robburke.NET

I was asked a few weeks ago about why Artificial Intelligence over the past few decades has been such a “failure”, meaning mostly that it isn’t seen to be living up to its great expectations.
James Gaskin at NetworkWorld gives a well-referenced response very similar to the one I gave back then, which went like this:
Essentially, [...]

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If you’re authoring multimedia applications in Silverlight, you might be interested in how each of the core game engine services for Legend of the Greasepole is now implemented for the Silverlight 2 Beta.
From C/C++ to a Provider Model-Based .NET Engine
Some brief history to explain how we got here: Greasepole’s first incarnation was manky C/C++ stuff [...]

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One of the reasons I’m pleased with the Silverlight version of Legend of the Greasepole is that it represents a reasonably-scaled multimedia application, and therefore a good way to learn about the Silverlight 2 runtime’s performance.
The Silverlight 2 Beta game engine runs rings around the game engine I tried to create using the Silverlight 2 [...]

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The Legend of the Greasepole is a game that began its life on July 1st, 1996, when a group of Engineering students from Queen’s University in Canada decided they’d create a way to re-live their unexplainable annual tradition from the comfort of their long-suffering computers.
The release of the Silverlight 2 Beta has allowed the game [...]

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Congratulations to Sci ‘11 for their one-hour, 47-minute conquering of this year’s greasepole!
Can we all just take a moment to reflect on the academic year called “Sci ‘11″?  Man, I feel old all of a sudden.
Just for giggles, here’s the current list of achievements for Legend of the Greasepole.  I wonder how the crowd around [...]

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I’ve posted Windows and XBox360 versions of Legend of the Greasepole 2007 to the Queen’s EngSoc website!
The new version is built with XNA and includes the following new features:

Controller support for either the mouse or the XBox360 Controller attached to the PC
3D sound 
Modestly enhanced graphics (although we realized it was ultimately a choice between a total revamp [...]

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… in fact it’s probably happening as I type, but I’m three-and-a-half hours down the 401 in Toronto. Sigh.

A huge thanks to the folks who have beta tested the re-release of the game.  I had hoped to have it ready for today, but I’ve received some great feedback about a few things to tweak, and particularly [...]

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By my reckoning, it’ll be next Saturday when Queen’s University frosh week will culminate this year for a new batch of fresh-faced Engineering students.  Surrounded by upper-years dyed purple with gentian violet, they’ll struggle to form a pyramid and climb a lanolin-covered pole to liberate a Scottish tam that’s been nailed to its top, and officially [...]

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Making that scuba video was fun!  As long as I’m playing with video I might as well dust off an old one.
The last time I worked with video was six years ago, at the MIT Media Lab, when I cut together Waiting for Goatzilla.
Goatzilla is the autonomous character that offered a proof-of-concept for the predictive [...]

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As part of my Last Stand demo, I showed how to integrate Nintendo’s Wiimote controller into XNA, first to navigate a butterfly around an environment by tilting and rolling the controller, and then to walk a creature across a tightrope wire by holding the Wiimote like a balancing pole.
I won’t be posting the code to [...]

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