The biggest problem is that as “entertainment”, most big AAA games fail for me, due to a combination of cringeworthy stories, and repetitive game mechanics.  After a while, the time investment is just not worth it, to see the end of a story that I would not make it through in any other media:  heck, I’d rather watch The Avengers again than slog through “Black Ops 2″.  But, I keep trying, because I love the idea of a rich story (good enough that I might enjoy it in another form) and interactions that are fun throughout the whole game.

My most recent attempt:  the new Tomb Raider.  I’ve never gotten into Tomb Raider games, for various reasons.  But, since it was getting such good reviews, I decided to give it a go (plus, it might be one of the last big AAA story-based games, as the genre disappears entirely into the all-consuming void of F2P tablet-based game-snacks).

I’ve only put in about 3-4 hours so far, but I’m really happy I did.  I can’t think of a movie I would have rather watched during that time, for example!  So far, it’s everything most narrative FPS’s aren’t:  I’m enjoying the story and Laura’s character development, and the game play isn’t (too) tedious or repetitive.  This may change as I get further into the game, but at this point most big games (like Call of Duty, Dragon’s Age, Prototype, etc.) would have reached that horrible stage where the story and characters are making me cringe, and the action sequences are something I’m trying to slog through in the hopes the story might improve.

Suffice to say, I’m pleasantly surprised, and don’t find myself wishing I’d watched a mindless action flick (or tried to catch up on The Walking Dead) instead.

Unfortunately, printcraft was a dedicated server, and I really wanted to let my kids go nuts on our own server;  after all, why not?  Between my wife and I, we have more CS degrees than any house should, so why couldn’t I get something rigged up?

I’m not going to give detailed step-by-step instructions here; I may do that someday, but the process is still a little jury rigged for public consumption.  But, here’s the gist of what I did.

First, I had to take the plunge and upgrade our server to support mods.  In particular, I’m currently running the craftbukkit-1.5.1-R0.1-20130330.075504-28.jar as my server, with the WorldEdit v5.5.5 plugin (I’m also running PermissionsBukkit-2.0 for permission control, Multiverse-Core-2.5 for multiple worlds in one server and Multiverse-SignPortals-2.5 to let me create signs that can be clicked to teleport).  The key feature of WorldEdit is that it lets you run javascript scripts from within Minecraft, and those scripts let you have full access to the server data-structures.

Fortunately, Paul Harter (the creator of printcraft) had posted his core script on github and while it wasn’t a load-and-go kind of script, it served as a great starting point for rolling my own server.  For anyone who cares, it looks like you’d expect:

While Paul’s original script is based on the idea of printing out everything within a predefined region, I opted to use the ability of WorldEdit to marker regions in the world.  So, my script assumes you’ve set a region to print, and then it traverses through that region, collecting up the blocks it finds.  It’s currently pretty limited in that it only supports square blocks (no ladders, chests, stairs, slabs, etc).   I divided the main blocks into two sets, and write out two scripts, one for each of the two kinds of blocks.

This is the second key thing Paul did:  he didn’t bother to create the STL file directly, but rather wrote out OpenSCAD programs.  OpenSCAD is a “programmers 3D modeler”, in that it lets you write programs that create models using constructive solid geometry.  So, printcraft creates a list of cubes and then merges them into a model;  OpenSCAD takes care of turning that union of those cubes into a proper model, which you can then save as STL.

So, the process is simple.  First, my kids create something they want printed in Minecraft.  Here’s a model my son made (the stone and dirt will be written out as separate models):

Next, I run the script I wrote, derived from Paul’s printcraft script, generating two OpenSCAD programs.  I then load each into OpenSCAD and generate STL files from them.  Here’s one:

Finally, I load both files into Makerware, size them as desired and select which is printed with which extruder:

And then, we wait for the Replicator to finish printing (a little longer than any of us would like)!

I won’t pretend this was a simple, smooth process, but it was fun!  And, most importantly, now I can print whatever my kids care to think up, without them having to learn a 3D modeling program.  I suspect that they will soon want to learn something more powerful, but for now I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

We just just the program committee meeting, and during the meeting, one of the program chairs suggested that we should start allowing the papers (which are submitted as PDF’s, so they can be put in IEEE’s digital library) to include interactive content.   ISMAR has not created print proceedings in a few years, so there is no reason for us to be stuck using static PDFs that mimic plain paper.

My first reaction was “why has nobody suggested this before”?   PDF’s can contain movies, Flash animations and 3D content, and for many conferences, this would be fabulous.  For ISMAR, for example, almost all papers include a movie, but that movie is not readily available with the paper in the library;  wouldn’t it be fabulous for the papers to contain the movies?   Of, for each figure to be self explanatory?   To have fully dynamic interactive figures in the papers?   Or to record the conference presentation, and append it to the PDF as an extra page?!

I don’t know if any other conference committees have been discussing this, but it’s time to do this!  Ditch the paper proceedings, embrace interactive content!