Graphics Projects

Occasionally I get interested in 3D modelling. I particularly like modelling architecture, and one of my aspirations is to bring to life buildings that can't nowadays be seen: buildings from the past the exist only as ruins, if they still exist at all, or buildings of the future. But I have also spent some time trying to model everyday objects, and would like (again) to bring to life past or future objects.

On this page I'll put posts about graphical projects that I think you might find interesting. Some of them have also appeared on my Facebook feed.

CGA Palettes

8 Feb: As part of my retro-computing hobby, I've been playing with colour palettes on an ancient computer. In this case, it's an old-fashioned PC with 4-colour CGA graphics. You might remember the early days of PCs, where all the games seemed to use the same shades of black, magenta, cyan and white. CGA actually had 16 colours. When using graphics, you could use four of them at once. But your choice of which four was more restricted than on computers ... (read more...)

A Hnefatafl Game

4 Oct: Birka was a Viking trading settlement on the island of Björkö in Sweden. It's famous for its archaeological riches. A huge cemetery was excavated which yielded a wealth of grave goods. In grave no. 886 was found a set of gaming pieces and the remains of a wooden board. The pieces form a complete set: 25 pieces, one a slightly different shape from the rest, would have comprised a king and his eight defenders on one side, and sixteen ... (read more...)

A Greek Temple

18 Oct: After playing with imaginary Saxon churches for practice, I started to work on another project: an ancient Greek temple. I based my model on the temple at Paestum in Italy, as I found measurements for it on-line. This wasn't intended to be a faithful reconstruction of Paestum, but a temple based upon it. The images show the temple during various stages of work: the roofless version with no texture set; the "completed" version with a whitewashed texture, and two ... (read more...)

First Steps in Architecture

8 Oct: For a brief time I was addicted to Minecraft. I'd use the game to build little mediaeval houses and towns, classic temples, windmills and other things: its "creative mode" is like having a virtual Lego set. The bonus when building things on a public server is that other players get to wander around your creations too! After a while, I got fed up with Minecraft's limitations. I was also made an admin on the public server I played on, ... (read more...)

The Little Tanks

28 May: In 2011 I started writing a new game for the Psion Series 3 handheld computer. This was a simple strategy game set in the future, played out with a limited set of units on a small map. It was to be very abstract, almost like a board game except for a key element of game-play, hidden movement. The project stalled and has never restarted. By 2012 the software was almost working, lacking only a reasonable AI, and I had ... (read more...)