My class will be watching, 4:00-5:10 PM, Thursday

Howdy fellow prealpha testers,

I am doing a case study today on the Portalarium Multishader for my GPU Programming for Video games class. If you see me ("Above Nyquist") in game, that means there's about 35 Georgia Tech CS and ECE students watching.

Class is 4-5:10; I'll only be in for part of that time, since I will be boring my students with PowerPoint slides and running the Unity editor for most of the lecture.

Based on community suggestions, I plan to head over to Kingsport and check out the new island if I can figure out how to get to it. Anyway, if happen to run across me and want to say hi to my students, that would be awesome!

- Aaron

 

Good luck with the class...click on the little skiffs/boats in the harbor to get to the island.

 

Just double click on any of the small boats at the dock in Kingsport. They'll transport you to the islands.

 

I will try to be around too!

 

Let the Chaos ensue! *hears and evil laugh boom in the distance*

 

we should all make DarkStarr characters and run around nekkid for the class

 

It was fun... alas, my timing wasn't great, I apparently logged in right as the game hit the darkest part of the night cycle. Ran around in Kingsport for a bit, went up to the top of the lighthouse, jumped off, looked at the shattered moon, and generally killed time until sunrise, at which point I fireballed a chicken (or some other sort of farm avian, don't recall) and cast "corpse explosion" on it. The latter was a big hit, BTW! (I'm not sure what that says...)

Took more time than I should have probably finding my way out of Kingsport...

Had a fun moment when we found a giant square patcb of pure white outside down that we could swim through, and then see the texture underneath the water, and then fell out of the world!

Around that time official class was over, but a lot of students stayed wanting to see more! So I then headed to Ravensmoor, took way too long to find the dungeon entrance, and generally ran through it in a panic until I got to the torch puzzle. One of my students captured some of that on his cell phone camera, so it may appear on youtube or something at some point...

It was crazy -- and chaotic! -- fun having a couple of dozen students telling me to go this way or another way...

 

I did the demo after going through some of the shader code for the Portalarium Multishader, and also looking a bit at the code for the custom materials inspector.

At the beginning, I gave a highly compressed version of RG's role in the start of the computer game industry, how he got into space, and my own intersection with that, including him signing my 30+ year old Akalabeth instructions at Dragoncon a few years back.

I've noticed there's a pretty sharp age divide -- most of my students over 30 (around 5) knew who Richard Garriott was, even if they didn't play the Ultima games; most of my students under 30 had no idea.

 

Sadly, that didn't happen...