Byron's not-quite-professional space

The game is now in useable form.  Its not completely finished, but 98% of the features are in and I'm collecting data with it. After a long wait and much anticipation on my part (this might not have worked!), the data are very very nice.  The first set of conditioning parameters I tested worked very well with surprisingly clear learning curves, a bit of timing, and detectable context conditioning.  Considering that I found these without any parameter tweaking, I'm feeling very hopeful that the game is going to be an extremely robust method.   I'll have the other 2% of the features in soon.  I need two more models for my last two "contexts" & I'll have a video up of the final product and maybe a graph or two of data.   The final video will make it clear what the game is intended to do and how it does it.

The viewscreen is done, and it fits the bill perfectly.  I'll put up a screenshot & vid sometime later.  I have the sensors working, an error console for the user, and I've created the trial structure & have it working.  The game will read in a simple text file then begin cycling through inter-trial intervals and trial events.  It is really working out smooth.

I have to finish setting up some of the other outcomes (only works with one ship at the moment) then build the "magazine training" routine, add some instructions and it will be a useable product.  I'm shooting for this Friday &

do a test run on my colleagues Monday.

It has been some time since I updated this web log.    I very much need to create a proper web page with which I could more effectively control the layout and delivery of this blog info.   I plan to begin another to keep track of all my research, not just what I am doing toward getting this game-method finished.  I would also like to have a section where I can put up the code for some of the more interesting things I manage in the game for those of you who have expressed an interest in this or that effect.

If anyone can recommend a very (and I mean *very*) easy to use webpage design software package, I would appreciate hearing about it.  High level shader language & logic is much easier than the idiosyncrasies of wep design packages.   I generally like the "spaces" layout, but I would very much like to make the blog foldable into sections.

In the video game, I have solved the laserbolt problem (some time ago) and progressed quite a bit.  All the weapons function and are in what could be final form.  Weapon control and movement is done.  All the ships and their weapons are in final form.   All the shield effects are done. 

What is left is to:

1: Finish and incorporate the station models

A: get three from the fellow doing my difficult models

B: set them up & program their shields

2: Finish the view screen (get it, light it)

3: Finish the sensor panel

A: get the models

B: place the models

C: program the visual effects

D: program the sensor logic

4: Update my text handling routines to input data from text files & display on my popup instruction screen

5: Synchronize the voice instructions with the text instructions

6: Setup time handling routines to make the gameplay follow a general "trials" script.

Could be a little, could be a lot.  I am pretty sure though at this point it will be a little.  About a day on each should do it.

I have the Spanish Society for Comparative Cognition meeting coming up in Sept, and a series of talks to give in England in January.  I also have to finish up my "Guest Editor" work for Learning and Behavior where we're putting together a special section on Perceptual Learning.   I have a paper I need to write before mid October.... maybe I'll get the game done this year.  I seem to recall telling some grant agency that I'd do it....

Here is a video that shows the wireframe training context where the player learns to use each weapon against each particular enemy craft, then it progresses through each of the possible contexts where they might have to defend a station.  In those contexts, they will learn about the sensors on their panel and what they predict and use that information to effectively defend the stations.  It also demonstrates some basic gameplay.  The models are my designs and that of Andrew Crook, who created the models using Lightwave.

The next video "shows" some of the sounds I've got in the game so far.  The music is by Peter Clarke, who is making it for me, and the other effects are my creations or edits of soundsnap.com effects.

I'll be using this game for research in my work, and for fun I like to incorporate work into the game (such as the storyline described in an earlier blog).  I got carried away last night incorporating a diagram of one of Learning's most prominent theories (SOP & AESOP) into the game as a space station.

   Here is the diagram on the left, which those who have ever had a Uni course in Learning should recognize as a representation of SOP.

A couple of effects on which I was working came together in an impressive way... much better than I expected and I now have completed the AESOP station seen below.  I hope the resemblance is obvious.

I was backing up my stack of 3.5 floppys on my hard drive and got a big blast of nostalgia when I discovered the source code to my first video learning game.  I've located the source of my second, but I don't have a ready way to edit it and it will be looking for an analog joystick.  It also uses assembly language and I suspect windows will promptly kill it.  Here is a picture of the opening screen for the second, complete with my romulan warbird constructed in the POV scene language entirely with csg.

Intro screen to the Learning Game, ver 2

The first one, shown below, was written in Turbo Pascal.  It took some work with Dosbox and turbo pascal to get a new .exe that would run in Vista 64, but here it is.  This first figure shows the user shooting the Romulan who, of course, has a shield.

The next picture shows the Romulan shooting the user.

The game was written in turbo pascal using the BGI (borland graphics interface).  It ran in full glorious 640 x 480 resolution.  I drew the Romulan using a combination of lines and setpixels, then copied the image from the screen to a memblock and used it like a sprite from then on.  A portion of the stars in the background were animated.   

  Screens from the first learning game

Here is a screenshot of the third version of the game, written with Borland C++ builder 1 to run in windows.