Category: games

This is a game controller that enables the player to blow fire into the virtual world. It started out as a study of an electronic sensor and the findings were satisfying. The response time between the player action and sensing speed is quick enough for me to turn it into a meaningful and embodied play experience.

I purchased two wind sensors from ModernDevice.com many years ago, finally inspired to do something with them.

Wind Sensor Rev. C:
https://moderndevice.com/product/wind-sensor/

The first thing that came to me is Sasuke’s Great Fire Ball Jutsu (
Gougakyu No Jyutsu 豪火球の術).

The setup is pretty straight forward with Arduino, all I needed to do to read the RV pin with the analogRead. The sensor is capable of picking up very subtle changes in air movement around it. It works really well with detecting breath as well. I hooked it up to a flamethrower in Unity3D. I linked the serial data to the startSize and startSpeed properties of the particleSystem. Fireball is coming!

I made a stand for it on Tinkercad, so I can mount it on to my Arduino box. I also made a tube-like windshield to go around the sensor. By doing so, I was able to eliminate air coming from other directions and boost the strength of the reading by up to 20.

/*

 Hardware Setup: 
 Wind Sensor Signals    Arduino
 GND                    GND
 +V                     5V
 RV                     A1

 Vibration
 Signal                 A3

 LED
 PIN                    6

*/

#define analogPinForRV 1  // change to pins you the analog pins are using
#define analogPinForPR 3
#define LEDPIN 6

const float zeroWindAdjustment = .2;  // negative numbers yield smaller wind speeds and vice versa.

int ANALOG1, ANALOG2; 

void setup() {
  // put your setup code here, to run once:
  // initialize serial communication at 9600 bits per second:
  Serial.begin(115200);
  Serial.println("start");

  pinMode(LEDPIN, OUTPUT);
  digitalWrite(LEDPIN, HIGH);
}

// the loop routine runs over and over again forever:
void loop() {

  ANALOG1 = analogRead(analogPinForRV);
  ANALOG2 = analogRead(analogPinForPR);

  // print out the value you read:
  Serial.print(ANALOG1);
  Serial.print('|');
  Serial.println(ANALOG2);
  delay(10);  // delay in between reads for stability
}

Bumped into a strawberry cake shaped candy box at a Japanese deli nearby school today. I want to turn it into a game controller. The plastic strawberry on top is detachable so I decided to make a strawberry fishing game with this cake box. Imagining a candy box desperately want to become a fruit cake – oh wow.

With some Lego Technic parts and a lever switch, with some super glue, I made a simple fishing mechanism that allows the player to “fish” the top fruit piece.

Core mechanism:
1 Limit (Lever) Switch Roller
1 Lego Axle 4 with End Stop (87083)
1 Lego Technic, Liftarm 1 x 7 Bent (4 – 4) Thick
1 Lego Technic Gear 24 Tooth

I removed half of the teeth on the gear to make enough space for the lever switch to click and bounce back. I experimented with different locations for the lever switch in relation to the gear and found the most smooth one and glued it down. The extra technic arm (grey) to the right is glued to the black one for support also provides a bigger contact area for the switch.

Handle:
1 Lego Axle Connector with Axle Hole (32039)
1 Lego Axle 2 (3704)
1 Lego Technic, Axle and Pin Connector (32013)
1 Lego Connector Peg
1 Lego Pin Connector Round 2L
1 Lego Technic 1/2 Bush

Infinity Mitten is a solitary digital world destruction simulator. When a digital planet is located on the screen, the mitten wearer reads the name of the planet out loud followed with a reason to destroy it. Unlike Thanos and his Infinity Gauntlet, we wipe one planet at a time. (and we tell them why!)

After watching Avengers: End Game, I had been looking for an Infinity Gauntlet mitten. Without knowing the Infinity Mitten was actually a thing in the comic, a mitten is the closest thing to an infinity gauntlet I have in real life. When I put it on, I am the most powerful person in the kitchen universe.

Last week at our first New Arcade class, I drew a diagram on the board to show how our first basic pipeline worked. For the physical interface, I spontaneously drew an Infinity Gauntlet with buttons (jewels), LEDs, and haptics. In one of the slides that Henry, my co-teacher, was showing there was a picture of a toaster. For demo sake, I decided to make the infinity mitten idea a reality, and the kitchen universe where a toaster can be found becomes the inspiration.

Creating that vaporizing effect on digital planets in Processing:

I built a planet name generator based on this website, very good names.

I am going to lead a design and technology workshop at the Shanghai Art and Design Academy (SADA) this summer. I eventually decided to build the workshop on Project Mapping, because of the diverse design backgrounds of the participants and short turnaround time. After I decided on the direction of the design content and main learning outcomes, I went through all the examples I made in the past and updated them to work with the current tools and technology.

I kept most of the interaction and creative control based examples that were built with OSC, midi I/O, and Leapmotion, and retired all the Internet of Things ones that were built with Littlebits, Beedotte, IFTTT, and ESP8266 due to the scope of this workshop. There are no major changes in VPT 8, so most of the update works were on the Processing side.

Updating old examples or coming up with new ones is in itself a creative process. Discovering new affordance makes me fall in love with an old technology that I had worked with before all over again. I am excited to teach Projection Mapping in 2019 now! Among the new examples I created for this workshop, my current favorite is the INCENDIO example inspired by the wizardry world of Harry Potter. In this example, the user can set the projected surface on fire (animated fire!) with a magic wand. This is made possible with a commercial TV remote wand, an IR TV remote encoder, Processing, and VPT8.

Trying to design a stand that can hold the white cardboard cube I used for the workshop and an extension USB cable for the TV remote sensor dongle. On the stand side, the goal is to cover the least amount of the surface at the front. It turned into a dragon fish at the end, it was magic.

Gunslinger Stratos (ガンスリンガー ストラトス) is a 4 v.s. 4 third-person shooter arcade game came out in 2012. Every character in this game is equipped with some type of dual weapons. During the gameplay, players can transform their dual weapons into speciality ones based on situations such as a machine gun for rapid fire or a rocket launcher for more power. My favourite part is that these weapon transformations are initiated by combining the physical lightgun pieces in different ways.

In 2010, I had the opportunity to lead a group of students and work with General Engine (GE) on re-imagining the cockpit of a new commercial airliner. During the research, I also looked into robot animations and live-action films for inspirations. I couldn’t help to notice how much thinking has gone into the design of fictional mecha cockpits.

From a single fighter jet joystick to a PS2 game controller to twin stick setup to motion capture to mind-control, all is possible when it comes to piloting a giant Mecha. While motion capture seems to make the most direct sense, my personal favorite is the twin stick (ツインスティック). The concept of a twin stick interface is more of a metaphor than direct control.

I played Cyber Troopers: Virtual On in an arcade center in Tokyo when it first came out in 1995, it was love at first sign. Because the controls were intuitive thus easy to pick up, I was unstoppable that night (and that night only). The idea behind the twin stick is brilliant. The player only has to send out a combination of binary commands, and the robot (AI!?) will interpret the commands and put them into actual actions. It is very similar to how our body works. When we think of walking forward, our body turns it into action by moving all the related muscles.

It is inevitable for me to become a veteran of this arcade game – Gundam: Senjou no Kizuna (機動戦士ガンダム 戦場の絆). I spent most of my free time on this game whenever I am in Japan. It is a full-size Gundam cockpit with a panoramic view. Besides tiny legroom, this is the most authentic experience of robot piloting. The controllers I am interested in building for VR are inspired by the twin controllers in this cockpit.

Okay, the elephant in the room – the Steel Battalion controller. I love everything about this controller excepting the game. Just by looking at the hardware, there are endless possibilities in terms of what the play experience could be. I would completely detach it from the dreadful, demanding, and unforgiving Steel Battalion gameplay and re-imagine it in a Virtual On setup and add a SEGA Saturn in the back. I am very confident that I can come up with a fun mechanic or two for the WASHING button.

http://www.flyingbell.co.jp/works/promotion/%E9%89%84%E9%A8%8E-2/

星と翼のパラドクス

My first impression of this arcade machine was beyond joy, I thought it was the overdue Cyber Troopers resurgence. However, after a few games, I was very disappointed about almost everything about this poorly put together experience. It didn’t come anywhere close to the hype I had when I played Cyber Troopers for the first time, especially the control of the mecha, it doesn’t make the slightest sense and everything after that go south quickly. Maybe the game is trying really hard to differentiate itself from Cyber Troopers and Gundam Pod. The twin joystick of the game reminds me of the twin-stick for ACE COMBAT™ 7: SKIES UNKNOWN. Whoever designed the control scheme forgot two fundamental principles of interfacing a fast pace game – intuition and simplicity. The fewer turns and associations when making a piloting decision the better.

Honorary mentions:
[PS1] Remote Control Dandy (リモートコントロールダンディ)
[PS2] Tetsujin 28 go ( 鉄人28号)
[DS] Super Control Mecha MG (超操縦メカMG)

In Remote Control Dandy, the player has to press left foot forward (L1) and then right foot forward (R1) in order to move a step forward. It was weird and difficult at first, but it somehow resonates with my imagination of how a 1st generation giant robot would work. After becoming better at it, I felt achieved as a player. ROCKET PUNCH!

These cheap Zero Delay Joystick encoders appear on PC as generic gamepads. In the Device Manager, they are found under the Human Interface Devices. It can also be found in Setting/Devices/Devices and Printers/ as a USB Joystick. Right-click the icon and select Game Controller Setting and then Properties to bring up the USB Joystick properties window for testing the joystick and buttons.

I decided not to worry about making the handle look like the one in sketch and tried to re-imagine the left stick because I didn’t want it to be just a mirrored version of the right stick. Sliders, flip-switches, emergency exit switch, the weapon of mass destruction switch, key switches, a small touchscreen, more buttons, no buttons, …etc. Ideas went through my head like I was in a Mecha hanger going over different customization options.

Then it came to me (like a wrecking ball), what I needed is an RFID reader. This RFID reader will be built into the front of the left stick and served as a docking station for a Haro-like robot.

Goes really well with my keyboard:

I want to mod Monster Hunter Generation Ultimate (MHGU) so I can get my fashion on and maybe bypass all those delivery quests. I have done it on PS2, PS3, PS4, PSP, and 3DS and it gets harder and harder each time. Over time, the quest to mod the console or the game saves has become a game itself. My knowledge of low-level hardware and software can only get me so far. I remember back in the days when the modding was simpler, I was able to figure out the cheat codes for the English version of the game by offsetting the Japanese ones through trials and errors. I am glad that there is a strong community online that supports this liberation – to enjoy the gameplay our way.

The only way to mod MHGU on Nintendo Switch right now is through Switch homebrew launchers because the 3DS version of MHGU doesn’t exist. MHXX is the Japanese version of MHGU and it was also released on the Japanese 3DS. That is a much easier quest because I can just mod the 3DS save and then update it to Switch. For MHGU, I get 1 chance which is when I upload the MHG 3DS save to MHGU on Switch, but that only gets me all the pre-G contents.

I purchased an R4S dongle which is the latest payload dongle in the market. However, since I didn’t follow the Switch homebrew before this dongle, the installation didn’t go smoothly. I decided to stop being a Google zombie and put some thoughts into it. Here are some notes:

Payload: Payload senders (or payload injectors, or code loaders), are programs or devices used to transfer a small binary file (the payload) to the Nintendo Switch while being in Recovery mode (RCM), which allows early custom program’s execution at console boot before the Switch official Operating System (Horizon OS) is loaded.

Recovery Mode (RCM): The Recovery Mode (also known as Maintenance Mode in firmware version 1.0.0) can be accessed when turning on the Nintendo Switch while performing a button combo.

Jig: A jig is a type of custom-made tool used to control the location and/or motion of parts or other tools. In this case, a jig is used to short the Switch so we can get into the RCM and inject custom payloads.

hekate: Custom Nintendo Switch bootloader, firmware patcher, and more.
https://github.com/CTCaer/hekate

Atmosphère:

Atmosphère is a work-in-progress customized firmware (launcher) for the Nintendo Switch. I need Atmosphère to run the homebrew tool, Checkpoint, on Nintendo Switch. There are other firmware/launchers out there, but this one is my favorite, and Checkpoint is included in the release.
https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere

The R4S website was a bit confusing to read. After looking at it in both English and simplified Chinese, I finally got it to work. My goal is to be able to use Checkpoint. It helps me back up the save file from MHGU.

http://www.r4i-sdhc.com/R4SDongles.asp
https://github.com/FlagBrew/Checkpoint/releases

1 semi-useful video for beginners: There is no all-in-one tutorial online that aiming at modding MHGU. Most of the posts require some sort of hacking knowledge. For someone who just wanted to mod 1 file, it is really difficult to get the right help online. Many videos cover a portion of what I needed e.g. this video has some basic information on how to inject the payload with R4S dongle but there are some outdated pieces of information here and there.

I eventually stomp on the tables above. These two tables were separated by a horizontal line and a heading that reads, “Previous Version”. However, it turns out I need files from both tables to make it work. I tried R4S’s official Dongle Firmware V2.5 and ArgonNX SD-files V0.3 and the combo didn’t work on my console with firmware 7.0.1. The above combo, Atmosphere For NS 7.0.1 and Atmosphere_UF2_7.0.1, was the only one that worked for me.

It was a success. I was able to back up the save file and edit it on my PC with the MHXXSaveEditor. The editor works well but crashes from time to time, especially when I try to save for the second time. The editing was a lot of back and forth between my MHXX save and my MHGU one. The ネセト set in MHXX becomes the Neset set in MHGU. The name of each Neset weapon, instead of having a unique name for each weapon type in the MHXX editor, are all simplified to “Jewelled” + weapon type, i.e., Jewelled Greatsword and Jewelled Hammer.

Atmosphere 8.10 came out last week and it supports Version 8.0.1. , finally! The links to SD content and the UF2 file were also updated on the R4S website to version 8.0.1.

Fortunately, this time the dongle doesn’t need an update. I was able to keep my version 7.0.1 console as it is just in case something horrible happens to the new Atmosphere 8.10. The install was super smooth, but it took me a while to figure out how to launch the homebrew menu. It changes almost every update. For 8.10, simply click on the player account icon. Finally caught up to the current version. Before Nintendo strikes back with a newer update, gonna take advantage of the save editor and go to town with MHGU, thanks to all parties who made this possible. PLAY LIBERATION!!

7/23/2019

I wiped my SD card and did a fresh install of the firmware (Atmosphere 0.9.1). I had tried to overwrite the existing files without formatting, it gave me an error. I had to back up the 120G SD card and re-install everything, I must miss a memo somewhere.

20190923-atmosphere0.9.4 .rar:
https://mega.nz/#!fnoiwSQR!QleFKzzZOo-F0dFAu3BOI8J5HxvVoWTp-iMwu9xolJ8