3D Computer Graphics – Blog Post Week 03 – Part 2

This week we were asked to chose a model from a museum in Visby that we were then asked to replicate in 3D using a specific theme as a reference. After a brief tour of the museum and some general background on the items that were on display there we were asked to take photos for later reference, we were also asked to get some information about the object that we ultimately chose.
I chose this knife as my model:

The reason why I have chosen to model this knife was that I have never gotten around to model one before. I have always wanted to model a knife, and now that I had a chance, I took it. I think that this knife has a very interesting look to it. It has a very comfortable amount of detail to it, perfect for this assignment. I especially like the hilt because i believe it is what gives the knife it’s character.

During the Nordic seven-year war, where Poland, Denmark and Lübeck went to war against Sweden, a danish fleet of Lubeckian ships were headed for Gotland.
This knife is believed to have belonged to a Danish admiral who perished in a devastating storm outside the port of Visby on the night of July 28, 1566. The storm brought down 14 warships and somewhere between 6000 and 8000 men within hours. The dagger itself is made of silver and is used as a sign of honor.

I will try to model this knife as if it could exist in Skyrim i.e. make this as close to the original as possible, there will off course be deviations but i’m going to try at least. I’m also going to try and emphasize the age of the knife, it’s old and i’m going to try and keep it that way. There are inscriptions on the hilt of the knife which i will definitely keep as I think it helps convey the knifes significance and status. Since I’m trying to keep it as close to the original as possible I’m not going to leave any of the detail out.

Some of the things I’m going to try and avoid are making the knife too large or too shiny.
Even though it belonged to a great Danish warrior it doesn’t have to mean that it has to be unnecessarily large or shiny.

One might think that warriors of that specific time and age (1500 – 1550 ) fought with weapons much less sophisticated than the knife I’m going to model. By making it as close as the original as possible, maybe I could prove some of the general misconceptions wrong.

There are always risks with modeling something with a reference, especially when you aim for a result that’s as close to the original as possible. I believe the risks associated with modeling this knife apart from straying too far from it’s original design is the risks you would face in any other modeling process, overlapping faces / vertices, open edges, ngons, multiple edges / vertices and so on.

3D Computer Graphics – Blog Post Week 03 – Part 1

This week we were asked to get into groups and try to optimize each others crates that we had been working on lately. Through the use of 3DS Max’s xView you can locate some of the common problems that can arise when modeling in 3D. Some of the things we have learned to correct are overlapping faces and vertices and how to make sure polygons consisting of more than 4 faces are taken care of.

Since none of my original teammates was present during the model-correctional exercise I was put in a different group that already had 2 models each to correct. That resulted in me taking two of their crates for correction and instead of me writing about what they had done to my crates I was told to write what I did to theirs. In this blog post I will also include a brief description of what I did to improve one of my own crates.

Viktor’s sci-fi crate:

Viktor’s crate was near perfect from the start. It had none of the problems we were taught to look for and aside from removing a very small amount of edges that wasn’t necessary to uphold the structure of the model itself, I couldn’t find anything to improve.

Ahmad’s Medieval crate:

First of this model had some problems with overlapping faces. To correct this issue I simply moved the face that was causing this problem a bit to make sure that the edge of the face didn’t overlap with the face right next to it.

My next step with this crate was to fix the overlapping vertices. What I did was to quite simply weld them together.

I also noticed a kind of distortion around the large faces on the side of the crate, it turns out that there were way to many edges there which served no particular function which gave the face a distorted look. The last thing i did with this model was to eliminate all the unnecessary edges and give the thing a thorough clean up.

My own Sci-fi crate

My model had 1900 triangles, problems with open faces and overlapping vertices.
The first step I took towards cleaning up my model to weld the open faces and correct any edges that became crooked because of the welding. When I had welded open faces together and corrected the overlapping vertices I started removing excess edges. When I had thoroughly cleaned up my model I started adding edges where needed in order to correct ngons.

And here is the final result.

Next time I model I will take my time and make sure that things are properly attached before moving on. The middle part of my crate was created using a separate object, part of the reason why is that i didn’t have a well thought out plan for what to do with my model and if i had to do it again I imagine the process will be much less complex. Because i didn’t know what i was going for I couldn’t plan ahead as much as I would have wanted to.

Board game analysis: Stratego

This is a review of the board game Stratego, the classic boardgame of battlefield strategy. I will look into the game’s best and worst sides and I will take a look at the game’s core mechanics and I will try to interpret the game’s target audience. I will also choose one of the game systems that I found to be the game’s most interesting.

Stratego is a bit like chess except you don’t know which pieces are which on the other side. Each player has 40 pieces that represent soldiers, with ranks from Scout to Marshall (1 – 10). The object is to capture the opponent’s flag or make them surrender. In the event of no movable pieces for a player, the opponent is the winner, though part of the challenge is actually figuring out where the flag is.

Amongst the ranks of soldiers, there are four specialty units. The Scout is one of the weakest players in the game, but can move over many squares, as long as the movement is in a straight line. And the squares he moves over are vacant. Most players send Scouts out to battle early in the game to find out the ranks of the opponent due to their movement capabilities. The bomb is an immobile object that, once the game starts, must stay in position. If attacked by anyone, except the miner, the attacking piece is automatically defeated. The Miner is also a weak piece (just edging out the Scout) but his strength lies in the fact that he is the only troop on the battlefield that can attack bombs, thus disarming them. The last, and sneakiest, of the units is the Spy. The Spy is the weakest piece out of all, but he is the only piece in the game that can kill the top ranked unit, the Marshall. The trick is that for the Spy to kill the Marshall, the Spy as to initiate the attack. If the Spy is attacked at any time, including from the Marshall, he automatically is removed from the game.

Typically, one player uses red pieces, and the other uses blue pieces. Pieces are colored on both sides, so players can easily distinguish between their own and their opponent’s. Ranks are printed on one side only and placed so that players cannot identify specific opponent’s pieces. Each player moves one piece per turn. If a piece is moved onto a square occupied by an opposing piece, their identities are revealed; the weaker piece is removed from the board. If the weaker piece was the attacker that piece is removed from the board; if the attacker is the stronger piece, it will remove the weaker piece and occupy its square. If the engaging pieces are of equal rank, both are removed. Pieces may not move onto a square already occupied unless it attacks. Two zones in the middle of the board, each 2×2, cannot be entered by either player’s pieces at any time. They are shown as lakes on the battlefield and serve as choke points to make frontal assaults less direct.

Best sides:

Stratego is easy to pick up and play, it has a very short play time which I personally appreciate. The game features a simple set of rules but there are many things that you can abide by in order to be a better player, for example bluffing. Bluffing can be a great help when playing Stratego, for my first match I didn’t quite know where to place my different pieces and my setup was rather close to random. On my other playthrough however, I started to realize that I could trick my opponent into believing things that weren’t true, the location of my flag for example.
I choose a random low level character as my fake flag and all I needed to do was keep it stationary, since you are not allowed to move the flag, thus fooling my opponent into thinking that it was my flag. In reality I had kept my flag in the same location I used for our previous match. And that is just one of the things that make me like this game so much.

Worst sides:

I do not have much to say on this part, there isn’t much that struck me as bad and less that actually was worth mentioning. I will say however, that if I have to mention something bad it would be the fact that there are many, maybe too many pieces to set up which takes time.
I also wonder if all the pieces are necessary to play. At the end of all our games of Stratego we’ve played, both me and my opponent have had several low level characters left,  that we never even moved, this leads me to believe that maybe these aren’t as useful as the game make them out to be. And therefore I would like to try and cut down on the numbers of some of the low level characters and see what that does to the gameplay.

Core mechanics:

I would say that this games core mechanics are moving, attacking and planning.
Every troop piece, with the exception of the Scout, can only move one square at a time. During a player’s turn they can either move a piece or attack.
Attacking is as easy as getting adjacent to an opposing troop and placing your piece over theirs. The players declare what rank each piece is, and the higher rank wins and the losing piece is removed from the game. Stratego also involves a lot of strategy. I will list the most basic ones that I used when playing here. One of the most commons strategies in Stratego is the actual placing of your pieces. You want to place your pieces so that your flag is well protected, but you want to place them in a fashion that leads your opponent to believe it’s someplace else. You also want to place your stronger pieces so that they are available for attack (don’t place behind a cluster of bombs or all the way in the back).
Another important strategy is to try and analyze the way your opponent is moving his or her pieces, in order to find out their rank. For example if your one of your opponents pieces has remained stationary for most of the game you can assume that it’s either a bomb or his or her flag. Then there is the placement of your special pieces. Take the spy for example, you need to consider its placement carefully, place it to far forward and it’s more likely to be captured early on. Placing it too far back may make it inaccessible when your opponents Marshal’s identity is revealed. All these things are off course up to you as a player.

Most interesting system:

I would say that the trickery and bluffing is the most interesting system. I reckon this could be described as a risk / rewards system. To me, this system is what makes this game interesting. Some of the tricks you can pull are:

Placing a cluster of bombs to fool your opponent into thinking that your flag is hidden there, since placing bombs near your flag is a common strategy.

If a Marshal wins a battle (and is thus revealed), and the opponent immediately moves a piece near his or her back row, the player with the just-revealed Marshal may assume that this piece is the Spy when, in fact, the Spy may be several spaces away (and already close to the Marshal.) This is a common tactic as it may cause the Marshal to move next to the Spy, allowing the Spy to attack first.

A player could threaten a known high-ranking piece (such as the Colonel) with an unrevealed low-ranking piece (perhaps a Sergeant) to convince the opponent to retreat.

These are just some of the things you could do to trick your opponent and get the upper hand in the game.

Target audience:

The target group according to the makers of the game itself says ages 8 and up. I agree but also think that you could go as low as maybe 7 or 6 years old. The only really necessary thing that players need to know in order  to play this game is basic math for when comparing the ranks of the pieces attacking each other  and technically since you could win this game on pure luck I think 6 year olds could play this game without difficulty.

Summary:

All in all I think Stratego was a great game.  It’s a game with rules so simple you’ll understand them fully the first time you play, and yet so open to strategy and cleverness that you’ll never play the same game twice. With its fast setup and addictive play style, it’s the kind of game you find yourself playing twenty rounds of when you only wanted to play one or two. Then there are several elements that help this game stand out and make it less like ordinary chess and more like the strategy board game it really is. First off, this game has a memory type element to it, if the player attacks one of his opponent’s pieces randomly, his or her opponent must then reveal the rank of that piece and this gives you a chance to memorize the location of that piece.  There is a great deal of trickery involved in this game as well.  As stated before, the player can use the position of his unused pieces to fool his opponent into thinking that it is in fact his or her flag.

3D Computer Graphics: Blog Post Week 2

Theme one:

The theme sci-fi can easily be described as futuristic. When someone says sci-fi I immediately think of star wars. Shiny ships with ion engines and lots and lots of dashboards with blinking light.
Sci-fi basically points to the idea of science and inventions that have not yet been developed.

Image 1: Eve online.

I think this image represents the theme sci-fi pretty accurately. The image depicts a space ship mid-flight. The ship is very high tech and although we have somewhat perfected space travel we are a long way from that type of technology.

Image 2: Halo 4

This image is of “Master Chief” , a cyberneticaly augmented human with heightened strength and perception. He is wearing a combat armor with built in support for advanced tactical AI’s. Although this technology has been discussed in military circles it has never been achieved and as with the spaceships from Eve Online, the technology is well outside our reach.

My Sci-fi crate.

For my first theme I choose sci-fi. My reference was mainly a Borderlands 2 “Hyperion chest”.
This chest follows the structure of the aforementioned model as it is wide and long. I imagined it as a chest with two side compartments that will open at the same time as the main compartment. The opening itself will be the two blocks of the main compartment sliding apart but I haven’t gotten around to modeling the inside and animating the opening sequence.

Theme two:  Medieval

The theme medieval doesn’t have to have a detailed introduction.  A medieval chest is basically a chest from the middle ages. When I chose that theme and decided to make a chest using medieval as a visual style I did a quick Google image search with the keywords “medieval” and “chest” and got a myriad of images of chest from that particular point in time.

Image 1: Chivalry

This image depicts a knight, possibly fighting in the holy crusade. One thing that defines “medieval” in this picture is the obvious religious symbols on the knights helmet.

My second chest was supposed to be a medieval chest. I was going for something a little nicer than the ordinary chest. A chest you might want to keep valuable items in. The design is what you would expect from a European-medieval chest, it has a rounded top and stands on 4 legs. Of course I tried not to make the base model to detailed since I think that is best done with texturing.

Theme 3:

Post apocalyptic as a theme can be explained as “after the apocalypse” when everything is destroyed, often by a war or something in the likes of that scenario.  Some common sights when playing a post-apocalyptic game is destroyed cars riddled with rust, burnt down houses and debris everywhere.

Image 1: Fallout 3.

This game serves as an excellent example of post-apocalyptic. The setting is Washington DC and its surrounding areas. Everything is completely destroyed by an atomic war between the United States and the Chinese.

My third theme is post-apocalyptic. Quite frankly I chose this theme because I’ve played a lot of post-apocalyptic games.

My post apocalyptic crate:

For this crate I decided to go for your run of the mill wooden crate. The design is simple since yet again the details is in the textures. If I get around to applying a texture to it, I plan to make the wood look cracked with rusted nails in them, maybe give it a crooked build and basically make it look old and wrecked.

Summary:

I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise as it helped me define what I was creating. Part of me learning how to model in 3D has been to just cerate random shapes and every now and again a house. I’ve recently started working on an ”Iron Man” styled power armor for Batman but this was among the first times I’ve ever opened 3DS max actually knowing what I wanted to create.  It’s hard to actually make an object look like it could fit into the visual styles of pots-apocalyptic or medieval without adding a considerable amount of detail and if you’re not going to texture your model, which is the case with two of them, it’s kind of hard to define the objects characteristics.

Board Game Analysis – Carcassonne

This is an analysis of the board game Carcassonne, in this post I will examine some of the good things about this game but also some bad. I will take a look at the games core systems and how they interact with each other. I will also look into the game’s target audience and the reasoning behind it.

The game of Carcassonne is based on an actual French city with heavily fortified walls. Players take the roles of founders of the area and their ultimate goal is to move in on the terrain. There are elements of strategy and luck, which makes for a diversified game experience. The game can be described as a mix of puzzle building along with elements of strategy, all while trying to claim territory.

Here are some of the things that I think made the game worthwhile to play.

The game is very social and does very well when played with more than 3 people. It’s very easy to learn and no one can be eliminated. Also it doesn’t take long to get a grip of the games rules. Because of the fact that many tiles that the players use to extend roads, cities and monasteries are faced down on the table there is always a feeling of suspense when it’s your turn to draw. Another good thing is that since there are so many different pieces of land or city in the game the end results almost never look the same as it did the last time.

There were some negative things that I would like to point out.

One thing that struck me as sort of a negative trait was in fact the name Carcassonne. I’d doesn’t say anything to me and it doesn’t describe the game in any way, if I saw this game sitting in a store shelf, it wouldn’t look at it twice.

Core systems.

Creating long segments of road, building large cities or farms gains points. At the end of the game, when there are no tiles remaining, all incomplete features are scored. Points are awarded to the players with the most followers in a feature. If there is a tie for the most followers in any given feature, all of the tied players are awarded the full number of points. In general, points are awarded for the number of tiles covered by a feature; cloisters score for neighboring tiles; and field’s score based on the number of abutting completed cities.

Your objective is to gather points and move up the scoreboard, the player with the most points in the end is the winner. When it’s your turn you get to draw a card that is face down on the table. On each players turn, they will place a new tile onto the table and connect them to other pieces already on the board.

The core game systems are divided into several steps:

Step one:

Players will draw a tile from a pile and each tile will feature one of these three. They can be green farmland, a rustic road, or a medieval city. Players will then have to decide on where to place this tile on the board. Players cannot just randomly place the tile anywhere. They must attach to any previously played tile and must match all sides to place the tile. The other feature will be a cloister/monastery that is located in the middle of the tile. Each one of these landscapes can build on to places the player has followers on or gives options for players to put their followers in the next step.

Step two:

During this phase, a player may place one of their followers from their supply on to any of the 4 possible land types on the tile they just played. If they take one of these spots in the farmland, road, city, or cloister the follower now takes the role of a farmer, thief, knight or a monk. These followers will remain on that tile until the road, city or cloister is completed. The farmer will stay on the board until the end of the game. The one catch with playing a follower is that no other player’s followers can be on the same connected land type, even yours. For instance, if you attach a piece that connects to a city segment, you can’t place a follower in the city if another knight is already in that city. Part of the strategy of tile placement is to place tiles that allow you to later connect with larger roads, cities and farmland.

Step three:

All the types of land above can be completed before the game ends. Players receive a point for each tile that is used to complete the road. The city tiles form a completed city when the segments are fully surrounded by a city wall. The player that has the majority of followers in that city they gain two points per tile. Once all areas around the monastery tile are filled, the player receives nine points. Players can gain points on other players turns if that player completes any of the features above. Every time you or another player complete one of these segments, you gain the follower back into your reserves. It’s a balancing act to keep enough followers in your supply and try to put as many tiles as possible on each segment to gain the most points.

When the last tile has been played, all uncompleted segments of road, city and cloisters are counted. Farms values are determined at the end of the game. Farms are separated by cities and roads on the game board. This is one of the more confusing parts of the game. It takes a decent amount of explaining to make sure people understand how these are scored. Once the owner of each farm is established they gain 3 points for every completed city that borders the farm.

Players need to decide if they should finish one of their cities and gain the points or place it next to another city to attempt to steal some points from another player by placing one of their followers on the others players city.

There are several elements of this game that spoke to me, here is one of them.

When picking up a card the most logical move is to try to extend your own city or road, but there are other things you can do. Carcassonne allows two or more players to compete over control over cities and if you just picked up a city piece that doesn’t go anywhere on your own establishments there are several choices for you to make. You could either extend your own city, thus requiring you to find more pieces that fit in order to complete it. Or you can start a new city and place another follower there (if you have any left). Or you can choose to extend another players city and either place one of your own followers there and try to elbow your way into the points that can be earned there or simply extending it delaying his or hers chance of finishing that city and collect points for it. When you add a piece onto one of your opponents establishments the option to add one of your own followers in order to try to take points away from your opponent seems like an easy choice. But you have to keep in mind that you do have a limited number of followers at your disposal and if your next card turns out to be a monastery, being stuck with no followers is a real bad thing. Basically this game requires you to make the best of the situation. There is a substantial luck component to the game; however, good tactics greatly improve one’s chances of winning.

Target audience

I would say that this game is fun for both children and adults. For children the ”farmers” could be a little too complex, due to the fact that you need to plan ahead quite far, but the game works very well without that element.

The target age is 8 – 12 years, which is quite fair since there are some things that require some knowledge take the score for example: Each segment of city is 2 points + 2 additional points for each pennant during gameplay and 1 point per tile and tenant at game end. This makes for a pretty elaborate calculation when tallying the score and I think that some mathematical skills are needed.

Summary

Overall I enjoyed Carcassonne, the game was very easy to pick up and play, there weren’t a whole lot of complicated rules to abide to and since there aren’t any player eliminations and since the game relies largely on chance and luck (getting the right cards) I would say this was an excellent beginners game.

After reading some reviews of the game online it would seem that this game is considered a so called “gateway game” that is used to introduce new board game players. Since each turn is composed of three parts: Pick up / place tile, place follower, and try to finish segments of road, cities or place a monastery, there are no long waiting periods when other players make their moves, which makes replayability an option. And because of the relatively short play time there’s room for more playthroughs, and every round has a different ending due to the many different tiles and the fact that the tiles you get are random.

To summarize: great game, not too long, not too short. Not too complex, not too simple.