As I mentioned in my previous post, Foxie Hunny 2 used real weather conditions to change the appearance of its levels. Atmo5 provides this weather data to other developers so they can easily incorporate weather in their own projects. In this project I designed and built the entire system, from gathering and caching the actual data, to the backend REST API to handle requests, and finally the client side SDK for Unity3D.
For more information, see the site.
Over the last year I’ve been involved with the creation of two Foxie Hunny games.
The first, Foxie Hunny 2 with Real Time Weather, is a side scrolling platformer with 3D graphics for iOS. This was an exciting project on multiple levels. For one, platformers are my favorite genre of games and though I’ve done a few as personal projects, this was my first opportunity to build one for a truly public audience. It was also my first real project in Unity3D. And finally, Foxie Hunny 2 was the first mobile game to incorporate real-time weather. I was working on Atmo5 at the time and was able to build a system in the game to change rain, snow, and daylight in the levels to reflect the player’s physical environment.
The other is Foxie Hunny Jump, an arcade-style game in which you travel upwards by jumping from crystal to crystal.
For a variety of good and bad reasons, my previous revival of this site has now languished virtually untouched for nearly a year. But now I intend to create a renaissance of the site. For the time being my goal will be a minimum of one post per week. If I can maintain that, I may try to increase to two or three posts per week. To start, over the next couple weeks I will be writing short posts on some of the major projects I’ve done in the past year, and then I’ll launch into totally new content.
I’ve made a couple changes to the look and structure of the site. I’ve changed the emphasis of the name from Alder Forest to ericmarcarelli.com to make clear the nature of the site as a showcase of my personal projects and writing. “Alder Forest – a polyculture of ideas” is now the tagline/subtitle of the site, and I’ll continue to use alderforest.org for my personal email address. I’ve also removed the banner I created last summer because a plain header simply looks cleaner.
This diagram represents the overall program flow for Xovos
Xovos is the senior project I completed last May. It is a program that develops web designs in an evolutionary environment with user interactions and preferences as the selection criteria. The project consists of five basic parts. The user interface allows the user to interact with the program. A set of genes makes up a chromosome that describes a design. An offspring generator mates the designs from the current generation to form the next generation. The design generator parses the design chromosomes to create the visual representations of the design. Finally, environmental preferences (also called monsters) allow users to set basic criteria for designs that will be automatically selected against. In my research I have not been able to find anyone else who has tried to apply evolutionary programming to web design in this way. The closest related work is on evolving programs that are designed for specific tasks and are not visually oriented.
No tame trail leads one there
Through wild rye and tangled brier,
Over paths unworn,
To the old stone wall
That weathers all.
A remnant of lost triumph;
The artifact of forgotten struggle.
When leaves ate wood
And thatch wore to soil,
Crops to seed,
And stock to feral,
It stood there still:
The old stone wall
That weathers all.