next »

[SephirXV]

Honestly this is a project that I should have told myself I didn't have the time for, but I was too passionate to let it go, so I've been spending allot of time getting very little done. Computer/Video games have been something I've wanted to work on since I started messing around with Qbasic as a kid, but moving to where the work is wouldn't work for me, and they seem a little too 'non-8-5', which my family doesn't deserve. So I'm stuck with it as a hobby.

Anyway, the project. I don't remember what I was looking up, but I stumbled across the work of Johhny Chung Lee, who has done rediculously cool things with wiimotes and PCs, some of it counterintuitively creative. So one night I got to thinking about the possibilities of PC gaming with a wiimote. I decided that the future of gaming wasn't more FPS and higher density textures, but fuller integration of the other senses. Playing golf is much more realistic when you swing something then when you just use well timed clicks. Shooting things without a high resolution mouse is more like the real thing, your arms get tired, shake, whatever.

So I came up with JavaImmersiveGaming (JIG), which I had two game ideas that I couldn't choose between, so I kept both. One is a first/close third person RPG, allot of Zelda influence, but you swing your mote like a sword/club/whatever, spin it for a flail, aim it for a crossbow, use a nunchuk and a mote for a bow, hold it aloft for your torch (allot of rooms for that). Now if you've seen Lee's work, you might recall him turning a wiimote around and using it for a camera for head tracking. When one 'mote can follow four lights, I thought you could have IR lights on gloves, and gestures of your hands could be like making a spell.

The other game was a Mecha/Giant robot simulator, allot of HeavyGear feel to it, except the robot was remotely controlled and so your POV was variable, or your guns didn't always line up with your eyes. In similator mode, HeavyGear needed alot of input, you could walk one way, turn torso another, turn your head another, each fairly independantly. Anyway, alot of the weapons work sort of like a laser targeted one, except the bot doesn't use a laser, it just interpets the angles so it's pointed the right way, makes aiming trickier because there's a variable lag in the tracking.

Really, they are just an exercise in making gaming harder, but if it makes it seem more real, I think that adds so much more to the experience. And although the hardware is somewhat elaborate compared to what is common, it's not terrifically expensive. Wiimotes are $40, Nunchucks $20, and other then that you just need IR LED's and whatever you want to use to wire them together. You can have head tracking, full room orientation tracking, whatever, it's just fancy software to interpret it, and modern PCs have underutilized cores waiting for something useful to do.

[SephirXV]

Now where I tell you how far I've gotten... not very far. I've spent allot of time developing a java driver to interpret the raw reports from a wiimote, and that just works in Linux. If any windows gurus think they can find a way to provide that kind of low level access, I can add plop my driver on top. I still need to work on connectiveity management, but windows supposedly supports DBus, not there yet.

My first working tech demo (which is a proof of concept that 'mote input can be merged into a fast 3d 'game') is just a floating skull which turns to 'look' at the IR camera's 'mouse'. Next I'm going to have it determine distance from the mote and calc the vector to look at the 'mote itself (creepy when you think about it).

I've been working on getting a walking skelton model to play with, but having to learn Blender and how to make anims and how to import them and just a lot of work until we get a bunch of people doing it. Our community could really use some sympathetic grapics modelers and 2d/3d artists to make us some content to test our ideas with.

I've also been working with the new input system, fostering the idea of abstracting input away from the device it came from and toward it's type (binary, axes, etc) so that a bindings manager and everything on top of it had no idea what device an input came from, just how to get it's value. If/when I integrae wii support in, it will make handlng all the possible sources of input easier if every time we want a value we don't have to decide which device to ask it for.

Although my wiimote development is Linux only, I'm working on everything else on two computers, my home Linux box with decent graphics, and an XP workstation at work with moderate graphics. This sort of duel development helps me isolate issues that I wouldn't run accross until someone else tried to run it.

Once I get familiar with Subclipse, I hope to start contributing to what has to be one of the best platforms of it's kind. If anyone has any ideas of questions, I'd be happy to go into more detail.

[Marvin Fröhlich]

This really sounds like a funny idea. Please go ahead with it. Can't wait to see some nice demo videos or something like that (I don't have a wii).

If you have more questions about anything I could help you with, don't hesitate to ask.

Marvin

[SephirXV]

I don't have a wii either, but they pack so many sensors in those wiimotes, I had to get one to play with.