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!
Block Rockin’ Progress
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.
Game-On
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.
3D Arkanoid
Of the various ideas I have been prototyping, one showing some promise is Block Rockin’ .. it’s a 3D Arkanoid or Brick-Out type game controlled by physics. Using the tilt sensors on the iPhone is a great way to control it too – your bat moves around a circular platform. The blocks are destroyed after a couple of strikes, but they also tumble about and (if they’re in a wall or henge configuration) you get quite a pleasing level of destruction.