Monthly Archives: December 2015

Selling A Tornado – Edinburgh University Project

A couple of years back whilst at Edinburgh University, I had the fortunate opportunity to take a course called Informatics Entrepreneurship and Digital Marketplace taught by Dr Adam J Bock. I enjoyed the course so much I thought I’d give one aspect of it a special mention, the group project.

As part of the course, groups of students we were required to analyze an opportunity. My group which was myself, Anton Caius Gurgu and Marat Subkhankulov, decided to base our opportunity on Anton’s coursework project, which was creating a programmable tornado.

We looked at whether Edinburgh nightclubs would be interested in buying/renting this product (opportunity description). The most memorable part of our assignment was producing a promotional video for this product.

As a team of solely Computer Science students we hadn’t had much practice in film making. We went about creating this video by brainstorming, planning, considering video elements and scenes, and writing up a script (details). The result was in my opinion a decent job. Here is the video in all its cheesy goofy goodness!

I think it turned out well.

A big thanks to Dr Bock for his course. It was one of my most memorable while at Edinburgh.

SASA Performance, Edinburgh 2012

A couple of years back I performed for Edinburgh Universities South Asian Student Association annual DiwaliEid with a couple of guys. I finally got round to digging up the SASA Performance videos from Facebook/Youtube. In the first I’m playing percussion. My favorites moments were round about 3:08 and 4:50.

In our second performance I sung backing vocals.

As well as this I had the pleasure of collaborating with a couple of my Uni colleagues on a poster for this very same event. All in all, It was a good night.

Overlord – Anime Watch

Visiting the world of Overlord we are introduced to Momonga, our skeletal protagonist, master of the empty halls of Nazarik within a game called Yggdrasil. The story begins on the day the Yggdrasil servers are to be shut down. Instead of being ejected back into the real world, our protagonist finds himself trapped, transported into a living game world with his domain and subjects.

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The Force Awakens – Impressions

Star Wars The Force Awakens has been a long awaited installment in the series, and I certainly have looked forward to it. The day before its release I booked myself a ticket for a viewing at 12:00am on the 16th of December 2015, to be among the first to see it in Bahrain.

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Armed with popcorn, a ticket and a pack of Maltesers I made my way to the cinema hall.

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Cave Troll Painting Guide – Games Workshop, Lord of the Rings

Many years ago I used to play Games Workshops Lord of the Rings table top game. Naturally following this hobby I painted a number of models. One such model was the Cave Troll from Moria.

I spent awhile rummaging around the net for a good resource to remember how I painted the model and the best resource I found was from a Youtube channel which had a series of videos on how to paint a Cave Troll. I have written a summary to accompany the video series (paint name reference sheet).

Stage One: Assembly & Base Coat

To start first assemble your model, this involves:

  • Testing that joints fit together and filing them down if necessary (metal).
  • Making customization’s to your model and base as per your preference.
  • Gluing model parts together.
  • Attaching the assembled model to its base.
  • Applying a base coat of Chaos Black (can be done in White but I did it in Black).

Continue reading Cave Troll Painting Guide – Games Workshop, Lord of the Rings

FEAR’s NPC A.I.

FEAR has been cited as one of the most influential A.I. games. FEAR’s claim to fame was its implementation of NPC A.I. using a system called Goal Oriented Action Planning.

Since I have some experience with planning in games, I wanted to have a look at the techniques used. After some digging I thought I’d put together a brief summary of what I learnt.

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