A Half-Life 2 Mod and a History of Video Game Physics

My undergraduate thesis was long, kinda boring, and involved dead imperialists; two students at McMaster University have created a Half-Life 2 mod called Half-Life Havoc for theirs, and attached a little paper on the history of video game physics.

Half-Life Havoc (HLH) is a lesson in video game physics created in Half-Life 2 using the included level editing tools. Taking inspiration from games like Garry's mod and Portal, HLH aims to create an environment where players can take some time to appreciate the complex physics simulations that are present in modern games. HLH is made up of a series of rooms, each of which has a puzzle or game that illustrates a feature of Half-Life 2's physics engine. Commentary nodes spread throughout the level teach the player about what is going on in each of the games and gives insight into video game physics.

Half-Life: Havoc

Ingredients: Kids, a camera, an Xbox 360, a microwave, the timeless human desire to bust stuff up real good. Preparation: Remove white plastic shell from console. Cooking Directions: Insert Xbox 360 in microwave. Cook until in flames. Remove from microwave, inhale toxic fumes, high-five everybody in the room, take photographs. Serving Suggestion: Video of microwaved 360 is above, with a gallery of fried console components in the gallery linked below.
Xbox 360 [Microwave Science, via Giz]

Oh Dear, Peter Molyneux's Getting Excited About His New Project...

...And then [Dimitri] moved from [an] experiment to a moment in time that happened six months ago when a discovery was made, and this discovery has been so exciting that it has lead to Lionhead focussing on it and sculpting a game around that. I think that discovery is so significant... This discovery has lead us to start a game and that game will be on the front cover of Nature magazines and Science magazines.

FPS Dying Makes People Feel Better

'Phun': A 2D Physics Playground

Not precisely a game, but there has been talk lately of physics (and science in general) in games, and this is a neat little program that's fun to spend a while playing with. It's still in beta and has the requisite bugs you might expect, but here's what the creator has to say about it:

Phun is a Master of Science Theises by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt for supervisor Kenneth Bodin at VRLab, Umeå University. The solver is based on work by Claude Lacoursière

Phun is meant to be a playground where people can be creative. It can also be used as an educational tool to learn about physics concepts such as restitution and friction.

You can snag the download (Windows only for now, but an OSX version is apparently on its way) at the Phun website, where there's more information. There's also a thread going over at the GameDev.com forums.

Science Is Fun! Half-Life, Portal, and Science

All hail the Enlightenment — Thomas Freeman has an interesting look at science and attitudes towards science in Half-Life and Portal. What do such attitudes spell for future releases?

For the last few years, the buzzword for game engine design has been physics, but most games didn't use it for anything more than the most basic eye-candy. HL2 showed that the model itself could actually be fun and interesting as part of the gameplay. I like to imagine doing the same thing for other fields - chemistry, for example, which has never been one of my strong subjects but would almost certainly make for amazing puzzles a la MacGyver. To some degree, this progression is already taking place; what's Spore but an expansive biology toy?

A fun and thought provoking read, even for those of us who run screaming from labs of any kind. Give me musty library stacks any day.

Anomalous Materials [The Escapist]

Violent Games Make Kids Ruthless, Bloodthirsty Killing Machines

An entire swarm of Kotakuites has bombarded the tips email with a story from KETV 7 in Omaha Nebraska entitled, "Video Games Normalize Killing, Doctors Say." A completely atrocious headline, though good enough to get the story linked from the main page of CNN. Less hard-hitting news and more of a research roundup, the article presents information from studies done by Iowa State University, Kansas State University, the Indiana School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health showing that violent games normalize our children to violence...putting them more in tune with violent behavior and therefor much more likely to engage in it.

"Exposure to violent video games, even E rated video games, increases aggressive thoughts, increases pro-social behavior and increases general arousal," said Dr. Greg Snyder, a psychologist at Omaha's Children's Hospital.

Bionic Eyes Could Change The Face Of Gaming

What if instead of having your television cluttered with interface elements while playing an FPS, you could have the HUD displayed directly on your eye? This is one of the possible applications of the bionic eye created by engineers at the University of Washington, which utilizes microscopic manufacturing techniques to contact lenses imprinted with electronic circuits and lights. While the current prototype has yet to light up and a full display version is still years away, the possibilities for such a device are staggering. From the press release:

There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle's speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.

Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision [UWNews.org]

Video Games Damage Your Frontal Lobe

Noting that the study focused on subjects who played video games for only 30 minutes, Chou said many youngsters spend far more time on video games each day, unaware that doing so on a long term basis could damage the frontal lobe of the brain, as well as the anterior cingulate gyrus.

Science Is Fun! - Physics In Games

Guitar Hero III - Will It Blend?

How does the Guitar Hero III X-plorer guitar controller fare when faced with the whirring blades of the BlendTec Total Blender? I won't spoil it, but know that it doesn't hold up too well to a Pete Townshending. For a blender that costs as much as a PlayStation 3 it had better fuck this thing up.

Virtual Crack House Aids Drug Rehab

As a gamer, I've been through many virtual-reality crack houses in my time, usually with guns blazing. Duke University professor Zach Rosenthal, however, has an entirely different way of dealing with crackheads in virtual reality - curing them.

"What we're trying to do is take people into a virtual crack-related neighborhood or crack-related setting and have them experience cravings, just like they would in the real world," Rosenthal said.

Astrophysicist Dr. Gaurav Khanna is using eight linked Playstation 3s to measure what sort of gravity waves would be produced if a super-massive black hole were to swallow a star.

The eight PS3s, donated to the doctor's research by Sony, replace Khanna having to tap into supercomputing sites at $5,000 a pop, Wired reports. He said the "gravity grid" of PS3s, which has been up for about a month now, are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes.

"The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons," explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. "One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn't control what you do."

The other of course is the upcoming release of Eye of Judgment.... better pick up a some velvet robes Dr. Guarav "Gravity Grid" Khanna.

Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s

Game In College, Have Poor Time Management, Watch Grades Drop

"The recent inclusion of PS3 as part of the Folding@home program has afforded our research group with computing power that goes far beyond what we initially hoped," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "Thanks to PS3, we are now essentially able to fast-forward several aspects of our research by a decade, which will greatly help us make more discoveries and advancements in our studies of several different diseases."

Scientists Studying Warcraft Plague

Through The Glass Deveopment Studio

"We only need four days to complete the process. This means that visitors will be able to watch the game slowly take shape before their eyes. GC visitors in the glass development studio will be also be able to subject the different versions of the game to their own quality testing," explained Boje Holtz of exDream.

Timewaster of the Day (Week? Month?): Sharkrunners