www.mandriva.com/en/linux/2007
> > >
> > > On 10/20/06, fromm <fromm at vs.uni-kassel.de> wrote:
> > > What do you think is more impressive,
> > > advanced and useful, the new..
> > >
> > > ..Mac OS X Leopard with "Time Machine",
> > > "Spotlight" and "Ruby on Rails"..
> > > http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/index.html
> > >
> > > ..or the new Windows Vista
> > > with Aero, WPF and WCF ?
> > > http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/
> > >
> > > -J.
> > >
> > >
> > > ============================================================
> > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Doug Roberts, RTI International
> > > droberts at rti.org
> > > doug at parrot-farm.net
> > > 505-455-7333 - Office
> > > 505-670-8195 - Cell
> > > ============================================================
> > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
> >
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

--
Doug Roberts, RTI International
droberts at rti.org
doug at parrot-farm.net
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
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[Steve Smith]

Owen -

Have you ever seen our work with Flatland (from UNM)...

This is the only link I have right now (pretty old)...
http://www.ahpcc.unm.edu/homunculus/


Flatland is a VR/Simulation framework developed by Tom Caudell & Co...
which we adopted for doing not only visualization but coupled
simulations....  We added a layer (Flux) for data flow management and
Tom has his own variant (E-Loom) which he uses for Neural Nets and
similar.

It is implemented in C/OpenGL and has a simple C-binding... allowing
dynamic loading of multiple applications...   you register a handful of
callbacks that get executed at various appropriate times (first
startup, shutdown, before any drawing happens in the render-loop,  
during the render loop, for providing realistic shadows, etc.

It is not well documented but there are a number of us (LANL, Maui SCC,
Uniformed Medical Services, etc...) who have invested a bit of time in
adopting and extending it.

Among other behaviour-driven systems, we have a
network/graph/tree/heirarchy layout system under development.

- Steve


On Oct 19, 2006, at 10:37 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:

> This may seem a bit odd, but bear with me!
>
> We've been using Processing.org's great graphics system: the
> libraries and the nifty IDE and tools for managing
> "sketchbooks" (projects), building web pages/applets, and even
> building applications for Windows, Mac and Linux.  We've had success
> (i.e. got paid for!) two projects using Processing: a Stadium model,
> and a generalized Data Visualization system.  Quite nice.
>
> So now we've got two interesting environments for modeling: NetLogo,
> our old friend which keeps getting better, and Processing which seems
> great for what I'd call "wire frame" modeling.  We've also got high
> end rendering experience with Blender: we can both use it to build
> Processing meshes for our models and can render agent motion inside
> blender, using NetLogo and Processing output.
>
> BUT we're missing a "sweet spot" in the middle: a fairly realistic 3D
> environment that can do realtime modeling .. i.e. animation via
> behavior.  We also want to have some notion of "physics" .. i.e.
> things bouncing off walls or agents colliding.  (Blender thus far has
> not worked, but we're still poking.)
>
> This prompting me to look into Java graphics and game books, one of
> which is Killer Game Programming in Java.  The book has a website
> which includes a LOT of material that is not in his book:
>    http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/jg/
> This let to getting in touch with the author, asking for pointers to
> "game engines", see email attached.
>
> Now to the question to FRIAM:  Has anyone found a good environment
> for agent based modeling with "game-like" 3D realism and with modest
> libraries for collision detection, scene graphs and so on?
>
>      -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>> From: "Dr. Andrew Davison" <ad at fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th>
>> Date: September 4, 2006 10:56:45 PM MDT
>> To: Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net>
>> Subject: Re: Processing.org
>>
>>
>> Owen,
>>
>> Thanks for the pointer to processing.org. It's a very nice system.
>>
>>> We're also looking for Java "game engines" to make our work
>>> simpler.  Do you have any pointers?
>>
>> Here's a snippet from an article I'm writing:
>>
>> Xith3D (http://xith.org) uses the same basic scene graph structure
>> as Java 3D, but can also directly call OpenGL operations. Since the
>> high-level APIs of Xith3D and Java 3D are so similar, porting Java
>> 3D code over to Xith3D is fairly straightforward. There are
>> versions of Xith3D that run on top of JOGL and LWJGL.
>>
>> jME Graphics Engine (jMonkey Engine, http://
>> www.mojomonkeycoding.com/) was inspired by the scene graph engine
>> described in 3D Game Engine Design by David H. Eberly (http://
>> www.magic-software.com/Books.html). jME is built on top of LWJGL.
>>
>> JAVA is DOOMED (http://javaisdoomed.sourceforge.net) includes
>> loaders for Quake 2 MD2 and 3D Studio Max 3DS files . The
>> implementation uses JOGL, and the distribution includes Escape, a
>> Doom-like game.
>>
>> Aviatrix3D (http://aviatrix3d.j3d.org/) is a retained-mode Java
>> scene graph API above JOGL. Its tool set is aimed at data
>> visualization rather than gaming, and supports CAVEs, domes, and HMDs.
>>
>> JView (http://www.rl.af.mil/tech/programs/JVIEW/) is another
>> visualization API, supporting both 2D and 3D graphics, developed by
>> the U.S. Air Force Research Lab. GL4Java, an older low-level Java
>> API for OpenGL, was used to build it.
>>
>> Espresso3D (http://www.espresso3d.com/), a games-oriented library,
>> includes OpenAL audio, sprites, collision detection, input, and
>> rendering support. It's built using LWJGL.
>>
>> - Andrew
>>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Joshua Thorp]

Another flame war!  Why can't we all just get along?  Just kidding...

I have been using linux since 1995.  First slackware on desktop and  
thinkpad (the vintage butterfly keyboard model),  then a sony vaio  
with an old defunct distro called "storm" based on Debian which had  
probably one of the smoothest installs ever.. Followed by red hat and  
mandrake/mandriva.  Lately my home server runs Gentoo-- which used to  
always be up to date but has fallen behind this past year,  but it  
still has uptimes of months (generally between electric grid  
failures).  This week I installed kubuntu on my intel macbook using  
'parallels'.

I would have to say that though I mostly ran fvwm and gnome as my X  
Window Manager,  KDE has increasingly been the enticing green grass  
in the neighbor's yard.  Just because it seems to be more integrated  
and OSX has made me partial to well integrated systems,  thus taking  
Kubuntu, a KDE based Ubuntu distro, for a spin.

Finally, the New Mexico super computer challenge is using a specially  
tailored Edubuntu distro for this year's kickoff.  As they use a lot  
of donated hardware from the labs they had a handful of funky pc/
monitor combos that required re-running the XWinows install but  
beyond that appeared to run incredibly smoothly.  Interesting to note  
that a similar lab of Windows based machines would not have gone  
nearly as smoothly--and the licenses for that many windows XP seats  
(maybe 60+) would have been huge.

http://www.edubuntu.org/
http://www.kubuntu.org/

http://challenge.nm.org/

--joshua


On Oct 20, 2006, at 10:27 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:

> OK, Doug has brought up a point I've wondered about.
>
> Friamers .. another question .. well three actually .. for you all:
>    - Which Linux desktop distros have you used?
>    - Which distro do/did you like best?
>    - What hardware did you run it on?
>
> Years ago at Sun I was a RedHat + Gnome user .. indeed in 2000-2002,
> it, on the Thinkpad hardware, had taken over SunLabs.  We even put it
> in our JavaCar and found it worked with most of the weird drivers we
> needed.
>
> It was a bit hard to get going on laptops, however.  Audio was quite
> difficult, requiring rebuilding the kernel with new drivers, and
> getting the Sleep function to work correctly was tough.  But all in
> all, RedHat + Gnome + Thinkpad was quite successful.  Gnome was even
> available on Solaris, so the interoperability was great between the
> Sun servers and the laptops.
>
> So anyone else out there taken on the Linux desktop challenge?
>
>      -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> From: "Douglas Roberts" <doug at parrot-farm.net>
>> Date: October 20, 2006 6:26:33 AM MDT
>> To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group"
>> <friam at redfish.com>
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Leopard vs. Vista
>> Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>> <friam at redfish.com>
>>
>> Mandriva 2007 'la Ora' with KDE 3.5.4 (and a slew of whatever other
>> packages you prefer)..
>> http://www.mandriva.com/en/linux/2007
>>
>> On 10/20/06, fromm <fromm at vs.uni-kassel.de> wrote:
>> What do you think is more impressive,
>> advanced and useful, the new..
>>
>> ..Mac OS X Leopard with "Time Machine",
>> "Spotlight" and "Ruby on Rails"..
>> http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/index.html
>>
>> ..or the new Windows Vista
>> with Aero, WPF and WCF ?
>> http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/
>>
>> -J.
>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Doug Roberts, RTI International
>> droberts at rti.org
>> doug at parrot-farm.net
>> 505-455-7333 - Office
>> 505-670-8195 - Cell
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Parks, Raymond]

Owen Densmore wrote:
> Now to the question to FRIAM:  Has anyone found a good environment
> for agent based modeling with "game-like" 3D realism and with modest
> libraries for collision detection, scene graphs and so on?

   Not specifically for agent-based modeling.  Some open source game
engines include:

This one looks interesting:

<http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/>

This one looks more suited to your purposes in as much as it is a Naval
Postgraduate School sponsored project - much more likely to support your
  needs, I would think:

<http://www.delta3d.org/>

This one seems very much game oriented, but it is mature:

<http://www.ogre3d.org/>

This is the only one I've played with and it seems quite capable:

<http://www.cubeengine.com/>

--
Ray Parks                   rcparks at sandia.gov
IDART Project Lead          Voice:505-844-4024
IORTA Department            Mobile:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/scada Fax:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/idart Pager:800-690-5288

[Giles Bowkett]

> Years ago at Sun I was a RedHat + Gnome user .. indeed in 2000-2002,
> it, on the Thinkpad hardware, had taken over SunLabs.  We even put it
> in our JavaCar and found it worked with most of the weird drivers we
> needed.

I'm sorry, I just saw this. You had a JavaCar? And it had weird drivers?

I hate to admit this but I know absolutely zip about setting up Linux.
I do all my development on my ssh account through my hosting company.
I'm too lazy to install Linux, too picky to develop under Windows, and
too broke to get a Mac. (Luckily I have a really great host, they
don't seem to have any objection to installing all kinds of weird Ruby
gems for me.)

--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org

[Jochen Fromm-3]

Is someone interested in modifying an existing 3D engine
for agent based modeling ? I am thinking of a complex virtual
world with a number of different scenarios, for instance a
crowded city, a small village, a clear forest or whatever,
where the actors can be controlled by programs or humans.
It is a daunting task which is too big for one person alone,
and it makes more fun as a group anyway. Modern games have like
films a long list of creators and contributors. Who would be
interested and which of the mentioned engines is most suitable
for the task ?

-J.

[Stephen Guerin]

Hey Jochen,

> Is someone interested in modifying an existing 3D engine for
> agent based modeling ?

We're doing small tests with the Blender Game Engine and Ogre3D for
ABM/scientific visualization. In fact, there's now an announced migration path
to Ogre3D to replacing Blender's older game rendering engine.

A parallel track of ours is using Processing (http://www.processing.org) for
projects that have different requirements/developer preferences. Not exactly a
game engine but close enough for our purposes.

-Steve