Moddable LittleBigPanet
Yesterday, the Reuter ran an interesting report about LittleBigPlanet (see excerpt below). I am interested less so about the game per se, but more so in the “moddable” aspect of it. It seemed that a “toolkit” will be given so that players can create and share player-created levels after they are done with the game’s [...]
Age of Decadence by Iron Tower Studio
Came across the Age of Decadence by Iron Tower Studio. Apparently they are building a new isometric, 3D RPG using Torque Game Engine. The game (preview) looks really good! Below’s an excerpt from an unofficial FAQ from their forum. I am particularly interested in the post-game statistic. Will certainly keep an eye out for this… (More pictures and [...]
Book Chapter on Game Modding
I have finally sent off the book chapter I co-wrote with JaeHwan Byun for the Gibson-Baek’s book. Book Title: Digital Simulations for Improving Education Editors: David Gibson & Young Kyun Baek Chapter 18 - Making Video Game By Modification (Game Modding): Lesson Learned Apart from the regular “fix this”, “change that”, I am actually very pleased with the [...]
Witcher Editor: D’jinni
The long awaited D’jinni “Adventure Editor” is finally available. Great! Those who are interested in modding Witcher (err… creating new adventure for WItcher) can finally have the means to do so. Unfortunately, what I have learned from my team so far, there is not much of a chance to create a “listener” for it. So… [...]
Civilization Modding Contest
Firaxis has just announced a Modding contest for Civilization IV! There are a total of four categories: Best In-Game Asset (art, including units, buildings and/or wonders) Best World-Builder Scenario (just a single .wbs file) Best Map Script (just a single .py file) Best Educational Mod (only educators and schools can submit entries for this one) [...]
Neverwinter Nights for military
It was at I/ITSEC 2007 that I first heard about Shawn A. Weil from the folks from Aptima, Inc. (Woburn, MA). It appeared that Aptima (or should I say Weil?) also worked on Neverwinter Nights for a little bit, and had presented their papers at past I/ITSEC (2004/2005). It looks like they have been busy: [...]
I/ITSEC 2007 (Orlando, FL)
My participation in the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2007 was more chance than planned. I had seen an advertisement for Serious Games Challenge on the Serious Games listserv, and decided to go for it. After two months of hardwork, we finally had a completed mod for submission… and it came in as [...]
NWN2 Custom Model Contest
Okay, I must admit I missed this one altogether. Apparently, Obsidian had commissioned a Custom Model Contest sometime in November… (I figured it was right around the time I was preoccupied with The Witcher). Anyway, for posterity sake, you can still view (and download) the custom models submitted for the contest here. The original announcement [...]
Serious Games Challenge
After two months of planning and several weeks of crazy coding/scripting, my research team has finally put together a game for the 2nd Annual Serious Games Challenge and Showcase at I/ITSEC. I must say I learned a lot. Before, I was able to put together a story, and even build the set. But when it [...]
CGames 2007
I will be presenting “Assessing What Players Learned in Serious Games: In Situ Data Collection, Information Trails and Quantitative Analysis”at the 10th International Conference on Computer Games: AI, Animation, Mobile, Educational & Serious Games (CGAMES 2007) on July 25th – 28th, 2007, in Louisville, KY. This would be my first foray into the computer games [...]
Neverwinter Pedia
The main source for NWN2 tutorials is obviously NWN Vault, where you will find several leads, and even a series of video tutorials in Spanish. Amongst these, I will heartily recommend Githonym’s Don’t Panic Guide for new comers, and for those who wans to go on further. But NWN2 being a new game, there is [...]
NWN eXtender 4 (beta) for NWN2
After 6 months of waiting, NWNX4 has finally reached beta! The NWN eXtender has been an essential add-on program (plug-in) to those of us who intend to make persistent world out of NWN. Acting as a game state viewer, it allowed a peek into the game engine, and extraction of certain variables from the game [...]
Peter Gorniak (MIT)
Peter Gorniak, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is probably the first person who used NWN as a research platform. He originally conceived it as Situated Speech Understanding (you can read his thesis proposal here) but eventually turned it into Affordance-Based Concept [ABC] (you can read his thesis here). Some of his other writing [...]
Making the News
Kathryn Jaehnig did a write up for CILR’s Information Trails research team today. The article was printed in today’s Southern Illinoisan newspaper. Headline: Computer Games May Help with Class Work ID: 19394578.doc Author: Kathryn Jaehnig Approx. number of words: 687 CARBONDALE – Some day, in the not-so-distant future in a school not far [...]
Scripting Compendium
There have been many scripting tutorials written for NWN (since 2002). David Gaider (Lead Writer, Bioware) once compiled a long list of tutorials for beginning scripters at Bioware NWN Forum based on many of Celowin’s works (see this thread). The list of tutorials proved very useful when I set out to find resources for my [...]
Construction Toolkits for Game Modding
As I have said in an earlier post, if you want to do game modding, stick with the PC. The reason being most of the construction sets (or toolkits) released by game publishers tended to be PC-based. Toolkit for Mac and Linux platforms is almost unheard of. Moddable games such as the Neverwinter Nights series [...]
NWN Modding: West Notts College, UK
West Nottinghamshire College at Mansfield, UK has been modding NWN since 2005. Those of us who followed the Bioware’s Wednesday newsletter would have read about their educational NWN project at one time or another. The project has also been reported in the news, here’s one write-up, and here’s another. On Jan 12, 2007, BBC News [...]
Modder Modding Mods
People who are not from the “gamer generation” – those who are above 30 years old, according to the definition by Michael and Beck (2005) – often ask me what is this “mod” / “modding” I am talking about. The short answer is that the word “mod” originates from “modify.” Hence, a gamer who has modified part [...]