Fastcall's Mystery Box

Minecraft -- It's Distrubing

2010-12-12T02:23:00.008-07:00

EDIT: Haha. So months later after this incident, Nayruden finally admitted into installing a Herobrine mod that had just been released that day. Joke's on me! ;___;

So there's this "Herobrine" character that's sort of a joke in the Minecraft community. Supposedly he's an incarnation of Notch's deceased brother who appears at random or on a combination of rare conditions... Anyways, my friend told me about him a few months ago, and since then, I have long forgotten about Herobrine. Until recently that is.

This same friend runs a small server just for a small group of friends (whitelisted server, mind you) with a few addons. Runecraft is one of those addons, and the server has one central "nexus" in which players add their teleports to their areas of interest. Players can teleport between the nexus and the players' creation through this nexus.

Sometime about 9:45 PM or so I got excited about organizing my many waypoints and teleports into a central "subnexus" of just my teleports. I was alone in my friend's server when I joined, as I made my way to my floating islands, in which to scout out a new location for this subnexus.

This island looks like a good place to place the subnexus.

I jumped off the island and tried to land in the lake over there. I managed to land in water, but it was shallow enough to take a significant amount of damage. This is where it starts to get weird: A few seconds later (at exactly 10:00 PM), I get a private message from Herobrine: "..." This takes me by surprise as I was the only one on the server. I check the player list and find that I'm still the only one in the server. I had forgotten who Herobrine was, and attempting to communicate with Herobrine as a player proved futile. "Oh, well," I thought, as I made my way across the lake to my target island. But as I was wading across the lake, I saw the "Herobrine" swimming across this same lake not too far from me. (And to much regret, I hadn't thought to take screenshots until much later.)

Here I am about to make my way to the island, when I noticed Herobrine about where that torch is and the water artifacts are. (The torch, cobblestone, and sign were added later to mark where I saw Herobrine.)

At this point, I was seriously disturbed. As I tried to follow, he started to sink into the lake... He then proceeded to sink through the lakebed until he was so far away that his tag wasn't visible anymore.

This was my conversation log, taken much later after the incident occurred.

When I first saw Herobrine crossing the lake, I made a quick sanity check with my friend (the server owner):


(9:55:50 PM) fastcall22: also, would you be mad if i were to start my own nexus?
(9:59:55 PM) Nayruden: What?
(9:59:57 PM) Nayruden: Why would you do that?
(10:00:17 PM) fastcall22: who's "herobrine"?
(10:00:21 PM) Nayruden: ?
(10:00:30 PM) fastcall22: Herobrine
(10:00:33 PM) fastcall22: he's in our server
(10:00:37 PM) fastcall22: and walking through the floor
(10:00:41 PM) Nayruden: haha very funny
(10:01:39 PM) Nayruden: Wasn't I the one who told you about him in the first place?
(10:01:46 PM) fastcall22: dunno ?
(10:02:56 PM) Nayruden: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/images/6/68/1283223082465.jpg
(10:03:06 PM) Nayruden: I remember linking at least stickly to that and probably you too
(10:03:14 PM) fastcall22: ah yes
(10:03:18 PM) fastcall22: so is this an addon or something?
(10:03:23 PM) Nayruden: ?
(10:04:29 PM) fastcall22: this is what i saw:  http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/7619/herobrine.png
(10:04:37 PM) fastcall22: erm, at least in the chat
(10:05:20 PM) Nayruden: lol you know standard messages don't have (MSG) in front of them
(10:06:02 PM) Nayruden: I'm not falling for it :P

He also didn't believe me. Most of the conversation that followed took place in Minecraft, and I'll edit this post when and if I can get a hold of the logs from Nayruden later tomorrow. Basically, Nayruden accused me of staging the incident, and what not. I tried my best to convince him with the lame sauce screenshot above as the only proof I had. He mentioned that Herobrine produced anomalies in the terrain, such as neatly built pyramids, or 2 high by 1 wide tunnels of missing blocks, and etc. I also proved that it was impossible for me, the only one in the server, to send a private message to myself, and it was impossible to have received a private message from anyone, with the sender's name in grey. As I traced the steps I took during the incident, with Nayruden following, went to about where I saw Herobrine crossing the lake.

It was here I noticed this odd straight water feature, the kind that surfaces when you remove a block of water. The fact that this line agrees to about where I first saw Herobine, the direction he traveled, and about where he started to sink.

Here's where Herobrine fell through the lakebed; it looks like he carved his way through it.

The tunnel continued in a straight diagonal line, a very odd structure -- not something I would have built. As Nayruden and I explored the tunnel, placing torches as we go, we reached the end of the cramped tunnel after about 42 blocks or so. Nayruden wasn't convinced, so he dug around the dead end to find that the tunnel continued... Twice...

The tunnels were shorter in length, but there were a total of five redstone torches placed in those tunnels... I did not have any redstone or any redstone torches, and neither did Nayruden... We tried to dig around the end of the last tunnel, but we did not find anything.

There wasn't much more to it after that, life on the server continued as normal, and Nayruden eventually believed me, though I still wish I had taken at least a screenshot of Herobrine swimming across the lake.

For the most part, I feel quite disturbed. The whole experience was almost like being abducted by aliens: The story is so absurd that no one will ever believe you.

EversionMod 1.2 bug fixes

2010-03-30T13:11:00.006-06:00

I've fixed the gem counting problem for levels before level 8. Also, the HUD is not drawn for level 8; place a 0xDB tile anywhere in the area8.map to force drawing of the HUD for that map. Conversely, place a 0xDA anywhere in a map to hide the HUD for that map. In addition to these tiles, there's also a 0xDC tile which forces the 7-8 gem warp to update according to how many gems the player has collected. This allows the player to collect all the gems on the last level and return to the 7-8 gem warp and eversion. In the original Eversion, you would need to restart the level in order for the 7-8 gem warp to update.

You can't reach these tiles normally, you'll have to turn off "Available tiles only" from the edit menu to get to them, or you can edit "./data/tileLayout.txt" and "./data/tiles.png" and add the 0xDA to 0xDC tiles manually. Closing all the windows in EversionEditor and then opening another window will force the reloading of tileLayout.txt and tiles.png.

Requirements:
EversionMod 1.0

Download:
EversionMod 1.2

Obicham -- Color Algorithm

2010-03-26T13:31:00.010-06:00

I discovered yesterday that the color selection algorithm I used for the nearest color algorithm didn't quite cover all the possible combination of foregrounds, backgrounds, and blends. The old algorithm code looked something like this:

Let c be the color that is the texel in an image at row y, column x: Find the nearest two colors in the 16-color VGA palette (note: O(16) time) Let output be the console character on the screen at row y, column x Let output's background color be the closest color (most predominant visually) Let output's foreground color be the next closest color (least predominant visually) Let output's display character be a blend between 0%, and 50% fill, depending on how close the color is to its nearest color (blank) or to its second-nearest color (50% fill)

And with the new palette containing all available possible characters:
(We build the table before hand) For fg in 16-color VGA palette: For bg in 16-color VGA palette: For bl in the available blend amounts: Let blend be the bl% mix of color fg onto bg If the fg, bg, and blend combination doesn't already exist in the palette then Add blend, along with the fg, bg, and blend used, to the palette (Next, the color selection algorithm) Let c be the color that is the texel in an image at row y, column x: Let output be the console character on the screen at row y, column x Set output to be the fg, bg, and blend combination for the closest color to c in the palette (note: O(310) time)

For small palettes, say the old 16 colors, this algorithm didn't need any optimization. However, now that we have all the possible 310 (!) colors, this algorithm now becomes quite heavy. For an image sized 80 by 60, the total time to convert an image will take O(80x60x310) time, or O(1,488,000) time! So a hunt begins for a data structure that will improve the speed.

I first thought a Voronoi diagram would help sort the data. However, implementing a 3D Voronoi tree builder took me more time than I was willing to spend on it. So I searched elsewhere.

Next, I hypothesized that a Voronoi diagram is the same as a BSP where its branches are a selection of planes, where each unique plane is equidistant to two unique points. Also, it would be faster for me to implement. In a half hour's time, I came up with a rough tree building algorithm:

If there is only one point in P left, then add it to the tree, and return Find a plane, L, that is equidistant between two points that splits the points as close to half as possible Repeat for points in P that are in front of the plane L Repeat for points in P that are behind the plane L

Although there is a small delay building the tree (brute force implementation), the results of this tree are significantly faster, since it takes at most log(310)/log(2) ~8 checks per texel instead of 310! However, my assumption is incorrect:

On the right is the non-BSP color selection algorithm (most correct), and on the left is the BSP color selection algorithm. As you can see there are abnormalities in the BSP color selection algorithm. It became quite clear to me that making a planar cut anywhere in a Voronoi diagram chops off some of the cells! D'oh!

Well, from here I can do two things to spend my weekend:

Build a proper Voronoi structure
- Either using Fortune's algorithm
- Or by creating convex meshes from the availble planes built by the original BSP algorithm
Duplicate some of the data in the BSP tree
Play DoTA/League of Legends
Catch up on homework

Hmm ...

Obicham -- 3D Rasterizing Demo in a Console Window

2010-03-23T18:26:00.013-06:00

Speaking of demos, here's one I recently did. It's a traditional 3D rasterizer ... in a DOS console! Heck yes. The process goes like this: A Rasterizer renders objects in a sort of OpenGL immediate mode fashion onto an Image, a two dimensional array of Colors, and then sends it to a Console which then takes that Image and converts the individual pixels into ascii-characters, and sends the result to the window. A SDL debug window rendered the same image in another window with true color to help debug how the Console was choosing its blend of 16-colors.

Screenshots:

Here's the first ever screenshot from Obicham. Its supposed to be a box. As you can see, it is not; it's more like a rhombus on a flat piece of paper that's being rotated. Turns out I was multiplying the matrices in the wrong order.

Here's the second ever screenshot from Obicham, this time, with the matrices multiplied in the right order. This is still supposed to be a box. As you can see, there's some serious WTFs/sec going on. To add insult to injry, the top vertices spun in the opposite direction of the bottom vertices.

Polygon filling and color blending. This took a few tries to get right, but there it is. On the left is the main window, the console window, and on the right, is another SDL window for debugging.

First rotating cube! Having some trouble with the polygon filling, the technique I was using didn't do any bounds-checking, so I aggressively clamped the transformed x and y coordinates of the vertices, which changed the geometry a bit. I also chose a different charset to use for the blending. Looks better, doesn't it?

Same rotating cube! This time, I redid the bounds-checking on the polygon filling, added some back-face culling.

Video:

Showing off the different modes the demo offers.

Download:
Obicham Demo 2.0 (few more demos, better colors)
Obicham Demo 1.0

Video Game in a Week -- Day 4

2010-03-17T23:59:00.003-06:00

Well, grim news. I have to put this project on hiatus; this is going to take longer than a week, and I plan to finish it sometime over the summer. Right now, I'm just gonna enjoy my spring break. Here's a semi-playable demo*. At the moment, there's no gameplay elements other than maneuvering; there's no dying, no obstacles, etc. I've tried testing MarbleRun on another computer, and the materials turned up black. Not sure how to fix it, but I'll worry about it later. Another curious thing, when you set the direction of the light towards the south-west corner of the map causes the stencil shadows to go crazy. Also not sure how to fix, but I'm pretty sure it may have to do with ProBoolean not liking the level, i.e. a large chunk of the mesh is removed when I try to combine it with a mesh.

*Heh, if I were to call this a game, I'd be in the same boat as "Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing." Therefore MarbleRun stands as a demo.

Instructions:
Move the mouse to orient the camera
Right mouse button sets the light direction
Space resets the player to the start
The keys W, S, A, and D maneuver the marble FPS style.

Requirements:
Visual C++ 2010 RC1 Runtime Libraries (not included with download)

Download:
MarbleRun alpha .3

Video Game in a Week -- Day 3

2010-03-16T23:59:00.000-06:00

Made some progress today. Setting up Bullet is taking me longer than expected, but at least I'm making some headway. 3dsmax's pro-boolean tool didn't like the tube in the test level, so I had to re-make that part in order to make a few changes to the tube. The results turned out better than I expected. The overall progress of MarbleRun, however, is slower than I expected and I'm worried if I'll be able to meet all the requirements on time... Also had to battle 3dsmax for a while, took me half an hour to figure out that pressing the space bar during "walk-through" mode locks the pitch of the camera! Grawr!

Screenshot:

Video:

Video Game in a Week -- Day 2

2010-03-15T23:34:00.005-06:00

Didn't have much time today to work on Marble Run, had to work today and lots of chores to do. However, of the goals for the day, I accomplished all but the last. I seem to be having trouble obtaining the Ogre wrapper for Bullet. In the meantime, here's how Marble Run is looking:

Here's a 3dsmax rendering of the test level:

Here's what it looks like in game:

Simple directional light with stencil shadows == drool!

I also had a lot of trouble trying to get the materials to show up in Ogre, and it turns out all I was missing was one line of code. Spent more time than I'd like to disclose on getting the materials to show up properly.

Video Game in a Week -- Day 1

2010-03-14T11:59:00.000-06:00

Got the whole week off of school; something about a Spring break epidemic or something. Anyways, about sometime last week I thought it would be a really cool idea if I can get a whole entire game completed in a week. After giving it some thought, I figured it would be a great way to pass the time! The game will be titled "Marble Run," a clone of my favorite marble games, Marble Madness and Hamsterball. I'll be programming in C++, using Ogre3D for rendering, OpenAL for audio, and Bullet for physics. Since I've chosen all open-source multi-platform technologies, I plan to make the source available on release.

Here's the target schedule:

Day 1: Basic application setup with Ogre
Day 2: Build sample level, integrate Bullet3d
Day 3: Gameplay elements and menus
Day 4: Asset creation
Day 5: Asset creation
Day 6: Asset creation, polishing
Day 7: Polishing, release

At the closing of the first day, I have accomplished the day's goal with a simple application, Ogre rendering, FPS-style movement and mouse-look:

Eversion Level Editor 1.3, EversionMod 1.0 Released!

2010-03-13T23:30:00.007-07:00

Introducing EversionMod 1.0, which feature modified Eversion scripts that improve the flexibility of the editor. Eversion Level Editor 1.3 now supports EversionMod 1.0's extended tiles. EversionMod includes features such as supporting unlimited number of levels, changing the player starting position, setting the starting eversion per level, support for vertical levels, and support for the death/blood-walls. Eversion Level Editor 1.3 has a new font change, and some new tiles to support the extended tiles that are used in EversionMod. Documentation for Eversion Editor has now moved online, where I can edit it for everyone whenever I find a mistake. :)

Video:

Here's a quick demo of the features of EversionMod 1.0 as well as how to install it, and how the extended tiles look inside the editor.

Requirements:
Visual C++ 2010 RC1 runtime libraries (included with download) -> vcredist_x86.exe

Download:
Eversion Level Editor 1.3 and EversionMod 1.0
EversionMod 1.2 bugfix

Eversion Level Editor released!

2010-03-06T14:09:00.014-07:00

Intro:
It's finally here! The level editor you have been waiting for! What are you waiting for? Go download it now!

Video:

Demonstrating some capabilities of an older version of the editor. This version uses software rendering GDI, which was incredibly slow. The newer version employs OpenGL, and therefore it's fast(er)! Also, I'm not liking fraps for video recording. It took me all day to get that video onto youtube without any video/audio syncing issues.

Requirements:
Visual C++ 2010 RC1 runtime libraries (included with download) -> vcredist_x86.exe

Download:
Eversion Level Editor 1.3 and EversionMod 1.0
Eversion Level Editor 1.0