New Frontiers in Panoramas

So those of you who follow this blog probably know by now that I love panoramas. There's just never enough of a landscape encapsulated in a single photo in my eyes. Within a few years of getting access to a digital camera I had figured out how to take multiple pictures of a scene and stitch them together in GIMP. This, however, is a long, painstaking process prone to errors. I think I've discovered errors in pretty much every panorama I've made sometime after making it, in the form of areas where two pictures were imperfectly blended. (The amount of work it takes to make one has always discouraged me from going back and fixing them, however.)

This weekend I discovered an amazing program called Hugin which creates panoramas automatically. Sure, I can create panoramas with the camera on my phone now that are quite high quality already, but Hugin allows me to go back and recreate ones from the pictures I already have, which is exactly what I spent most of Saturday afternoon doing. Upon loading in a set of pictures it can automatically analyze them to find matching points, assemble them, fix perspective issues, blend everything together, and spit out a finished panorama, all with a couple of clicks. It's incredibly fun to watch and see the finished output, especially comparing them to the ones I've made manually.

It's unfortunately a bit hard to see the differences (which are important, but subtle) without blinking between the images, so I don't think putting a hand-made and Hugin-made panorama up together would be particularly informative. However, I did find a few cases of images I'd taken with the intent to create a panorama that I never got around to, so have a few never-before-seen photos with this post:

This is a panorama from June 2011, taken from the summit of Mauna Kea at Puʻu Wēkiu on the one occasion I hiked there and remembered my camera. To the south, on the right, can be seen the summit of Mauna Loa, and not a lot else due to the clouds. (This might be why I never made a panorama out of it manually…) The view extends around to the north-east, where you can see some of the cinder cones (or puʻu) on Mauna Kea's north-eastern rift zone.

This panorama dates from November 2013. It's a view out over Kīlauea Caldera from near the Jagger Museum (where the people are on the left, including my friend Graham!). Within the caldera (which takes up most of the picture) can be seen the Halemaʻumaʻu pit crater, where the gas is rising from. I rather like this picture, so I'm not sure why I never got around to panorama-fying it manually. Another nice feature of Hugin that I forgot to mention is the way it can blend pictures pretty seamlessly, compensating for differently-colored sky in different images. This was always a big problem for me when making them manually and it's a super-useful feature.

This is another panorama taken at the same time as the last one, and from very nearby, but looking away from Kīlauea up towards Mauna Loa instead. Not much more to say about it, honestly—it's a different view of Mauna Loa than the panoramas I usually make (from the south-east instead of the north), and it does a nice job of showing off just how long and flat Mauna Loa is, but I can understand why I never felt motivated to spend the time to make this panorama manually.

Finally, this panorama comes from September 2014, from the time I visited Polulū Valley. I made one panorama from higher up at the trail head already but this one comes from further down the trail and I never put the pictures together. The color balance isn't particularly great on this one between the multiple photos, but I do like the view.

Anyway, I'm super excited to have discovered this program and I'm hoping to put it to good use with some more—and better—panoramas from Australia in the future now that I can make them in a few minutes rather than a few hours. A hui hou!

January Astrobite and Australia Day

Well this is a few days late due to a busy week, but I posted my first Astrobite this week over at the Astrobites site. It's on the accidental discovery of a so-called solar twin, a star extremely similar to our Sun, and is a heavily-edited version of my initial application submission (though it's much better now than it was originally!). I had some fun figuring out when to post it due to being pretty much the first Astrobites author in Australia as far as I know, but it worked out in the end.

I've also taken on the modest task of designing some new logo variations for the Astrobites store that I (and quite a few other authors, and not just the new ones) found out about a few weeks ago, so I may have some stuff to show off in that regard in a bit.

Other than that not much to say; it's a long weekend here due to today being Australia Day so I've got some more time to be creative. A hui hou!

Transit of Venus: Reloaded: Director's Cut

Remaking and rebooting things seems to be all the rage these days, so I figured it was time for me to join the bandwagon and take a shot at redoing one of my old videos from 2012 about the transit of Venus. Well, actually I was recently reminded of its existence and decided that I could do better now. The original video was from before I'd started really working at video editing, and was probably made in Windows Movie Maker. I wouldn't call it bad, and you can already see some of the hallmarks of my video editing style even back then, but I think this one's a bit better overall. I've gone back and replaced the old version from 2012 with this one, as Blogger's video hosting abilities have always felt a bit shaky to me—one of the reasons I didn't upload many videos prior to getting a YouTube channel. (Two, actually, one for gaming that I introduced in the previous post and a second more general one seen here for everything else.)

(Fun fact, the title in the thumbnail there was recycled from the original video.)

2017 Retrospective: Making the World's First Let's Play of Dodge That Anvil!

Last year I created the world's first (and so far only) video Let's Play of Dodge That Anvil!.

The thought that I'd ever get to create the very first Let's Play of a game had never entered my mind prior to last year, but for those who have no idea what I just said, let me back up and explain. (I suggest listening to the game's soundtrack which can be found here in the background while reading, as it's great music and will help set the mood.)

1. A “Let's Play” (or LP) is a fairly recent art form (stretching back perhaps two decades or so) that at its core involves playing though a game in order to share the experience with others. Typically this is done either in a series of videos of gameplay with accompanying commentary (with varying amounts of editing optional) or in the form of a mixture of textual commentary and screenshots, the type of game often dictating the best or most convenient format. Usually the person making the Let's Play does so because they love the game they're playing and want to share the joy playing it inspires with other people, and the love and dedication put into a truly great Let's Play can be a wonderful thing to behold (though actual levels of skill at the game and dedication to showing off everything in it vary).
2. Dodge That Anvil! is an indie game made entirely by a single man named Jake Grandchamp that came out in 2006. I only discovered it sometime later—it must have been about 2007 or 2008, because I remember finding it and buying it around the time or soon after I started college. It has the humorous premise of a warren of technologically-savvy rabbits who grow their own crops but whose world is turned upside down one day when anvils begin raining from the sky, threatening all and sundry. The player is a brave “volunteer” who in order to feed the warren must run around harvesting crops while every few seconds an anvil falls out of the sky aimed at his head. (At least initially, later levels add more hazards of various kinds to avoid from exploding beach balls to anvils that come alive and chase you around like bulls to alien flying saucers from the Moon, who turn out to be the source of the anvils.) It's supported by a beautiful stylized art style, some amazing music, and a charming sense of humor in the writing that keeps it fun, but the real meat of the game is its gameplay, which is fast, fun, a little frantic, and utilizes the powerful Havok physics engine to create all kinds of hilarious emergent gameplay as anvils interact with the world, explosions, and each other.

After getting Dodge That Anvil! I played it off and on for about two years till moving away to college in 2009, often watched by my younger brothers. We all greatly enjoyed the experience, and the funny situations the game could come up with—I've got great memories of the three of us laughing uproariously at the latest foible of the physics engine. I then kind of forgot about it in the excitement of moving to Hawaii, and there things stood for almost a decade.

A shot from the first level, showing off an anvil trying to squish me as I gather crops from the tilled areas.

Last year I happened to remember Dodge That Anvil! out of the blue, and felt a nostalgic desire to see it in action again, so I typed its name into YouTube, and got…nothing. Well, not quite nothing, I found the original trailer for the game and a six-minute recording of someone playing the first level from the early days of YouTube soon after the game came out, but the point is that there were no Let's Plays. This is YouTube we're talking about here; if a game exists, someone, somewhere, has made a Let's Play about it. Usually more than one. But in this case, no one had.

After recovering from my surprise, I realized that this presented me with an incredible opportunity/responsibility: to make one myself. This immediately presented a slight problem, though: the game came out in 2006, the latest versions of Windows and Mac it officially worked on were almost a decade old by this point, and it didn't have a Linux version. The game's website was still up when I checked though, and even had the game download still working (the game allowed playing the first few levels as a demo before buying and unlocking the full game). I found my game key in an old Gmail chat nearly eight years old, installed Wine to run Windows applications, downloaded and installed the game, and to my pleasant surprise it ran on my computer (running Debian stable at the time). To my infinitely greater amazement, when I entered my game key at the appropriate screen, it thought for about two seconds and accepted it.

Here's a raging anvil trying to get me in a later level. Also note that it's now summer/fall instead of spring.

This is an indie game that had come out over a decade ago, and the key validation servers were still functioning. That blew my mind so hard that I distinctly remember sitting and staring at my computer screen open-mouthed for a few seconds in disbelief. Jake couldn't be making new sales of the game, not this long after the last supported versions of Windows and Mac were so many years behind, so the only reason those servers were still going had to be for people like me, who were coming back and installing the game again after so many years. That moment, right there, cemented my desire to make this the definitive Let's Play of Dodge That Anvil!—someone willing to spend money on keeping a key server alive over a decade after his game came out just so buyers could continue to play it deserved the very best I could give.

And so I did. Starting in March I steadily worked my way through the game I'd loved so much as a teenager. Unlike many of the games we look back on with rose-colored glasses, it lived up to my memories. The gameplay was just as good and frantic, the writing as humorous and charming, and I took just as many anvils to the noggin while distracted as I remembered. I did my best with every episode, explaining the many things I'd learned about the game, showing off all the secrets I could find, getting 100% completion on every level, all in pursuit of my quest to make a Let's Play that Jake could be proud of should he ever perchance come across it. I'd never been able to find out what happened to him after Dodge That Anvil! was published—he'd never released any other games that I could find and seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth, so I'd always wondered and this led me to push myself to share his wonderful game with the world lest it be forgotten.

Here's a later winter level, showing a multi-anvil strike called an anvil squadron. A split second later my hardhat makes the ultimate sacrifice to save me.

Dodge That Anvil! is actually a decently long game so I slowly worked my way through it at the rate of about one video a week, until August when the most amazing part of this story takes place. I'd finished the main story mode of the game (and was working on recording the post-game optional content) when a few days after posting the final story mode video I got one of the biggest surprises in my life: out of the blue, I got a message from Jake Grandchamp himself, saying that he'd randomly stumbled upon my Let's Play while searching YouTube to see if his original trailer was still up, and loved it! He explained that he'd long been a fan of Let's Plays and always secretly hoped that someone would make one of Dodge That Anvil!. He'd never expected to stumble upon such a good one over a decade after the game came out, he said, and it was worth the wait.

Needless to say I was thrilled beyond words that I'd succeeded in my mission of making a definitive Let's Play of a game which the creator himself could be proud of. We got to talking by email and as a token of his appreciation he sent me a package with a physical copy of the game (something I'd never had due to buying it online), the game's soundtrack, and an actual physical hard hat as a humorous reference to a running joke from my Let's Play of how many times I'd lose my hardhat to anvils and need to buy a new one. (I even did my first unboxing video ever with the package to capture my reactions upon opening it.)

Me wearing that hardhat at my job at the YTLA.

After that, I continued on with the game with renewed zeal. The climax of the game's story mode involves travelling to the Moon, but there's an optional Moon Mode that's unlocked after finishing the story that details the process of getting back from the Moon and involves playing on mirror-flipped versions of all the normal levels with low gravity and a space helmet taking the place of the hard hat to allow you to breathe. It starts to drag a bit near the end, but I've always enjoyed the feel of jumping around in low gravity and the usage of names of actual lunar landmarks for the levels.

Anyway, I finally finished Moon Mode (and by extension the story) near the end of November, a little over eight months since I started. It's been a long and sometimes arduous journey; the time I tried and failed one particular bonus challenge a hundred and thirty-eight times in a row comes to mind (Episode 12), or the time I forgot to record audio and had to add as much of the game's audio as I could back in by hand in editing (Episode 26), or the international move that happened two-thirds of the way through, or when I was two levels from the end of Moon Mode and upgrading from Debian stable to Debian testing wiped my save files, or…you get the picture. But on the whole it's been an incredibly rewarding experience and I'm very pleased with myself for having done it; it's something I can look back on and be proud of. It's definitely not a perfect Let's Play (though I like to think it gets better as it goes along), but I think I learned a lot about recording and video editing from the experience, and it pushed me to finally get a real microphone for vocal recordings and stop using my old phone as a makeshift mic.

Me fighting the final boss's ultimate weapon Anvil Prime on the Moon. It's a remarkably tense fight.

I'm not quite done with Dodge That Anvil! yet; near the beginning of January I put together a video of the game's soundtrack (linked at the start of this post) and I have some plans for a future video showing off some of the game's multiple game-changing codes (some of which I don't know that I've ever tried before, and the descriptions are quite intriguing!). For anyone who's interested and has survived this huge post, my full Let's Play playlist can be found here. I hope you enjoy it, and a hui hou!