pouët.net

I'm hardly a scholar of interactivity, but it strikes me that in any interactive artwork or game one of the marks of skill is being able to introduce restrictions without the user feeling constrained, so as to shape the user's experience so that they are more likely to experience what you want them to experience.

This is also why I appreciate the intelligent use of form in poetry, which can also be a mathematical and technical art in its odd way, but an expostulation on that subject would be out of place here. And I'm far less qualified to do so than nom de nom (a NA scener most of you likely don't know, it suddenly occurs to me, but anyway . . .)

re Garg:
Didn't play all the way through the tutorial, but the flavor text on Pixel Zen was marvelous. Consistent tone, even a sense of character. ( :

re wysiwtf:
From what little I know, it does seem that many games nowadays are built with the popular sandbox model in mind, perhaps partially because then there may be less writing to do, and also perhaps because giving the player a sense of freedom means that they'll take longer to finish the game and one does not have to work as hard on either padding the game or actually making it difficult for players more practised than say, me, or scaling the difficulty increases in a sane way. Although of course there is the venerable method of scattering save points to make the game last longer as well.
Perhaps interactive fiction, both the classics and celebrated more recent works, might serve as a model for a sandbox world where plot is still paramount, or a puzzle world where story still comes through.

For some reason I find myself thinking of Dual Transform [url]http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/dual/[url]

Back to WebGL, what I found nifty about it wasn't just "wow this stuff is happening in a browser" but "wow, I'm less daunted by the prospect of developing for a browser, as a n00b." It is irritating when people get all excited about something that isn't that awesome because they don't know about the really awesome stuff people are doing otherwise.

And yeah, celebrity shine (re Lights) so encourages press slavering. :P

I forgot that one of the keys on my laptop is broken. Here is that url, now that I have pasted to make up for that keystroke.

http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/dual/

and clarification, what I mean by "as a n00b" is that the first remotely technical stuff I ever did was in a browser (I'm not counting playing with Paintworks Plus or HyperStudio or Painter or whatever else as a kid and teen because that isn't technical).

Word.


Maybe you're right.

But for sure, outside the demoscene, web-demos have a bigger audience than windows-demos).


(Gargaj>of course Cortex is not meant to be interactive, my point was more it may not be that far from what a non-demoscene audience could like, style-wise.)

I am close to think "interactivity == able to move the camera" is a misconception and a mistake. Like some pointed already directing includes careful care of the camera to guide the viewer's eye (so on this matter I completely second Gargaj that doing that for Cortex sous vide would be nothing but trying to make the cube fit in the round hole with a hammer).

Though I can think of two examples where this kind of interactivity worked, namely the introduction in the game Half-Life and the citadel flyby in the end of Half-Life 2. Both are just shows where the player can do nothing but look around, and it worked pretty well.

Does a web demo necessarily have to be interactive?

And it strikes me that fill in the blank (like Gloom's example) is a better example of controlled randomness, because it seems to me that if you don't control *something*, then the result is just noise.

One interesting question that folks asked at nearly every presentation on kb's tour here was whether Elevated looked the same every time (and not always after he mentioned the Perlin noise).

Actually, I think it's the same for Windows demo (~= demos should me more interactive), but in the case of web demos it's more obvious since the access is easier, you may reach other people than your typical , demoscene audience, ...

BTW we have :
- user interaction (restricted camera moving like in HL, restricted game, ...)
- datavisualisation (personnalized data, or live datas, like news feeds - or even the date/time)
- randomness
- ???

Also, webGL is not the only new interesting playground : mobile phones (w/ restricted hardware and bw), consoles (Nintendo DualScreen, Kinect, ...).

"Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices." --Roger Ebert

Do THIS with WebGL, make it 3D so the planes altitudes can be visualised, etc etc

Yeah, already thought of that. If only they served they data in JSONP or with CORS.

So why the hell did you ask me if ive seen your talk then? And if you don't know anything about this piece of crap please don't try and act as you do.

Maybe availability matters. It's relatively harder to see a scene demo the way it was intended to be seen, while watching the Javascript GC stop the world is cheap and easy.

There's a reason captures are useful for outreach.

And web demos could also be useful for outreach.

The important thing isn't the medium, in the end . . . it is how you approach it.

Now, medium and message can be related, yes. But media that seem ill-adapted to art perhaps haven't been explored in the proper way yet. Who knows.

And I agree with Garg's Ebert quote, although I disagree with Ebert (and for that matter Moriarty) about whether games can be art. (Which is rich coming from someone who used to think that games were evil time wasters which sapped peoples energy for worthwhile things. IF changed my mind. Well, Garg, and that, and some GAMBIT projects. )

i agree with smorgasbord!

I'm sorry. I'm afraid you misunderstood me, I didn't ask anything to you.

invitation demo with interactivity made 14 years ago: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=4070 this totally flushes the Lights demo down the drain.

Ironically enough, the webgl API looks very much like the much despised opengl2 with shader model 3 restricted shaders in some ways, to avoid infinite loops that hang the gpu and create a "security threat". The functions are absolutelly trivial entry points when you know opengl. Well, in the end, it means i haven't been doing so much opengl for nothing, if that tech picks up on the web. :)

wait and see.

trace: saw you (and that google falling physics thing) in the metro this morning - congrats! :)

nystep: Could it be because WebGL is actually a JS bindings of OpenGL ES 2.0 ? NAaaaaaaah.

smash: hehe! thanks! :)

WebGL should be an higher level thing, with fixed functionality IMO. It's so strange to use those casts to floats or shorts in javascript when javascript doesn't have explicit types.

xernobyl: there are some mailing list out there where sharing such opinions would be more... uhm, relevant? we can't do anything about that here.