One of the coolest features on Shiva that I have been playing around with is the modifiable mesh. This is something I always wished I could do in Darkwind, but Torque really didn’t make it very feasible.
With Shiva, you can iterate through the individual vertices and even their uvs, and edit them. I’m working on an explosion system for Block Rockin’, whereby certain ‘exploder’ power-ups will blast nearby vertices away from them, causing a warping of the game platform/walls etc.
It’s exactly 5 years since Darkwind’s first online Alpha tests.. a 3-lap race with symphonies around the dirt racing track, complete with timetrials. It has certainly come a long way since then!
I approached Anthony, a long-term Darkwind player with a talent for texturing vehicles, to see if he’d like to get involved as the texture artist in Block Rockin’. So now there’s a team of two 
We’re working on a number of themes (Neolithic, Circus, Deep Space, etc.) and therefore different textures for all of the game objects for each of these themes. I have also purchased some music from the excellent Shockwave Sound archive. It turns out streaming music on the iPhone is quite a drain on its puny resources however, so we’re stuck with 30-second song loops.
We’re going to be hosting the academic/industry crossover conference ‘Game On‘ here in Galway this year. My academic colleague Colm asked me to help out on the organising team, which I’m happy to do since I know he’ll run a tight ship and I’ll only need to row in behind him
It was only really last year that I learned that valid academic research can include computer games – this was somewhat a revelation to me, as it gives me a way to combine my two major interests into a ‘win-win’. Last year I was at a ‘Serious Games’ conference in Portugal, with a PhD student talking about our work with neural networks and image processing in the development of a ‘social agent’ for online communication tools; I also presented a paper at an AI conference in which I talked about the use of Genetic Algorithms in Darkwind to train the computer to drive races more competitively. You can download the research paper here.
This is a win-win I plan to continue with.. I’ll probably put something together about the collaborative ‘virtual whiteboard’ tools in VRCGroups, for the Game On conference itself.