Games Page
There are more technical details about these on the programming page.
Aethyra and TMW
These are a new pair of projects that I've joined, and have their own page.
Note: development halted at the start of 2001
I started work as a full-time programmer in 2001; to avoid any confusion about the ownership of the copyright I stopped making changes to these.
These are all Java games - you need a Java 1.1-compatible browser to play them.
Six Gems
This is something that I have wanted to do for a long time - an RPG game (it works as both an applet and a stand-alone application) in the spirit of the old Phantasy Star or Final Fantasies. It won't be as good, of course, but it is fun. It will also let other people add locations to it, if they want to.
The game is now almost ready, and you can play it here. It still needs the difficulty tuning, the animation smoothing, and a load/save option.
More on the story of the game.
Technical details of the game.
Screenshots and Images
A clone of Tetris
Follow this link for a playable version.
Stereograms (3D images)
Autostereograms used to be an obsession of mine.
Eventually I took a Communications and Cryptography course. Visual cryptography and stenography were part of it. So I cleaned up the code to its present form, ran it on a series of images, and ended up with a 5 megabyte animation of a rolling dodecahedron, a stereogram obsessed lecturer, and an A grade.
Here is an autostereogram of the greek letter pi (π).
For people who have difficulty seeing them, try this applet.
Stereogram decoder trick
If you're having trouble seeing them, this trick will at least give you a clue what's in them:
- Take two copies of the same stereogram, hold them against a window so that the light shines through them.
- Align them vertically.
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Horizontal alignment.
- If it has two dots above it, start by making one line up with the other.
- Otherwise look for a pattern that recurs from left to right, and align the stereograms "off" by a single pattern-width.
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Then move one sheet to the left or right a bit, and you'll see these:
- A (dark) silhouette of the object in the stereogram.
- Light objects against a darker background, which are parts of the image that are at the same depth. The better the quality of the stereogram, the less recognisable the objects will be.
On a computer, the same trick can be done with any graphics program that supports layers (such as Gimp). Set the top layer to "darken only", "difference" or some similar sounding option.
Very silly Red Dwarf thingy
Waffles. Just say no. Do you have any idea how much the toaster will bug you if it ever finds out that you've eaten one? Were you only two years old at the time, and forced to eat them by your mother? Well, the Toaster doesn't care, it'll offer them to you anyway, with a happy cheery note to its voice to help you get out of bed in the morning.