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Forays in Web Crawling

I've always been really interested in the idea of gathering data from the internet. It probably stems from my love of organizing, classifying, and recording stuff. I finally took an opportunity to exercise this interest this week.

On the forums for the (amazing) game Dwarf Fortress, there is a thread dedicated to illustrating "forgotten beasts" from the game. Forgotten beasts are terrifying monsters that are randomly generated by the game and lurk in the depths of the earth. Because forgotten beasts are rarely alike, the thread has seen a great variety of works from some outstanding artists. I wanted to collect these illustrations and organize them into an archive where people could browse them by artist or by the beast.

To collect what ended up being over 650 images from a 150-page forum thread, I created a web robot in C#. This part of the task provided some interesting challenges. The robot had to collect the URLs of any images that were posted in the thread and their authors, as well as the actual text descriptions of the beasts being illustrated, which were sometime in text form or in the form of screenshots from the game. Fortunately, the descriptions follow a certain identifiable formula that made it possible to pick them out with good success from all the other text in the thread. To actually associated the beast pictures with the proper descriptions and to find and transcribe the descriptions that were embedded in screenshots, I turned to a sort of "crowdsourcing" model - I set up a simple PHP page to show images to viewers and ask them to classify them. This was an easy way to finish these tasks that would have been impossible for an automated program to do (though I contemplated incorporating some kind of OCR to look for text descriptions in the images and transcribe them).

To check out some of the great art this thread has produced, visit the archive page: http://brianmacintosh.com/beasts/view.php

New Blog Feature: Tags

I've updated the blog again with another new feature - tags. Each post is now tagged with a number of strings based on what it's about. To see more posts about the same subject, just click on one of the tags in the top line.

Computers in computers - Camera Obscura Adder

It's always fun to see people building computer-like circuits in games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress. While it's outlandishly impractical to build computers in computers, it's just so much fun and so educational. Well, today I figured out how to do it in the Camera Obscura engine using moving platforms and I was irrationally excited about it, so I built a four-bit adder circuit. It adds two four-bit numbers together and show the results. Check it out:

You can download the level here.

Boring details on how this works: there are several very small sets of logic gates, the basic building blocks of electronic chips, that can be provably used to create every other possible logic gate (trivia: NAND gates alone are sufficient, as are NOR gates). Camera Obscura's mechanics are capable of creating two gates: OR, by simply linking multiple sources to the same moving platform, and NOT (at least as far as I've discovered). Fortunately these two gates together are sufficient. Information can propagate through the system because moving platforms can press buttons that trigger other platforms...and so forth.

This possibility also provides some pseudo-scripting functionality to game levels. Imagine a passcode-protected vault that only opens when you enter the right number, or even a game of Mastermind within the level.

Camera Obscura Demo Release

This week marks the first public release of a playable demo for Camera Obscura! The released demo contains 20 levels out of the 100 total in the full game. We have also included the full level editor, so you can make and share custom levels without limit.

We are very excited to be at this stage where we can finally begin to get solid feedback from people based on how the game actually plays. Please download it and let us know what you think, and remember to support us on Greenlight!

Download
Demo Installer (Recommended)
Demo ZIP

The process of releasing a demo was a surprisingly lengthy one. I always thought I would just compile a release build, stick a readme file in it, and send it out to the internet. As it turned out, however, there were numerous aspects of the game that had to be examined and tweaked to make sure publication went (and continues to go) smoothly. In addition to the normal, everyday tasks of polishing features and tackling bugs, I had to consider what parts of the user's saves needed to be kept for future versions of the game (like their options and achievements) and which parts would need to be thrown out later, and build in a mechanism for allowing that. I also had to build an installer to ensure the users would have all the right dependencies (runtime dependencies can suck). And, of course, we had to test the heck out of every other aspect of the game, as well. The thought of someone putting aside the game because it crashed on the menu screen is not a nice one. So there's my semi-educational post-mortem thing for publishing a demo.

XNA Bitmap Font Library Release

I've just released some code I've had for a while. This library allows you to use bitmap font images to draw fancy and stylish text to the screen in an XNA project. It was used in Music Island to strings using bamboo-styled text.

More information and downloads are available on the code page.