SErik

Hello again,

you can now offically call me Master of Arts and therefore I will also provide my thesis here:

Story and Game combined
Using Machinima for Interactive Experiences (PDF / 3.6 MB)

Abstract

This thesis is going to introduce machinima and its history and tech-niques. Due to the possibilities of real time 3D, I will propose to use the inter-active potential of machinima. Furthermore, the concepts of the terms story and game, as well as their differences, will be discussed. This will be concluded with the suggestion of a new way of combining stories with game-elements, in order to make use of the diversity in the field of combining stories and games.
Based on this theoretical point of view, I will present three ideas for the use of the interactive potential of machinima: an interactive installation, digital theatre and live cinema. I will exemplarily develop the idea of an interactive installation to a more concrete description, a concept. This concept will use my idea of combining a story with game-like elements.

I was invited to the Games Convention in Leipzig by Animation in neuen Medien. Ingo Linde, Dirk Förster and Karin Wehn organised a stand for machinima.
I spoke about the “border areas” of machinima like live performances and live visuals and about game art and game movies outside the spectrum of the machinima community. Some people are producing machinima without calling them machinimas and some do things which are maybe not machinima anymore but call it machinima and then there are people who do not produce machinima and do not call it machinima but are using computer games to do it. The world is fuzzy.
I enjoyed the time there with all the nice people on the machinima-stand. Hopefully soon I will post some links about some works I mentionend in my talks.

I finally handed in my thesis about three weeks ago. There was so much to do that I did not even write a message here. I am waiting for my grade and my degree now. I also submitted a paper to the ICIDS08. I hope I can post thesis and paper here for download very soon.

I am also thinking about if and how I could realise the practical part of my thesis. I think the only way would be to gather a team of people for this, especially for the 3D modelling and animating work. My practical skills in this area are low. Maybe I start searching for interested people very soon.

Friedrich Kirchner uploaded a screen capture of his puppet play “Ein kleines Puppenspiel” which he realised with Unreal Tournament and his moviesandbox. He is working now on a standalone version of moviesandbox with OpenGL so it will be cross platform, open-source and you do not need a game anymore. Sounds promising.

So I posted some weeks ago that I moved from Unreal Engine 3 to the Source engine from Valve but this actually never happened because I was too busy writing the thesis. And then Epic updated Unreal Tournament 3 and there was tcplink from Unreal Tournament 2004 back again. So I believe it is possible to realise the concepts now with the Unreal Engine 3 and after I finished my thesis I will hopefully have some time to get more into the practical work with UE3.

Ok. I wanted to post rough version of some chapters but it seems like I am not going to … but anyhow the thesis has to be finished soon so there will be the whole thesis to look at at some point.

The focus changed a bit during the work on the thesis (this could already be seen in my abstract posted earlier). So I am not going to publish anything practical here anytime soon but only the academic work since that is nearly the only thing I worked on. It is much about the relationship between games and stories and how I want to combine them in a new way, much about machinima and a concept of the things I hopefully will do some day. But since the future after my graduation is pretty unclear at the moment I cannot make any prediction although I would really like to find some people which would like to cooperate in the realisation of the concepts. That would be good. I will work on this next month after I finished the academic work.

OK. It is more than one month since I started. But here is a screenshot of my current document. Alll the red stuff are ideas, notes and stuff like this. So its pretty much work in progress …

But I hope I can post a rough version of my first main chapter in one or two weeks. This chapter will be entirely about machinima: history, current state, up- and downsides, definition, … And I would be very happy if some people would find their way to my blog and comment the stuff whichI am going to post.

Actually it is not the first version, but the first version I will present here.

Two days ago I officially started my thesis. I have 4 months left now to finish. I cut almost all practical parts out because I realised that this would be too much for the time I have.

Here is the abstract I made for my professors:

Story and Game combined
Using machinima for interactive experiences

In my thesis I am going to introduce machinima and its history and techniques. Due to the possibilities of real time 3D I will propose to use the interactive potential of machinima. Furthermore I want to discuss the concepts behind the terms story, interactivity, game, machinima and interactive storytelling. This will lead me to the point where I suggest a new way of combining story with game-like elements in order to make use of the diversity in the field of combining stories and games.
Coming from this theoretical point of view I want to present three ideas for the use of interactive potential of machinima: an interactive installation, digital theatre and live cinema.
I will exemplarily develop the idea of an interactive installation to a more concrete description of the idea, a concept. This concept will use my idea of combining a story with game elements. To show the technical practicability I will make proof of concepts of the critical parts of this interactive installation.

Keywords: Machinima, Real time 3D, Virtual Environment, Interactivity, Mixed Reality, Story, Narrative, Dramaturgy, Game, Interactive Storytelling, Digital Theatre, Live Cinema

As I finally decided to make some tests with the UT3 engine I noticed that the UDPlink function from UT2k4 is not implemented in the new engine. But I will need something to communicate with the outside. So I took a look around again and evaluated the Source engine a little bit. So maybe I will not use UT3 but Source from Valve instead.

There are several plus-points to the Source engine:

• It seems that it is possible to communicate with the outside over UDP. There is a class called CBlockingUDPSocket which was pointed out to me by Dustin Hulm aka Teddy from the mod Dystopia. Thanks for that.
• I like the visual aesthetic of Team Fortress 2 as you can see in the machinima Ignis Solus. And hopefully there will be soon the opportunity to make mods with the new version of the Source engine. A beta update is already there. I am waiting for the final.
• It runs better on my notebook. My notebook is my primary tool for working.
• The Source engine is older than the Unreal Engine 3. This lead hopefully leads to more experienced users with it, more tutorials and lesser bugs.
• There seems to be a good documentation from Valve for the engine: Valve Developer Community

I already bought Orange Box and set up some stuff. Hopefully I will find the time to do some testing soon.

In the meanwhile I hope I can register/apply my thesis soon. To be able to do this I need to find a second supervisor/tutor.

I read a lot of books at the moment for my thesis and a came across a free version of one of them.

Steve Pool gives away his book Trigger Happy for free as a PDF under a Creative Common license at his website.

I think I will read it sometime soon because the content seems to be interesting:

Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics.