Articles from September 2009

The last days have been very interesting: first of all I went to Venice because of an exam (which I passed only in part), then attended La Biennale for a day and finally went to Milan in order to attend to an almost private presentation of "Risen".

First of all, the exam was about "System reliability and performance", i.e. stochastic processes and their modeling, queuing systems and finally about how to write a simulator and get statistically valid data out of it. Well, turns out that the simulator Silvio and I wrote wasn't too correct about the "statistically valid" part and we'll have to fix it in the next weeks.

Then, two days ago I was part of the film delegation of "It.Aliens" at La Biennale in Venice. Unfortunately, the showing was a technical Waterloo (audio and video were out of sync, the audio mix was completely wrong, etc.) but the audience laughed a couple of times so it wasn't a complete and utter failure, all in all. The festival was a great experience even if I stayed just for a couple of hours.

Finally, yesterday morning I woke up at 5 to catch a train to Milan - more exactly to Rho Fieramilano - where the Italian "Koch Media" headquarters are located. I met there with Leonardo "Sakkio", the leader of the Italian Gothic and Risen online community with whom I manage the official website Risen-Italia. Together we attended a nice preview of the new video game by Piranha Bytes, Risen, which is to be released in less than a month. We shot a couple of videos, which I'll start editing in the next days. The game looks pretty promising and we had fun testing it; the people at Koch Media also covered us in merchandising and stuff, which is always an easy way to make fan's heart happy!

Assume you bought some expensive surround headphones and a special surround edition of a music album, on DVD-A (like Insurgentes by Steven Wilson, for instance). Listening to the high resolution 5.1 mix is a wonderful experience, way more immersive and pleasant than the standard stereo mix through cheap loudspeakers.

Unfortunately, the only problem is that you can't easily bring the music with you: even if you manage to bring the 5.1 headphones, you can't schlep a ton of DVDs even if you wanted. A week ago I finally found out how to rip the DTS audio data on a DVD-A disc to a digital file containing all 6 surround tracks. I'm now enjoying my collection of Porcupine Tree and No-Man records in full 5.1 greatness.

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A couple of months ago I started a short series of blog posts about genetic algorithms, which I originally intended to develop quickly, but never found the time to do so. Finally, here's the next chapter.

During my time at the Computer Science institute (ISTI) of the University of Urbino, immediately after my graduation, my friends Alessandro, Piervincenzo and I dedicated some time to find possible applications of genetic algorithms to video games. A field that of course we did (and still do) find very interesting. We spent some time coming up with prototypes and developing them - one of which, "Genetic RTS", you'll see in a future post - and our work culminated with a seminary at the university and a short paper published at SECEVitA 2007.

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In the previous post I wrote about the problems of adapting a genetic algorithm to work inside the constraints of a video game. In some cases it is possible, and quite easy, to reshape and reduce the "problem" at hand in order for the GA to be able to solve it and pretend to be an intelligent adversary.

During our tests at Urbino we built a couple of prototypes, one of which is Genetic RTS (yep, I know, not the most creative of titles ). It's essentially a simplified "Defense Grid" game where the player must build up the defense of his base while the computer attacks it and tries to overcome the defensive structures.

The game

Genetic RTS is limited to a little square terrain with the player's base at its center. At the start of the game, the player can place a certain number of defensive structures around the base (in the blue area):

The game terrain. Marked in blue, the area where defensive units can be placed.
You'll notice the base graphics are stolentaken directly from "Dune II".

There are two different defensive structures: cannons, which shoot quickly but cannot target airplanes, and anti-air rockets, which are slower but of course only target planes. Each defensive tower has a limited range and a limited rate of fire, but never misses the enemy.

The objective of the computer is to destroy the player's base (which has 20 "health" points) by trying to get its units to touch the base (each hit costs one health point). When the base reaches 0 points the player loses. The player's goal instead is to place his defenses correctly and resist to the attack waves as long as he can.

The computer can generate a certain number of units, that will start on the edge of the map and then move towards the base. A unit can be either a land unit (a tank) or a flying unit (an airplane): each unit will be shot at by the corresponding defense tower type and not by the other. Moreover, each single unit can choose its "toughness" (the number of hits required to destroy it). A tougher unit will also be slower, so there's a trade-off to find, based on the number of defensive towers and their rate of fire.

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During the last month I have been working again at the university of Urbino, on a project that involves other two graduates of the Computer Science faculty, Andrea and Saverio. The objective, for now, is to build an embedded InternetTV decoder which should work like a low power set-top-box able to reproduce digital HD video.

The project was presented yesterday at a conference here in Urbino about the future of television (i.e. InternetTV, of course, which is slowly taking hold here in the old continent). A representative from StreamIt attended, the main partner and most promising content provider in Italy.

Our set-top-box is being developed on a Beagleboard, a quite cheap board powered by a Texas Instruments OMAP 3530 processor which also includes a dedicated DSP chip particularly suited to decode multimedia streams. On the software side, the board is running on Ångström (a Linux flavor) and we have been implementing an RTMP client (the Adobe / Flash streaming protocol) and a player (based on GStreamer + QT + Mono). That's a lot of topics I'd like to blog about if I ever find some time.

Anyway, in the past days we had some euphoric moments when suddendly we were able to decode some largish videos (not HD, but still) using the DSP and with a CPU load of ~15%. After weeks of banging our collective heads against the board...

Watch on Vimeo.

As you might know, I'm an avid video game buyer - that is, I usually buy tons of games but hardly ever find the time to actually play them. I still have a huge stack of games to check out and I usually never finish any of them. Anyway, I'm also a huge fan of the Gothic saga by Piranha Bytes: a german action-RPG series.

Some of my time is always spentwasted moderating the boards and webmastering the website of the italian Gothic community. During the last year we also opened the official Risen fansite: the new RPG by Piranha Bytes which is about to be released in a week.

Fortunately, in managing the Risen community we have full support by the publisher of the game, Deep Silver. In fact, a couple of weeks ago I was invited in Milan with another founder of the site to attend a private preview of the game. We had some fun checking out Risen and shooting a short video (in italian):

I have been using a second generation iPod Touch for almost 9 months now and, while being completely satisfied with the player (I'm a bit tempted by the iPhone 3GS, even), the earbuds it comes with are simply terrible.

The iPod earbuds are standard earphones, but have quite low volume (when traveling by train I often couldn't hear most of the songs I was listening to, which gets even worse for podcasts or videos). They also disperse a lot of the sound outside the listener's ear, which forces the people sitting next to you to listen to everything you're shuffling through your iPod (something I hate being exposed to and hate to do onto others). The earbuds also tend to dislodge from the ear quite easily, especially when walking or jogging. And finally, after having used my pair of earbuds to exercise for a couple of months, one of the earbuds started to play at a much lower volume (probably because of the sweat).

Time to throw them away, I decided... So I took a lot of time to decide which model of earphone to get and finally bought the Sennheiser CX-300 II in-ear phones.

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