Last month, my dad visited me from Thailand for a couple weeks, and I had the pleasure of eating the most amazing Thai food while he was here. I had nearly forgotten how awesome of a cook he is since I haven’t had his cooking in years. Doctors Hyperbolus and Echo Bloom came over for my birthday and had the privelege of trying some too, so they can vouch for the tastiness. It’s better than any Thai restaurant around (and I’m not just saying that because he’s my dad). Anyway, he showed me how to cook a handful of Thai dishes before he left which I’ve been working on perfecting. And now, I’m gonna share one of my favorites: Panang Curry. Making this dish isn’t complicated at all and you’ll be surprised at what will come out of your kitchen (besides the gas).

The Ingredients:

• Panang Curry Paste (4 Tbsp or 2 oz)
• Coconut Milk (half can – about 6oz)
• Fish Sauce (2 Tbsp)
• Sugar (about 2 tsp)
• Pepper
• Veggies
• Thai Chilies
• Garlic
• Chicken (optional)

You can find Panang Curry paste at most Asian markets and possibly even at your favorite local grocery store. I get mine at a Thai market in Thai Town. Also, my dad told me that Maesri is the best brand and what I have here comes in a 4oz can. For this recipe, we’ll use half the can. You can also pick up coconut milk anywhere but I’ve found it to be much cheaper at the Asian markets. Look for it to be less than a dollar. Anyway, let’s get started…

Start off by cranking your burner up to 11… err high. Thai food is cooked very fast and on high. As my dad says, “It’s stir fry, not stir boil.” Just pour some vegetable oil into your wok or saute pan and when it’s hot, toss in some chicken and garlic.

Meanwhile, finish dicing all of your veggies. I used onions, green/red bell peppers, and zucchini. Make your cuts pretty large so the veggies won’t cook too fast because you want them crispy. You can leave your Thai chilies whole and just beat them with the back of the knife (I finely sliced one of them for extra spice).

Once the chicken is almost done, toss in the vegetables that will take longer to cook. For me, that’s everything except the zucchini.

Let that cook for a little bit… shouldn’t take but a few minutes. Remember, you want your vegetables to remain crispy but cooked. Once everything is almost done, add in your Panang Curry paste, coconut milk, fish sauce, sugar, pepper, and a tad bit of water. Also, throw in your remaining fast-cooking veggies.

Let that finish up for a couple minutes and give it a taste test. You want to find a happy equilibrium between spicy, sweet, sour, and salty flavors. Once you’re happy with it, throw it over some rice. And don’t forget to use the best Thai rice: jasmine rice.

Anyway, I’ve got a few more recipes I’ve been practicing which include Tom Ka Kai soup, Thai Basil Chicken, Cashew Chicken, and Pad Thai. Just lemme know in the comments if you’d like me to continue adding recipes in the future. And let me know how your curry turns out, too!

(Also for all you vegans out there, I don’t know what to do to substitute fish sauce. I guess you could try soy sauce, but you may end up with a little different flavor. Or maybe just use salt.)

Live

Guess nobody had the balls to step up to last week’s challenge. Tha’s OK…I did one for ya.

Mixed -LIVE- in Ableton, so it’s a little sloppy. Enjoy.

http://vodpulse.com/misc/bring-em-down-dnb.mp3

There’s also some new business happening over here, but it isn’t done yet. Seems to be the status on every single project I’ve got flying around my head right now…

Wading through the mind

Always searching for MORE time

I am… Thunderstruck

You've been....

Megaton Trigger takes place in a futuristic, cyberpunk version of New York, where megaconglomerates secretly control the government entities while even larger relgious factions police the actions of the megaconglomerates…if that makes any sense.  Cybernetics are a commonplace amongst the people, yet hard-wired surgical implants, prosthetics and  are slowly being replaced by wet-wired devices called Runes.  Runes and Runic replacements can serve a number of functions such as bolstering human strength, increasing an individual’s agility, or even expanding ones brain functions and capacities.  Since the devices were wet-wired, they could be easily removed and replaced without any potential damage to the user, unlike older cybernetic implants and prosthetics that could cause further irreparable damage if improperly removed.  The Runes themselves were originally created for the agents of the various religious bodies that are supposed to be providing world security.  Economical versions of the technology soon became public.  There are a number of policing religious entities all over the globe, however there are only a few that hold the largest spheres of influence, yet are all ultimately vying for total control.  One of the largest factions, The Order of the Prodigous Hammer, or the OPH, has uncovered a powerful pre-cyberage relic of a time long since passed.  An old, giant cannon-construct that is capable of vaporizing cities in an instant: The Megaton Ballista.  For years, the OPH has kept the site of the Ballista sealed from the rest of the world however the other rival factions have seen through the veil of deception and have their eyes set of the relic as well.  The other factions that share the shaky balance of power with the Order of the Prodigious Hammer; The Order Vehement Blade, and The Order of the Magnaminous Flail; have sent their agents to claim the site and continue the research of the cannon and how to actuate the possibly world ending weapon.

During the course of the storyline, we come across a fourteen year-old electronic scribe, or an E-Scribe named Randall Faris, that has been performing research on the Megaton Ballista that has been working for the OPH since he was old enough to read.  Faris came across an old coded holodisk that provided more insight as to what was needed to activate the Ballista.  The Megaton Trigger.  The Trigger is what can ultimately activate and allow continued control of the Ballista.  Coming across this infomation hadn’t gone unheard.  Factioned spies hiding amongst the OPH had been ordered to retrieve the data about the trigger from the boy.  Randall was ordered by his superiors to create a hard-wired Rune that encoded the data within his brain.  All other traces and copies of the information were destroyed.  Randall was then ordered to site of the Megaton Trigger in order to activate the device.  The Vehement Blade and the Magnaminous Flail could not let that happen.  The OPH realized the threats placed upon Randall and have conscripted their best Agent-Templar to provide protection for the boy:  Augustus Proximo – the main character.

As you can see with the image above, I was going to make a set of teaser images for the main characters of the storyline, starting with Proximo.

Augustus Proximo has been working with the Order of the Prodigious Hammer since he was seventeen.  There’s a ton of backstory about this guy, but I’ll spare you all going into it right now.  By the storyline’s start he’s currently thirty-two years of age.  His job as an Agent-Templar make him a frontline field agent that enforcing the will of the Order by performing secret actions behind enemy lines and exacting kill orders sent to him by way of the Prodigious Hammer.  In his fifteen years of dedicated service he has proven to be one of the most promising agents for the OPH.  He believes in his duty to the OPH, however he doesn’t believe in the need to take control of a weapon that could ultimately claim the lives of millions of people.  During his career he was told to uphold the sanctity of innocent life and punish the unjust, much like a knight of the days of old.  As ordered by the Prodigious Hammer superiors, he was also forced to sacrifice something he holds dear.  Although that’s supposed to be revealed later in the story, if I can ever get this puppy out of the zygote stages.

As you can see with the image above, Proximo is supposed to be a rather large man.  Think Agent 47 from the Hitman video game series, but much larger, almost brutish, yet refined by always wearing excellent suits.  The odd looking cross on the back of his head is an older prototype rune that was hard wired into his central nervous system.  He was diagnosed with Pathes Syndrome, a debilitating neurological disorder that can cause muscles to spasm violently to the point of tearing or rupturing.  The rune installed helps keep his disorder under control while also giving him the ability to become highly agile while not offsetting his natural strength.  Over the years, his Rune has grown faulty and has began to complicate his career with the OPH.  He’s kept his status of his condition worsening hidden from his superiors by taking a number of pharmaceuticals that he recieves from his ex-girlfriend and data courier, Muriel Tatum.

Much like the other teaser poster, Muriel’s poster is also themed with what her life in the story line entails.  Which in this case is Militance.

Muriel is a freelance mercenary, and data courier.  She can smuggle information with the best of them, however if you try and stop her…she’s liable to maim you, if not kill you outright.  Muriel grew up in the urban sprawl, the world below  the high-class corporations, governments, and religious factions policing the world.  She met Proximo while acquiring some “sensitive materials” about a particular priest working within the Order of the Prodigious Hammer for a client.  Proximo was sent to return the stolen data from Muriel.  When her client was murdered, Proximo was ordered to simply make sure the data she had could never be publicized.  They engaged in a game of cat and mouse that lasted a number of months.  During those months they had a number of physical engagements that would ultimately lead to the two becoming a couple despite Proximo’s standing orders.  Through some convincing, Muriel was forced to delete whatever data she had on the Priest of the OPH.  A running joke between the two is that Proximo was never actually told what the contained within the encrypted information, and Muriel still refuses to tell him.

Muriel wears a ”cyber-fiber” protective suit that provides basic protection of some forms of blunt attacks and other kinetic forces such as falls from potentially crippling heights.  If you notice on her arms, she also has a wet-wired Rune installed on her right arm.  Her Rune is strength bolstering.  If a job requires a bit of muscle, she’ll let her Rune do the talking.

Ultimately I want to have two more posters finished for the teaser collage including all four images for the story.  However with so much other work in the way, I’m not sure how soon that’ll happen.

Any questions?  Suggestions?  Lemme know.

The doctor is clocking out.

I hacked together a little widget that will allow you to check the stuff out. The widget still has some bugs but should do the job of presenting the information.

Back from the great beyond after our nation’s birthday – until then.

VODpulse was born. I’ve been posting news stories regarding VOD on it for a few months now, but only this weekend did I finally arrive at what the “true” face of the site is. Let me break it down by the major components.

- VOD News: this is important because as these companies vie to be more competitive, they will announce new features, expanded content, and price breaks to stay on top. Currently, it is a battle between Apple (iTunes), Amazon, and Netflix. The others can’t even hope to compare right now. These services will continue to evolve, and I aim to know what they’re all up to.

- Showcase: this is meant to show a small sample of what VOD has to offer. There’s already a lot of great content that is VOD exclusive, and may never see life beyond the Internet. That means you can’t buy this stuff on a disc. So, I want to have a place where you can watch some of the best content in one centralized location, without navigating to YouTube, then Vimeo, then to SpikeTV just to watch some good little videos.

- VOD Comparison: this is the final and most important (yet incomplete) feature of the site. I aim to break down all the current VOD services, free or not, and describe some of the technical features the services offer as well as an opinion on the content. The idea is to inspire an easier choice for someone like my Dad, who loves films and renting DVDs but doesn’t know a damn thing about VOD. This one will clearly take a great deal of time and research, but it is slowly coming together.

The site is probably 80% done right now, but that is what I’ve been working on for the past week. Take a test drive in it. Comment on it, watch some videos, rate them – just check it out. Leave some comments on the site for me here and let me know what you think. Thanks!

The neat thing about NPR in games is how easily it conveys a tone through a sense of style. Take, for example, the Legend of Zelda: Windwaker. It’s very light-hearted, almost child-like in nature. All the colors are very bright and vivid. The character’s proportions are very exaggerated. And the shading on the characters is like that of a cartoon (cel-shading or toon-shading), with large bands of color. These traits combine to create a very unique tone to the game, namely of being playful and adventurous. I’m very excited by the prospect of working on techniques and styles that have such a large impact on how the user interprets a game. I find rendering stylization to be sorely underused. Why, for example, does a game have comic book cut-scenes but is still rendered photorealistically? The style of the game should reflect the comic book feel, rather than having a huge disconnect between the game’s aesthetic and the aesthetics of the cut-scenes. Yes, I’m looking at you, inFamous.

Since I mentioned cartoon shading with Windwaker, I’ll go ahead and take the opportunity to explain how it is implemented since it’s very common and will help us cover some initial ground to get to some cooler stuff later on. Cel-shading, also called toon-shading, is a very common technique in games and animation and is named after clear sheets of acetate, called cels, used in traditional 2-D hand-drawn animation. The idea behind cel-shading is to create a cartoon-like quality to the image. The main trait of this style of rendering is the removal of smooth areas of shading on an object, instead conveying shading as large bands of color. The example below shows how the smoothness in the shading is removed in favor of distinct color bands.

This is implemented fairly simply in a game. First, note that the light an object receives is proportional to the orientation of the receiving surface to the light source. A flat surface aligned to a light (perpendicular to the direction of the light) will be fully lit while a surface parallel receives no light. A light somewhere between will be somewhat lit. This amount of scaling is implemented per pixel using the vector-dot product between the surface’s normal and the direction to the light and normally the value is from 1 to -1, and occurs at a per-pixel basis in the shader. A shader is essentially a set of instructions that can be run per vertex or pixel. Cel-shading works by applying a threshold to that value, creating a step-wise clamping that results in distinct bands of color whose number, size, and darkness depend on how the piece-wise threshold is specified. This piece-wise thresholding function is typically specified as a grayscale image so that it can be easily modified by artists on a per-object basis. I whipped up a few examples with the famous Utah teapot below to show you how the size, number, and blending of bands impacts the final shading on the object. On a related note, Valve uses this same technique for shading their characters in Team Fortress 2. Their threshold texture pulls the lights and darks together for their illustrative stylization, but still maintains a slight gradient between them, similar to the right-most example below.

I’ll end today with a taste of a watercolor technique I implemented in which cel-shading provides an intermediate abstraction step. Without giving away too many details, several paper and noise textures are used to provide the painterly effect. These textures are aligned to the screen, not to the surface of the object. This is one crucial aspect to a lot of NPR techniques, and there’s some pretty neat literature about the nature and interplay between 2D and 3D with artistic representation. I’ll try to provide some videos of these techniques in action, since they can’t be fully appreciated until they are seen in real-time. And it’ll also provide the perfect impetus for the idea of temporal coherence, and mapping those 2D screen-aligned patterns onto the 3D objects. Basically, imagine how the paper texture is supposed to move when the teapot rotates. It’s a pretty big issue I’m attempting to address in my thesis and it’s pretty tricky stuff.

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