Ever wonder what the backend of creating video games, and video game programming looks like? Enter Alice.

It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

Alice is free and open source. It is a stand alone application, and is available on many platforms. It uses much of the technology that was used in the making of The Sims2.

It’s used at many schools and colleges as a teaching tool. Instructions are similar to that of C++ and C# But includes a neat drag and drop interface for the actions, methods and properties. I made a short sequence myself in about 10 minutes.

Exporting to the web is a bit difficult because it requires the end user to have a lot of Java framework installed on their unit. Exporting as video isn’t functioning yet as the video’s are just too big.  You can view a bunch of Alice works on YouTube.

Here’s some more info direct from Carnegie Mellon:

Ze Frank is best known in the podcast world for his strange, witty and clever videoblog that he produced daily for a year, but did you know he had a snowflake creator that can be rotated in 2D or 3D?

Not terribly useful because you can’t export your creation to a website or do anything, but it’s kind of cool to look at, especially as the weather gets cooler. Ze labels it as a toy.

While staring at these images, do you see them as 3D? How about checking out the Tiltviewer which offers images from the Flickr photo service from Yahoo in a 3D rotating grid.

Here’s a challenge: try writing your name or drawing something a rotating 3D canvas. Trippy. Too Van Goghesq? Maybe drawing using the 3D Stereogram will be easier.

You’d think it would take more than 200 faces to create any other face. When you look at this and compare it to MMO software for avatars in say Second Life, the realism is impressive. Fascinating stuff. Imagine having a script to be able to morph your face to another avatar on command or click. One of my favorite parts is the male to female transition by moving a slider about a minute and a half in.

Remember the move Terminator 2? Good 3D morphing effects there.

The rumored description by ARS Technica sounds believable:

ASU students received a questionnaire yesterday, screenshots of which were originally posted by a MacRumors forum member, that hinted strongly at Google’s plans. Specifically, the questionnaire intro says that students will be able to test a product that will be publicly launched later this year by a “major Internet company,” and the graphic makes reference to 3D modeling, video gaming, and avatars. It proceeds to ask questions about students’ involvement with social networks like MySpace and whether they have Gmail accounts.

Video games? Could Google be looking to expand their iGoogle product to include MMORPG? With news of Metaplace and the Sony PS3 Home project both arriving in Spring 2008, does this add a third player with a big G in their name to the space? Wouldn’t surprise this writer, as Google doesn’t really have a serious gaming platform — yet. Sure, you can add widgets to your personalized Google pages, but that’s nothing on the scale of what a real gaming platform could provide.

Though this is only barely related, this also reminded me of the commercial traffic tracking software, Visitorville which will show you real time visitors to your website, including buses with the Google logo on it when somebody arrives at your website from a Google search. Imagine if Google could wire up something like that where your customizable avatar plays in part what’s happening in real time — or close to real time as possible — on your website or personal home page? With Google Analytics, search, orkut, Sketchup (for the 3D avatar creation) they have a lot of the necessary pieces to glue together.

Or is this all just somebody’s 20% project at Google and nothing serious? As usual with rumors, Google isn’t talking, but that shouldn’t prevent the rest of us from having fun speculating at what the Wizards of G are secreting from the rest of us in Kansas.

If you’re looking at an interesting perspective of the other side: pulling Google Earth data into Second Life, take a look at fellow VTOR author, jvastine’s post: Google Earth & Virtual Reality.

Entropia Universe, the safest virtual world utilizing a real cash economy, has signed a license agreement to use the stunning high-tech game engine CryENGINE 2®, from German developer Crytek, creators of “Far Cry®” and upcoming “Crysis®.” This will make Entropia Universe the closest-to-reality looking massively multiplayer online game ever seen.

It’s said to be finished by mid 2008.

Some of the really cool features (seen in video) that I’m looking forward to are;

• Parametric skeletal animation system
• Breakable buildings & vegetation systems

This is going to bring gaming to a completely different level!

Download the wmv direct from Entropia Universe (better quality).

Second Life Insider reports that Linden is acquiring Windward Mark Interactive in an effort to bolster the 3D environments of SL. I previously had covered the issues with the detailing of environments and why SL lacked the shine that other MMORPGs seemed to be able to achieve.

One look at the Nimble system that Windward Mark has developed for 3D volumetric clouds and you can see how this could really be advantageous to Linden to have graphics as such integrated into the system. The realistic look of the environment could put Second Life in a whole new ballgame when it comes to environmental graphics.

Hopefully the integration efforts begin soon and is more smooth that recent feature additions. I personally look forward to more realistic environments that we all can buzz around in. It would definitely throw a whole new meaning to the term “escaping reality.” Meanwhile, let us gaze in awe at the screenshots and movies that Windward Mark has to offer and cross our fingers for the best that is yet to come.

Update(1): Linden’s official weigh in.  Check out the screenshots.   And what do you know…. they talk about cloud shadows on the environment. heh.

Let’s visit an old friend that began many of the look and feel of MMORPGs. Quake. While Quake was not the first FPS, it was one that was wildy popular and one that incorporated the use of skinning for the models that was eventually open to the rest of the world. This was very apparent in modifications later on when you looked at the layouts of skins and found that what you were seeing in 3D was actually a 2D layer that was draped over the 3D body. These days, practically all 3D engines skin models as such. The more the polygons to fill out the skin, the more realistic. Still confused? Let’s bring it down a notch in terms that everyone can understand. Think of it this way. Take a bed sheet and drape it over you. Now if someone were to trace your features on the bed sheet, then take the sheet off and lay it flat, then that would be what a skin is like in a game.

Caption: Note that the moon doesn’t change from different angles, it just elongates like a flat image laying inside a curve.

Some of these claims come from an interview Robert Scoble had with Randal Leeb-du Toit and John Wolpert, executive producer of Outback Online a newcomer in the 3D MMO space coming in alpha form this summer:

Imagine if it was possible to build any world you dream of that was just for you and your friends. A club, a new planet, a race track with less gravity, a city in the fog…all infinitely scalable. Then imagine that you create the rules of these virtual worlds – the games to be played, the things to be done.

via scobleizer:

1) The quality of graphics on Second Life aren’t good enough to do lots of things.
2) The scalability of Second Life isn’t good enough to hold really large events (only about 100 people can fit into a single island, in Outback Online they claim they can get 10,000).

All we have at this point is the word from those in the Outback Online camp claiming this is possible, no third party unbiased sources have verified these claims, so don’t get too excited just yet. Still Linden Lab better expect the competition will be coming someday and smart competitors will target SL weaknesses (of which there are many). Linden Lab could deflect and diffuse this competitor momentum and advantage by opening the source of their server ASAP. Remember Google came out when other search engines dominated so being #1 doesn’t last forever.

Compared to the MMORPG camp — and forgive me for making the comparison as I do realize SL is not a ‘game’ — Second Life is still a long ways in the rear view mirror of World of Warcraft. For what SL does they are clearly the leader of their niche but nothing lasts forever, especially on the web.

This VTOR author is signed up for the Outback Online beta and will be happy to report back his findings when the site goes into alpha later this year. I’d like to see 10,000 avatars being able to meet on a single sim/server. Heck, I’d just like to see a service with sims that don’t crash several times a week.

Not sure that Outback Online will be able to deliver but I believe there is a Google-type company that will rise in the virtual world area. Will it be Linden Lab? This field is still fertile ground.

Perhaps you’ve never heard of Carera. Well Carera 5 is a software package that sports a simple easy to use interface to multiple 3D modelers,, an advanced texturing system, a terrain module, a full animation toolset, and a remarkably fast rendering engine. This means that Carera can handle all of your needs – everything from creating and texturing models, developing animation sequences, and then render your designs into a video.

Now if you couple Carera 5 with DAZ Studio and some of the figures & models, which DAZ provides for free (see the post: 3D Creation Tools), you have everything that you would need to create your own animated shorts. The only thing missing would be an idea or script. That is unless you want to to create a voice-track that has been lip synced to the figures. For this you would require an additional tool like Mimic.

So whether you are interested in creating 3D content or are already involved in 3D, head on over to DAZ3D (affiliate) and catch the Carera wave now!

The other day I ran across an article on C|net’s news.com website that I thought was a bit interesting. The piece was called: Rich 3D imagery added to Google Earth, which began to set my mind in motion. I quickly began thinking about the possibility of using Google Earth’s repository of data to develop recreations of real-life terrains within a virtual realm, like that of Second Life.

In a nutshell, the piece basically said that the latest version of Google’s mapping application will enable users to create and share 3D content. This is accomplished by using Google Sketchup to create rich 3D renderings of buildings as KML or KMZ files that are simply used as overlays in Google Earth 4. KML (Keyhole Markup Language) is the XML (Extensible Markup Language) file that is used for modeling and storing features in Google Earth. KMZ is simply the compressed version of KML.

With the revamping of the Second Life architecture to include the common protocols used on the Web, the SL engine would be compatible with the XML data in Google’s repository. Now just imagine having the ability to import famous architectural sites and terrain from Google Earth into your simulation. This would indeed greatly speed and enhance your ability to create the fundamental elements of your virtual world.

This offers expanded benefits to the use of virtual worlds in the area of education. Not just in the realms of say geography or modern civics, this could be applied to the various sciences too. Plus this would make it easier to reconstruct historical sites, as well as any number of other things.

A few quick ideas that came to mind are:

• You could easily recreate accurate virtual representations of the Seven Wonders of the World for people to explore and experience.
• How about recreation of a famous landmark to be used to re-enact a historical event.
• One could even model proposed construction and have a better view of how it may impact an area.
• The terrain layouts could be used for all types of planning and training.

Though these are just a few rather simple ideas, it is becoming very clear that with the advances in technology, within a virtual world that provides you the freedom to create, such as Second Life, your only limitation truly is your imagination!

As Linden Labs revamps the Second Life architecture to embrace Web standards and the server components are open-sourced under the GPL, this is something that the developers need to keep in mind. Having the ability to import data from Google Earth would be a real benefit. Don’t you agree?

If you could create your virtual world from Google Earth data, what would you build and how would you use it? Well, begin to speak up and make your voice heard.