Semester wrap up

2 cold spells, 1 imagine cup and 1 demo day later, this semester is over, the Christmas break has arrived and a quick wrap up is in order.

Cosmopolis was selected as a finalist for the US Imagine Cup which will be held in Washington DC sometime late April. We’ll get shipped up there for a weekend of who-knows-what. With some luck and a lot of hard work, we’ll hopefully break into the international finals in Poland later that year.

Demo Day* was a huge success an enormous failure at the same time. Huge failure because I somehow managed to book my flight back to Iceland in the morning meaning that I’d miss the entire Demo Day, something I did not realize until 2 days before. I need a personal assistant to book my flights in the future. The Cosmopolis demo however was a huge success from what I’ve heard, the best one there by most people’s accounts. Just wish I had been there.

*Demo Day  is a dedicated day at the end of the semester where people from the game industry come to USC and watch students present the best projects of the semester for almost an entire day.

With that in mind, here is what matters, the videos presented at Demo Day. Keep in mind that these are probably unnecessarily  long, intended for someone to be talking while they are playing. Maybe we’ll put up annotations sometime. The videos are in HD, so fullscreen + HD is recommended.

What I specifically worked on in this is pretty much the programming of everything you see (and don’t see, ie core engine stuff) except the animation system. I wrote all the shaders and pretty much everything graphics related (vegetation, terrain, water, time of day, shadows, particle system, etc), as well as a big part of the gameplay (including network) for both (sub)games.

Cosmopolis: United Nations Millennium Challenge.
This game (or subgame actually) was our Imagine Cup submission, although the graphics have been improved a little bit since our original submission. The premise here is that you play as a United Nations officer trying to build up a war torn nation. The specific gameplay that we implemented was de-mining. You have a mine detector and a map at your disposal and take a part of a collaberative and persistent de-mining efftort, where individual score is kept track of. The mine detector is sound based and and once you have locked down the position of the mine you throw rocks at it to blow it up.

Cosmopolis: WarPipe.
This subgame is compltely different from UNMC and is meant to be used for research purposes in the near future. Right now the gameplay is pretty much just a free for all killfest involving an assault rifle and 3 types of grenades (smoke, flashbang and frag). Teamplay is the #1 thing to add in the next semester.

Cosmopolis: World Tools
This is just a demo of the tools we used to create the Cosmopolis world.

Chris Metzen

Today’s Game Design class had a guest speaker, Chris Metzen. I had heard the name before but wasn’t really sure on any details, so I did some research. His wikipedia article is pretty conservative, basically stating that he is a long time Blizzard employee, so I wasn’t sure what, or who, to expect.

I soon found out however, that I was standing (or sitting rather) face to face with the father of the Warcraft universe and the reason that Warcraft 2 (and presumably installment #3 and WoW too) was made. And he’s pretty damn cool too. He spoke (in a very entertaining ranting manner) about how Blizzard just barely managed to avoid bankruptcy and rise to be (in my opinion) the top game studio in the world today. He also described the “every voice counts” creative process at Blizzard. What stood out though was that no matter what he said, incredible passion and devotion shone through his words.

Not going to write up any details, aside from one. He really, really.. really really really likes Modern Warfare 2. I haven’t played through the campaign yet as I tend to get bored of single player stuff (although Spec Ops mode has been keeping me entertained) but just listening to him describing it gave me goosebumps. He literally said that MW2 has changed his vision and has forced him to rethink everything.

On that note… I’m off to a session of Modern Warfare 2.

Ps. He also said that my middle name (Thor) is epic. So that’s my name from now on.

Pps. Note to Chris, if you ever happen to google your name or something: Thanks for taking the time for this great lecture / QA session!