I’ve started a new Flickr Group for Structure Synth creations. It is open to everyone, so feel free to post.
Of course the number of Structure Synth users is probably quite limited since no binaries have been released yet. I still plan to release the first windows executables in next month (Sep ’07).
As a side note, Flickr is extremely nice and well-organized, even better than Picassa Web Albums. Looks like Yahoo actually win this one over Google.
Structure Synth has its own website now.
…though I must say, SourceForge is not exactly the fastest web host I’ve tried.
Experimental Gameplay started out as a student project at Carnegie Mellon University in 2005.
Given three basic rules (“Each game must be made in less than seven days / by only one person / be based around a central theme (e.g. gravity or swarms)”) some very interesting projects were created. Since then the website has opened up, and everyone is allowed to post their experimental games.
The experiences gained from the project are summed up in: How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days (Gamasutra Feature).
This post describes the ongoing development of Structure Synth
A lot of progress in the past week. First of all Structure Synth is no longer hosted at Google Code Hosting, but instead at SourceForge.
A few of the new features:
New primitives: I’ve added box, line and dot as new drawing primitives. I’ve also added a new coloring model (based on the HSV color space). Notice the spherical structure above – it was kind of surprising (given the rules) that a spherical structure was produced.
Rule retirement: It is now possible to specify a maximum recursive depth for individual rules. Optionally, it is possible to specify an alternate rule to use as an substitution when the ‘maxdepth’ is reached. The is demonstrated for the Menger sponge above, where the recursion is terminated at the given level.
Ambiguous rules: This one is taken straight from Context Free: it is possible to specify multiple definitions of a rule, each with individual weights. When an ambiguous rule is executed, one of it definitions is chosen at random, taken the weights into account.
The prototype code is now able to actually render something:
The parser, builder and OpenGL engine are now all working at a rudimentary level. The EisenScript for the above picture is:
(Download: doublespiral.es)
Still a long way to go, but a nice milestone anyway.