Its not often these days that I post about games I have been playing, usually I leave that sort of stuff in the realms of Twitter or social networks.

For “From Dust” however ill make an exception. It’s also not often these days that I see some tech in a game and wonder to myself “how the hell did they do that?” or just “wow I have never seen that done before”. From Dust made me think both those things this week.

From Dust is a god game that follows in the heels of other god games such as Populus and Black and White. The reason why it has attracted my attention so much is the incredible tech that the game employs.

Check out this tech-demo / trailer for the game:

When I watched that earlier in the week I was amazed but skeptical that everything shown was actually how it was in game. After downloading and playing it on xbox this week however I can confirm that everything shown in the above video is in game and more. Not only that its actually fun!

The water flows from the top of the mountains realistically, over time it erodes the landscape to form rivers. Water pressure builds up need harder rock causing bends in the river that threaten your villages. You have to think ahead about how to divert a river one way but making sure not to flood an area downstream. More often than not it takes several tries to get it right.

Lava is great. Several missions have volcanoes that you must be swift to tame else they can easily threaten your villages. The great this however is that there are many ways you can choose to solve a particular problem.

You could just manually suck up all the lava and drop it somewhere else, a somewhat temporary solution. You could try to build a channel for the lava to follow however lava has a habit of melting through any channels you build. You could use one of the spells your villagers to supply to aid you. You could divert the course of a river to cool the lava as it nears your village. You could use a “water tree” to cool the oncoming flow of magma. The choice is yours.

I have been pondering over the tech and thinking how they managed to get such a complex liquid simulation to run in realtime. Infact, how they managed to get several complex liquid simulations to run in realtime. The sand, the water, the lava and the rock all act as liquids with different properties, however they all interact with each other in different ways. Not only is the liquid tech impressive, the vegetation propagation and the fire mechanics are all seamless, and from what I could tell not a single frame was dropped.

It must be a GPU based liquid simulation (particularly as the xbox CPU is weak), however I didn’t think they were good enough to do something like this. Perhaps they are using some optimized Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics such as that employed by Fairlight from the scene: http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/

Anyways, the game is available for download right now on xbox or if you are like me and are pc-inclined then it should be available on PC from the 17th of August.

The following is the offering by the ever excellent CNCD & Fairlight. I posted a particle-tastic video by them last year so if you like this sort of thing I strongly recommend that you check that out too.

Edit: Oh if you like the music on this video you should check out the artist album, its bloody fantastic! http://stereowildlife.co.uk/

Just thought I would share this little thing I was introduced to by a friend.

http://grantkot.com/MPM/Liquid.html

Its a liquid physics simulator written in Java.

Apparently its creator, Grant Kot has been playing around with particles for some time. Theres more of his work on youtube, here is one:

Pretty!

Edit: Didnt realise but this is the same guy that did Polluted Planet that I covered almost 3 years ago -> http://mikecann.co.uk/fun-videos/polluted-planet/ thats some awesome particle based dedication right there, I think I need to buy him a beer

If you enjoy gaming or know someone that enjoys gaming I cant encourage you enough to watch this video. Its quite long but I strongly encourage you stick with it till the end!

If you liked Day[9]‘s quirky style of humor of  or are interested in watching some more of his casts you should checkout either his Youtube channel or his BlipTV archive.

For those not in the know the demo scene or “scene” is where a team of people come together and compete to make a music video. Except that they arent videos in the traditional sense as its all generated using code and runs in realtime. This means that you have to be super efficient with your code. Some of the competitions are “64k” or even “4k” competitions which means that the whole demo must fit in 64kb or 4kb! The music is also produced by the groups and often excellent.

I have been checking out some of the demos produced by the teams this year and they are simply stunning. Every year they get better and better.

This one from CNCD and Fairlight particularly caught my eye as it has massive numbers of particles and a stunning soundtrack kinda reminiscent of glitchy Radiohead. Therefore I thought it essential I share it here.

Enjoy:

Oh while im at it check out this one from last year:

If you are interested in more demos from assembly you can get them all here: http://scene.org/newfiles.php?dayint=7&dir=/parties/2010/assembly10/

Oh I have also posted about the demoscene before here: http://mikecann.co.uk/art/andromeda-software-development-lifeforce-2007/

Firstly its an impressive video showing how easy it is to intercept 80% of the worlds calls with just $1,500 worth of equipment. Also the source article over on Venture Beat says that he can also jam a band preventing calls just as easily which is quite scary.

The second reason why this video caught my eye is it appears that this brit-hacker is wearing high-heels throughout his presentation, check it out:

I used to spend hours and hours playing the custom maps released with Warcraft III, I still log in every now and then to check out how its going and am suprised every time to see people still making new maps. Some of the most popular game genres in existence today wouldn’t be around if it wasnt thanks to be map making community in WC3. Genres such as Tower Defence (TD) and Defence of The Ancients (DOTA) were born there.

So it made me extremely happy to see this video on YouTube showing that yes custom maps are possible in SC2 and yes you can make TDs with them, horaay!

Its a a physics engine called Lagoa and its by Thiago Costa, check it out:

Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 – Teaser from Thiago Costa on Vimeo.

I can only assume that things have gone whoops during the various moves this site has had over the years.

So over the course of the next week or so im going to go back through and fix all my old posts and make sure everything is working again. I would greatly appreciate it if you could drop me a comment or an email if you see any post that is still broken and ill take a look at it. Cheers!

I have started by uploading a load of my old videos to Youtube and Vimeo (stupid YT 10min limit).

If you are interested I have included them all below the jump: