Wii Remote Software Setup
Mat came to do the setup over the weekend before the workshop. By friday night we'd succeeded only in loading up unreal editor and loading a map, saturday was spent finding maps and putting them together. When we saw how long a map takes to stitch to another, we realised it would be much faster to simply load maps already set up in the game, and that for the first day's bluetooth workshop we'll be mostly working with a backdrop - so we have freedom to use other game engines.
Second life is good for it's social environment - people are there and you will find spectators for what you do. It also has a huge amount of pre-built meshes(3d objects) that can be placed in different areas.
Garry's Mod for Half Life 2 is also very useful as it has an in-game editing feature, very realistic avatars and game physics, and it's easy to set up backdrops for bluescreening also.
So we decided we'd use the wii remotes to control as many of these as possible, instead of spending too long building a map.
For XP, we downloaded PPJoy to control the wii remote, turning it's signals into joystick symbols: http://www.simtel.net/product.download.mirrors.php?id=75176 Glovepie(Glovepie versions 0.29 and 0.30: 29 is older and carries a huge amount of scripts for connecting to various games and devices. 30 is newer and has more functions, but less scripts) turns wii remote signals via bluetooth into 12 different emulations - key commands, open sound control, midi amongst them. On one laptop, bluetooth was inbuilt, the other not. Glovepie is in a very natural language and has presets for first person shooters, so it's not hard to load it up and quickly adapt it to something interesting in a game.
Glovepie - open and go to old scripts (30) or wiimote scripts(29) and you'll find the midicontroller script. This runs a simple script allowing the movements and buttons of the wii to control the midi device. By far the easiest way of testing it.
Now that this step is finished it has to be connected to Garry-s mod or whatever game is needed.
Mat's note - Burning Chavs*: now you can set fire to your favourite glittery person, and do it all in big lights with reactive media. The Wiimote requires a candle as a heat source in order to work as an infrared mouse pointer. This is more accurate than the tilt sensors on the wii. So point the wiimote at a heat source of your choice (a fire juggler, a candle, a burning chav or young offender), and tracking will happen based on that source. However - you can also choose to leave the wiimote still, and move the heat source - so in this way a fire juggler would be able to directly trigger a visual display or other devices simply by acting as a heat source.
Bluetooth registration: to get glovepie working with your wiimote, you have to turn it on (by pressing the 1 and 2 buttons), then go to the bluetooth icon at the bottom of the screen, to add a new connection. It should find it - give it a name and it's now communicating.
Mat's note: this gave him the idea of hooking up infrared transmitters as is done with the wiimote [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/ here] but not to a wiimote - simply add the ir transmitters to headphones - then people would buy headphones that already did head tracking - for file management uses as well as in game operation...
Also Second Life client and Garry's mod 10, for which Flash and Quicktime are needed. Voice chat in second life requires a microphone/audio working...
For mac, Darwiinremote is the software a la glovepie. It's very easy to set up second life via the wii on this, so the mac laptop that Mat brought will be the best interface for second life. Linux: http://www.wiili.org/index.php/Main_Page is a good resource.
Unreal Level Design:
After creating the simplest type of usable map; a box with a basic texture, we attempted to graft the contents of one Sci-Fi map onto another, more rural map. Although it was fairly easy to composite the two together by selecting all objects and using simple copy and paste commands, it proved tricky to get the newly pasted objects to be displayed when the composite level was built. The solution to this problem was to select them all and ‘Add’ them in the ‘Brush’ menu, after which the objects became visible, solid, and regained their original textures.
The next issues we had were with the floor surface of our map, which had lost its solidity, leaving our test avatar to fall to his doom every time the game loaded. This was only cured by selecting the outer ‘box’ of our map, and using the ‘Subtract’ command from the ‘Brush’ menu once again.
Although our map was now playable, we had placed only small, localised light sources, lending it a dusk-like feel. Our initial attempts to place some brighter, global lighting did not work, and we discovered that this was because we had not yet ticked the ‘fake-background’ box in the ‘surface properties’ menu of the surface we intended to be the sky. After this box was ticked, the previously rudimentary sky became a detailed spacescape (!).
To do:
get garry's mod + glovepie + ppjoy working on the wii Get second life mac running similarly
custom map: take away all guns.
* opinions voiced in this wiki are not those of University of Bristol, and came to us after a long weekend stuck in games-worlds.