Commuters are Like Sheep

This is a little random, but I believe right on topic. The Sheep Market is a project paid for by Amazon and made using Processing (P5). I was involved in the Processing community a while back, when P5 was still in alpha release.

In the Sheep Market, there are so many sheep that the cumulative effect is awesome. Each sheep was created by a different random person through a webpage, and when you click on one you can see an animation of the sheep being drawn. Everyone draws a sheep differently. There are 10,000 sheep in all, each a mini story. After watching a couple of sheep being drawn, that cumulative effect becomes even more awesome because all of a sudden you're staring at a huge library of human character studies instead of a huge library of crude drawings.

When you approach the project site, the cumulative effect of all the cars is also awesome - though in a different way. The stream of cars is alienating, for a variety of reasons. And because you can't pick one up and see the character in each, you can't really deal with the reasons you're being alienated. There's no way to see the value in all those people and machines. It's just too random.

10,000 sheep at $0.02 each [The Sheep Market]
Processing, initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas [processing.org]

Unreal Reference

I've been on the hunt lately for good, thorough UT3 reference manuals. Here are a couple good sites which I've had a quick look through. It seems obvious that there is editing, and then there is editing:


A complete kismet reference by the makers of the platform [EpicGames]
Details of something which I very much want to get into: UnrealScript [utwente.nl]
Unreal Wiki [beyondUnreal]
Unreal Developers Forum [beyondUnreal]
A pretty huge list of tutorials all over the web [IceCreamYou]
Player-specific kismet [Epic Forum thread]
Exporting from Max [PlanetUnreal] [waylon-art]


Btw Russell, we were talking about the ability to pull stuff into and out of the internet while in gameplay... At a glance, it looks like the LibHTTP library in UnrealScript might enable it.

This post on the forum looks very interesting, particularly in light of architectural workflow. Imagine if you could meet an engineer in the UT3 model of a building you're designing, while inside the VM collaboratively modify the building's elements, and then have that communicated back to your drawings or BIM.