America's Army

- Created in 2002, geared toward video gamers as a tool to generate new recruits
- Realistic, first person shooter, online multiplayer game
- Focuses on teamwork
- Not a substitue for real-world training, but helpful in familiarizing soldiers with layout, scenarios, etc.
- Photorealism is central to game
- Breathing, injuries, ect. all affect the character's performance
- Soldiers creed: a set of ethical guidelines for how to behave as a soldier

World of WarCraft

Visual Aspects

Fantasy characters
- appearance: blue skin, glowing eyes, powerful weapons, etc.
- illustrate power, importance, strength, beauty

Magic
- glowing colors, especially green

Landscape
- unusual colors draw attention to areas you want players to look at
- supernatural aspects portrayed differently; often bleak, gloomy

Project Update

I have added the necessary pages to my SC economic history website, so that there is now a page for each link. For some reason, however, the table containing the links has shifted, causing the positioning to become unbalanced. Hopefully this will be easy enough to fix. I still need to enter the actual text, charts, etc. onto each page, and I also need to find other sites with additional information to link from my site. Entering the analysis and interpretation of economic data (the bulk of the information on the site) will take some time, but I feel like I am progressing at an appropriate pace.

Computer Graphics

Realistic, high-tech animation is infiltrating our world. From video games and internet applications to commercial advertisments and feature film productions, photo-realism of animation is a provokative new outlet for visual communication. Programs such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro employ a graphical user interface (GUI) which allows users to digitally manipulate images, essentially blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.

- gameplay
- graphic
- first computer game developed: tic-tac-toe
- EDSAC - (military missile targeting??)
- 1948 - Wilkes developed first computer
- three countries developed computers almost simultaneously during this time (usa, england, germany). computers were almost identical in the way they functioned.
- Space War - "granddaddy of all modern computer games"; first multiplayer game, networked
- Chess - "Deep Blue" was IBM's computer which first beat a chess grand master
- Toomraider became a big hit partially because it gave a 3rd person perspective of a sexy avatar
- many computers now have a separate processor dedicated to video games

Visual Project - Progress Report

The development of my website has made significant progression. Although it doesn't appear to be very far along at present, most of my effort has been spent learning how to use the composer software. The content I am using for the site is gathered in an electronic portfolio, which can be accessed at:

http://bb.clemson.edu/webapps/bbcms/portfolio/viewPortfolio.jsp?pid=_15351_

If you log into Blackboard, you can view the shared portfolio under the "content collection" tab. Click on "received portfolios" and select "South Carolina Economic History" to view the files.

As for the site itself, I have been using a free program called SeaMonkey Composer to design the page. While it was fairly difficult to learn at first, I am now familiar the the process of using tables to layout various content areas. With this accomplished, I am able to make progress at a more rapid pace. The economics department is still using a remote server to store its content (http://clemsoneconomics.org/), therefore I am still waiting for a public folder on the Clemson network in which to store the files for my page. This should be taken care of soon; if not, the department should be able to link my page from its remote server. The work published thus far can be viewed at:

http://people.clemson.edu/~jcourtn/South_Carolina_Economic_History.html.

By the week's end, I would like to have the transportation and ports sections completed along with the welcome page. The narrative-style textual content, written by myself and coworkers, is included in the various files stored in my electronic portfolio. This will need editing and formatting, which can be done in the later stage of development. For now, my focus is to get everything posted to the site so it can be arranged in proper layout form.

CSI: Production Analysis

Last week in class, we watched an episode of CSI - Las Vegas. Although it was entertaining, the focus of this activity was to observe the production aspects of the program, including visual elements and the "made for television" plot structure.

Notes...

Project Update

At present, I am in the process of completing the Welcome page for my South Carolina Economic History website. The composer program I am working with is not as user-friendly as I had hoped it to be. I am considering switching to a different application. Nevertheless, the Wecome page will be completed later today, and I will post the link here in the blog.