Snowmen make good targets

Owen Kellet put together an interesting postmortem of the Project Snowman Darkstar demo I helped complete for this year's AGDC. The project distribution makes a nice playground for learning about using Darkstar and comes complete with a jMonkeyEngine based game client, a Swing based client for load testing, a Darkstar server component, and a simple world editor.

Back from Zion

My son Aaron and I recently took a trip up to southern Utah to visit my grandmother. She turns 80 in a few months and unfortunately she has been living with Alzheimer's disease for several years now. It was a good trip and a nice chance to slow down a little and enjoy family. While there we also took in Zion National Park which was a real treat. I learned that my great grandfather (a civil engineer) helped with the design of some of the existing keystone bridges in the park and the Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel, a 1.1 mile tunnel through thick sandstone.

All in all, a good experience!

Wow... Just wow.

LittleBigPlanet user 'Upsilandre' made a difference (a type of mechanical calculator) engine entirely using the game's tool set. You can see it in action here:

LittleBigPlanet 'Giant Calculator' gameplay

Like others who have mentioned it, I am truly astounded that anyone actually had the time and patience to pull this off. Much respect.