Chaos Love: love, life, design and more.

I was a little surprised the other day when Christine brought home a new computer game for us to play. Christine's not much of a gamer, thinking that everything since Super Mario Bros 3 has been unworthy of her efforts. However, the concept and potential of this new game had her itching to try it out. The game? Spore.

The only way you couldn't have heard of Spore is if you've been hiding under a rock or have negative interest in games, your brain actively repelling all the hype that's been thrown at you about it. Basically, it's the ultimate God game - in the vein of, but far surpassing, all the "Sim"-type games that have been around since Populous and the original Sim City. You start the game with a single celled creature and evolve it all the way into a space-conquering civilisation.

The game isn't perfect by any means - it's more like five completely separate yet increasingly complex mini-games than a continuous narrative, and a lot of the gameplay is either far too simple or repetitive. I'm not even going to get into the whole storm about copy-protection that's blown up around the game's release, as it hasn't affected me at all. Where the game really shines is in its total customisation abilities. You get to shape pretty much everything about your creature (and later on, their cities, vehicles, planes, ships and spaceships). Think your creature would look good with five heads? Maybe eyes on its knees? Eight legs? Whatever you can think of, it's possible. There's something strangely addictive about creating your own monsters and then watching them interact with other strange beasts, all of which have been created by other people around the world.

So while Spore isn't a multi-player game as such (there's no direct head-to-head competition with other human players), the game is a veritable menagerie of creatures, constantly changing as new creations are uploaded by players around the world. That's what keeps it interesting and fresh - getting to see what other people are doing with the amazing God-like tools contained within the game.

Here's a couple of our creatures as a sample. We've only been playing for a week or so and still have so much to learn about how to make truly unique creatures, but at least we've gotten past our initial, "oh look, I've made a dinosaur!" phase.

Posted in: chaosboy, computers, games on September 24, 2008 at at 8:41:00 PM 0 comments    

I think it's fair to say that I've done a fair bit of travelling - all over Europe, New Zealand a couple of times, different parts of Australia and my new explorations of The Land Of The Free™. And it goes without saying that I like to take photos of my adventures. Now the perfect thing would be able to place my pictures on a map of the world, to show exactly where I've clicked my shutter and exposed film or sensor to light.

Flickr has a very basic "Map This Photo" function built in, but this has always been unsatisfactory for me. For starters, Flickr's map (built using Yahoo! Maps) has always been woeful, with a strange way of organising pictures that seems to have no rhyme or reason. Then there's also the fact that only the version on my photo that is resident on Flickr has the geotags (latitude and longitude data) saved, not the version that I have on my computer.

So I started looking around at alternatives that could help me. Ovolab's Geophoto seemed promising, with iPhoto integration and a nice clean interface, but the resolution of the maps was next to useless, especially for adding geotags. I'm not one of those people who just say my photos were taken in such and such a city, I like to position my photos on the exact spot I was standing when I took the shot.

App4Life's RapidoMap was similarly disappointing, with a terribly complicated way of adding location data to your photos. It also lost points for changing its name from the far more charming Magrathea, a beautiful Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in-joke.

I was about to give up, when I remembered that I had a fantastically detailed mapping system already available on my computer, the truly gorgeous Google Earth. Surely there had to be some way to leverage all of Google's mapping know-how to do what I needed? And as it turned out, there was! The rather boringly named – but free – Geotagger simply allows you to find a location in Google Earth, then drag-n-drop JPGs onto the application to add all the geodata into the JPGs EXIF metadata. Neat!

The next step was to find a way to get these newly geo-savvy JPGs to show up in Google Earth itself. And once again Google itself came to the rescue, with its newly acquired Panoramio website. You simply upload all your location-aware images to Panoramio, and it submits them to Google Earth. Eventually, images that meet their guidelines can actually be viewed by anyone using Google Earth using the Panoramio layer, but you can always find your own images in your personal copy of Google Earth by using a personalised .kml file. Perfect! If I felt like it, I could even add locations in Google Earth so that it could "fly" me along the route of, say, my European backpacking trip. Images can also be viewed on a map directly on the Panoramio website. Be warned though, geotagging and uploading all your photos can take some time – it's a good thing I'm a patient person with a lot of spare time on my hands!

For those that would like to look at my handiwork, this is my Panoramio user page, where you can also download my Google Earth/Panoramio .kml file (works with Google Earth 4 and higher). Look at Sydney, Portland and Europe for the most photos. Enjoy!

Posted in: chaosboy, computers, geotagging, photography on December 12, 2007 at at 8:15:00 PM 0 comments