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Wouldn't that make an awesome app, building *real* 3d scenes, and making the models available for export in a variety of formats and with direct-links for popular functions (editing apps, export to popular 3d printing services, etc)?

Look into photogrammetry software like the cloud-based 123D Catch and the defiantly offline Agisoft PhotoScan - they'll turn loads of conventional photos into arbitrary 3D models. The former is probably closest to your request!

I've been playing around with the latter software recently - the required photography is pretty difficult to master, but it's a rather useful tool. Here's a geometry-only render of a statue I scanned as an example - there's a full texture map for the model as well, but this is showing off the frankly implausible levels of geometrical detail you can get from a physical object. (Excuse the noisy crevices - I was shooting hand-held at ~9am in the middle of winter on a cloudy day...) It's terrible at shiny objects (reflections confuse the hell out of it) and system requirements are pretty steep - it'll eat however many CPU and GPU cores you throw at it, and the more memory the better - but the results are well worth it.

For my own use, I was thinking of turning mine into an airplay-compatible receiver (I found that there is software for for that) and built it together with (wifi dongle and a little amp) into a very old radio cabinet. Nice to put in the kitchen.

If your radio is still in semi-working condition, it might be possible to inject the audio signal from the Pi into the radio's existing amplifier. I almost certainly broke all kinds of audio design rules, but in my instance it sounds brilliant. I (briefly) got it working as an Airplay receiver, but for nearly two years it's been doing sterling stuff as a time-delayed BBC Radio 4 device.

(I would definitely recommend against blindly doing this with stuff that's directly mains-powered - I know that a lot of old radios, especially in the USA, did scary things with mains voltages. For a battery-powered transistor radio? Certainly worth a try.)

I've seen so many incredible things looking out of aircraft windows. One vaguely recent example - a crescent moon during a sunrise causing rapidly changing light on the clouds below. And then there's a wintry Iceland with geothermal power stations venting steam, and ice on Lake Michigan reflecting sunlight in abstract ways...

Not sitting next to a window is awful.
 

I've seen so many incredible things looking out of aircraft windows. One vaguely recent example - a crescent moon during a sunrise causing rapidly changing light on the clouds below. And then there's a wintry Iceland with geothermal power stations venting steam, and ice on Lake Michigan reflecting sunlight in abstract ways...

Not sitting next to a window is awful.
 

I've seen so many incredible things looking out of aircraft windows. One vaguely recent example - a crescent moon during a sunrise causing rapidly changing light on the clouds below. And then there's a wintry Iceland with geothermal power stations venting steam, and ice on Lake Michigan reflecting sunlight in abstract ways...

Not sitting next to a window is awful.
 

I've seen so many incredible things looking out of aircraft windows. One vaguely recent example - a crescent moon during a sunrise causing rapidly changing light on the clouds below. And then there's a wintry Iceland with geothermal power stations venting steam, and ice on Lake Michigan reflecting sunlight in abstract ways...

Not sitting next to a window is awful.
 

I travelled with a large external hard disk as well, once - which also got taken to one side and swabbed for stuff. Internal monologue: OH NO MY PRECIOUS DATA ... Oh, it's just the possibility of it being a bomb they're worried about.

On another occasion, I had fun with my home-made, Arduino-powered dSLR timelapse gadget - it got thoroughly inspected by the TSA. I'd already opted out of the backscatter X-ray whatsit, only for a swab-for-explosives test to give a (false-)positive. Eek. Cue being taken to one side, where they looked in my bag and found the timelapse-o-tron...

To give the screeners their due, they let me go after a few minutes - after I'd heard their complaints about the potential radiation doses they and the passengers were receiving from the backscatter X-ray thingers, and after I'd provided advice on what sort of camera to look into buying for a budding photographer.

Security fun elsewhere: carrying a plastic bag of loose change through the Eurostar security in Brussels (it basically looked like an amorphous, completely opaque lump on the X-ray) - and a random customs check at a UK airport giving a (false-)positive swab for some sort of illicit drugs. Eek.

I've got a very-first-generation, USB-hobbled-by-polyfuses-until-I-performed-surgery-on-the-thing 256MB Raspberry Pi. The thing's part of my time-travelling Radio-4-Matic and thus transfers a few gigabytes a day over a little USB WiFi adaptor by streaming radio over the intertubes, buffering it for some hours then playing it back.

Uptime? Right now:
19:12:14 up 52 days, 15:46, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.09, 0.12

Last reboot was for a system upgrade of some description; the things are pretty stable now. (There have been many improvements to the firmware and system software.) My other Pi (a more recent 512MB model) is busy being a tiny home fileserver and virtual server backup device (remote stuff rsyncs over ssh to this thing) - I could easily use a spare PC for those tasks, but the result would be a lot less near-silent and much more power-hungry. Plus it can saturate 100Mbit ethernet with file serving - faster isn't much use when most of my stuff is on WiFi.

Make sure you've got a decent power supply. Apparently voltage drops can be a big source of instabilities. Power for my midget fileserver is via a Samsung cube phone charger; the radio's got a hacked-together DC-DC converter running off a mains-to-12V-DC adaptor. (I'm surprised the thing is as stable as it is, what with it solely relying on my impromptu electronics hackery!)

I've got a very-first-generation, USB-hobbled-by-polyfuses-until-I-performed-surgery-on-the-thing 256MB Raspberry Pi. The thing's part of my time-travelling Radio-4-Matic and thus transfers a few gigabytes a day over a little USB WiFi adaptor by streaming radio over the intertubes, buffering it for some hours then playing it back.

Uptime? Right now:
19:12:14 up 52 days, 15:46, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.09, 0.12

Last reboot was for a system upgrade of some description; the things are pretty stable now. (There have been many improvements to the firmware and system software.) My other Pi (a more recent 512MB model) is busy being a tiny home fileserver and virtual server backup device (remote stuff rsyncs over ssh to this thing) - I could easily use a spare PC for those tasks, but the result would be a lot less near-silent and much more power-hungry. Plus it can saturate 100Mbit ethernet with file serving - faster isn't much use when most of my stuff is on WiFi.

Make sure you've got a decent power supply. Apparently voltage drops can be a big source of instabilities. Power for my midget fileserver is via a Samsung cube phone charger; the radio's got a hacked-together DC-DC converter running off a mains-to-12V-DC adaptor. (I'm surprised the thing is as stable as it is, what with it solely relying on my impromptu electronics hackery!)

I've got a very-first-generation, USB-hobbled-by-polyfuses-until-I-performed-surgery-on-the-thing 256MB Raspberry Pi. The thing's part of my time-travelling Radio-4-Matic and thus transfers a few gigabytes a day over a little USB WiFi adaptor by streaming radio over the intertubes, buffering it for some hours then playing it back.

Uptime? Right now:
19:12:14 up 52 days, 15:46, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.09, 0.12

Last reboot was for a system upgrade of some description; the things are pretty stable now. (There have been many improvements to the firmware and system software.) My other Pi (a more recent 512MB model) is busy being a tiny home fileserver and virtual server backup device (remote stuff rsyncs over ssh to this thing) - I could easily use a spare PC for those tasks, but the result would be a lot less near-silent and much more power-hungry. Plus it can saturate 100Mbit ethernet with file serving - faster isn't much use when most of my stuff is on WiFi.

Make sure you've got a decent power supply. Apparently voltage drops can be a big source of instabilities. Power for my midget fileserver is via a Samsung cube phone charger; the radio's got a hacked-together DC-DC converter running off a mains-to-12V-DC adaptor. (I'm surprised the thing is as stable as it is, what with it solely relying on my impromptu electronics hackery!)

A couple of years ago I modified my old EOS 350D, replacing the IR-blocking hot mirror in front of the sensor with a filter that only allows IR through. I've taken loads of photos with it since then (please excuse the increasingly crap Flickr) - pretty much all hand-held with available light. Depending on the conditions (metering still works on visible light) I might be +1 or +2 stops up on typical outdoors scenes, while -1 or -2 stops down on near-IR-bright scenes like under forest canopies.

Images are generally pretty much direct from camera, all using the same white balance (set off a piece of white paper under tungsten light when I first did the conversion) - blue tones vaguely correspond with longer wavelengths. In-camera contrast is whacked up to the maximum, but little else. (The custom white balance is kind of weird - with a 'normal' setting, pictures come out looking fluorescent pink.)

I haven't noticed any magical see-through-clothes abilities from the camera, although I haven't really checked...

I put my Raspberry Pi in a box and it appeared on national radio. :-(

(Full documentation here. It's a 1970s transistor radio with WiFi, streaming Radio 4 over a SSH tunnel to the UK, time-delaying audio playback by eight hours or so, in order that everything gets played back at the correct local time in Seattle.)

I put my Raspberry Pi in a box and it appeared on national radio. :-(

(Full documentation here. It's a 1970s transistor radio with WiFi, streaming Radio 4 over a SSH tunnel to the UK, time-delaying audio playback by eight hours or so, in order that everything gets played back at the correct local time in Seattle.)

I agree. Get an Arduino Uno at first and then you'll start to get a sense of what direction you want to move in from there.

Agreed also. I started off with an Arduino nearly two years ago, and learned a lot of electronics and C/C++ building a camera timelapse gadget. (Videos here!)

The community is definitely incredibly helpful, and if you're trying to do something there's a good chance someone's done aspects of it already. Plus the limited platform means it's difficult to get too sidetracked, and you pretty much have to build things in an efficient manner. It's built over that pretty standard AVR stuff too, so implementing your own Arduino-alike hardware is frighteningly simple.

The ecosystem of Arduino shields is pretty amazing, but often a bit on the expensive and unwieldy side - for example, paying a fair amount for WiFi when an Arduino can barely handle a single connection, or full-colour backlit LCDs when the thing has almost no RAM - at some point you're going to have to make the leap to a Raspberry Pi or similar if projects are heading that way. I built a ridiculous time-travelling radio around a Pi, using some pretty standard UNIXy stuff which would have been impossible on an Arduino.

On the other hand, I've seen many learning projects built with Raspberry Pis which would be far better suited to Arduinos - the Arduino has no real operating system, just the (tiny) bootloader and the standard libraries that get linked in, so it's extremely difficult to break a working, embedded setup. My timelapse gadget? Ideal. Starts almost instantly, has no easy-to-corrupt storage - think of the Arduino as programmable electronics glue. Whereas the Pi is more like software glue - if you need a tiny UNIX box doing software-type stuff, potentially interfacing with the real world, then the Pi and friends win hands-down.

I agree. Get an Arduino Uno at first and then you'll start to get a sense of what direction you want to move in from there.

Agreed also. I started off with an Arduino nearly two years ago, and learned a lot of electronics and C/C++ building a camera timelapse gadget. (Videos here!)

The community is definitely incredibly helpful, and if you're trying to do something there's a good chance someone's done aspects of it already. Plus the limited platform means it's difficult to get too sidetracked, and you pretty much have to build things in an efficient manner. It's built over that pretty standard AVR stuff too, so implementing your own Arduino-alike hardware is frighteningly simple.

The ecosystem of Arduino shields is pretty amazing, but often a bit on the expensive and unwieldy side - for example, paying a fair amount for WiFi when an Arduino can barely handle a single connection, or full-colour backlit LCDs when the thing has almost no RAM - at some point you're going to have to make the leap to a Raspberry Pi or similar if projects are heading that way. I built a ridiculous time-travelling radio around a Pi, using some pretty standard UNIXy stuff which would have been impossible on an Arduino.

On the other hand, I've seen many learning projects built with Raspberry Pis which would be far better suited to Arduinos - the Arduino has no real operating system, just the (tiny) bootloader and the standard libraries that get linked in, so it's extremely difficult to break a working, embedded setup. My timelapse gadget? Ideal. Starts almost instantly, has no easy-to-corrupt storage - think of the Arduino as programmable electronics glue. Whereas the Pi is more like software glue - if you need a tiny UNIX box doing software-type stuff, potentially interfacing with the real world, then the Pi and friends win hands-down.

Greetings from Europe, where I hope we finally stop listening to crazy people over the big pond.

Greetings from a European who has been shouted at by Polish military police for taking photos of their vital security apparatus!

(Also, some of the locations I've been caught in may not have been public places...)

I had this device discovered in my backpack during a TSA extra-gropey our-explosives-detector-machine-has-beeped secondary inspection. It was powered down, but it actually is a hacked-together, home-made gadget for triggering an external unit.

The TSA agents responsible were grumbling about having to work next to the ineffectual backscatter X-ray scanners (I'd opted out), and were interested in what camera equipment I had and what I'd recommend for a beginner. Many of the agents are human, and sick to death of the security theatre they have to work with.

(As a photographer who likes taking pictures of weird bits of crumbling infrastructure, I've had plenty of run-ins with security guards and the like. Oddly, I've never been arrested.)

Wondering what else I could do with the stuff I assembled in Hugin, I put together a quick interactive version of the panorama. Requires a recent browser with WebGL support - uses the open-source Pannellum as the viewer.

Top-left here.

(Of note - the raw images got released quite a few hours before the official stitched version did. So a bunch of amateurs including myself and others used various panorama-assembling software to assemble our own, unofficial stitched versions. Seeing Curiosity like this before pretty much everyone else was great...)

Handy!

I wrote a slightly longer script to do the same (in PHP, stop laughing) to do some large-scale 'scanning' from public transit in Seattle. Firstly, I need a camera with a higher framerate (60fps isn't really enough) and secondly, I need to lock exposure, white balance and so on. But the very first attempt turned out quite well.

Exactly. I ship expensive electronics (scientific equipment) by container ship all the time. It's not that big a deal.

Actually, come to think of it, the only thing of mine that did get slightly damaged was an old Soviet microscope. Primarily because some idiot (i.e. me) forgot to bolt it into its carrying case, allowing it to rattle around inside.

(Good news - the heavy-duty Soviet engineering meant just the monocular head was very slightly bent. I hope I didn't damage the cargo ship, however...)

I ordered on the same launch day - and had a Raspberry Pi arrive in the US in early May. And the following day had a second Raspberry Pi arrive. Oops.

(Wracked with guilt, I donated the second one to the Raspbian project, which is a nifty recompilation of Debian to take full advantage of the Pi's FPU. On floating-point-heavy stuff, there are quite dramatic improvements...)

If you haven't played it already, take a look at Minerva. You can get it from its own website or even as featured mod on Steam.

What about their, um, minor billing issues earlier this year?

Yes, um, what about those billing issues?

The link you posted does actually say that the issue was resolved on the same day. What is your point? To sum up, Dreamhost had a problem. They admitted it, fixed it, explained what went wrong, and what they're doing so it won't happen again, and finally they apologized.

Show me a company that has never made a billing mistake at one time or another. Better yet, show me another company that rectifies mistakes, when they happen to occur, as graciously as Dreamhost.

If they had a track record of making billing mistakes, you might have had a point. Instead, you come off sounding like a political agenda pusher who causes a big stink because a politician may, or may not, have had a puff of weed in college. Get over it.

Over the 5+ years I have been a customer with them, they have been exceptionally reliable.

What about their, um, minor billing issues earlier this year?

They have loads of features, yes - but reliability often hasn't been high on the agenda, assuming it's been on the agenda at all. Random outages lasting much of the day, the aforementioned billing issues, you name it. Cheap, cheerful and easy to do stuff with, but don't use it for anything remotely serious.

Plus, my IMAP email stuff is about eleventy billion times faster and more reliable since I moved to a virtual server somewhere else entirely.

When Mr Security says "I'll take your camera" you say "just fucking try" and if they don't go off to get their superior then you call your lawyer.

Or, don't. Many of these photographer-versus-security-guard altercations appear to involve photographers immediately acting up with shrill "I KNOW MY RIGHTS!!!!1" tirades against said guards. Okay, you may well be correct, but you're only going to escalate the situation.

I've found that apologising, immediately moving to put the camera away and politely providing a brief explanation of what I was doing can work wonders - the other week, I ended up being given a potted history and miniature tour of some old industrial architecture by the people working there, and was provided with recommendations of where else to look at.

Actually engaging with your subject (or inhabitants thereof) and not acting like a total nob is great. And even if the person telling you continues to be unpleasant, defusing the situation, going somewhere else and getting the camera out again works okay...

(Mr. Hawk is a complete pansy, anyway - was he shouted at by Polish military personnel for taking photos of their security arrangements? Okay, it was their ridiculously fluffy, damp and grumpy-looking guard dog I'd taken a photo of, and taking pictures of such stuff in Poland is now legal anyway, but the politely-apologise, put-camera-into-bag-and-walk-away route worked just fine...)

Can someone explain to me what Aperture is, what a "raw photo editor" is, and how a "photo manager" differs from a "file manager"? Thanks.

Screenshots might help - basically it's a file manager with additional sorting, filtering and whatnot designed for organising photos. Here's Lightroom's library view as an example - I've filtered to show only photos I've given three stars or more, and selected one so you can see all the keywords and other metadata assigned to that photo. All searchable, sortable, filterable and so on!

With regard to editing, here's a screenshot from the develop view. All the edits are non-destructive - you can see a history on the left. 'RAW' refers to the image from the camera being in an unprocessed, raw-data-from-image-sensor format, which gives you a bit more latitude in tweaking white balance, contrast, exposure and the like.

(I don't normally shoot 'RAW', but my once-in-a-lifetime shipyard visit coincided with some utterly horrendous weather - getting just the right exposure in unlit, semi-derelict Eastern European industrial buildings at 7am on a cold, dark, wintry morning proved a little tricky at times... ;-] )

Can someone explain to me what Aperture is, what a "raw photo editor" is, and how a "photo manager" differs from a "file manager"? Thanks.

Screenshots might help - basically it's a file manager with additional sorting, filtering and whatnot designed for organising photos. Here's Lightroom's library view as an example - I've filtered to show only photos I've given three stars or more, and selected one so you can see all the keywords and other metadata assigned to that photo. All searchable, sortable, filterable and so on!

With regard to editing, here's a screenshot from the develop view. All the edits are non-destructive - you can see a history on the left. 'RAW' refers to the image from the camera being in an unprocessed, raw-data-from-image-sensor format, which gives you a bit more latitude in tweaking white balance, contrast, exposure and the like.

(I don't normally shoot 'RAW', but my once-in-a-lifetime shipyard visit coincided with some utterly horrendous weather - getting just the right exposure in unlit, semi-derelict Eastern European industrial buildings at 7am on a cold, dark, wintry morning proved a little tricky at times... ;-] )

I love bad reviews, especially those dripping with badly-spelled verbal venom. Here are some choice quotations from random forum postings about my own MINERVA mod for Half-Life 2:

lighting was fucking shit, its just like these other fucking mappers making maps extremely fucking dark

Despite the website that oozes more angst and self-hatred than an emo concert at an emo convention, this is worth downloading.

Was anybody else annoyed by those frequent messages? That pompous, cliche tone gave the sense that a smarmy Brit with two dictionaries, three encylopedias and a latin textbook shoved up his ******* was faxing you orders.

i made a box map with a giant penis that has better lighting that this shit

Besides, the content of the website is overly presumptuous, overloaded with vague metaphors, random big words and allusions to irrelevant Greek myths, as if they were talking about anything but a second-rate Half-Life 2 mod.

Strangely, nobody's yet told me it's rubbish in an email. I must try harder.

umm...ok, I have a healthy platter on my desk.

umm...ok, I have a healthy platter on my desk.

umm...ok, I have a healthy platter on my desk.

Ooer ... there's my own WAD in there too. Five maps of single-player mayhem, for Doom 2. Released over nine years ago, which was pretty late by Doom standards...

If you want something a bit more modern, there's always this for Half-Life, and this for Half-Life 2: Episode One (Liverpool nil). And some reviews!

Aaaand ... some bonus Quake!

Ahem. That's quite enough links, I reckon!

Ooer ... there's my own WAD in there too. Five maps of single-player mayhem, for Doom 2. Released over nine years ago, which was pretty late by Doom standards...

If you want something a bit more modern, there's always this for Half-Life, and this for Half-Life 2: Episode One (Liverpool nil). And some reviews!

Aaaand ... some bonus Quake!

Ahem. That's quite enough links, I reckon!

Wishing doesn't make it true: http://www.hylobatidae.org/misc/photoshop.jpg.

The deal with Macs is that ALL windows associated with an application come to focus if you select one of them. This can piss me off as I only wanted *one* terminal window, not *all* of them to come to the front. But this behavior is not specific to Photoshop but rather to MacOS.

My understanding is that the multi window interface is actually very similar to Photoshop on the MAC.

My understanding is that the multi window interface is actually very similar to Photoshop on the MAC.

Oh and GIMPs font rendering leaves a LOT to be desired.

Oh and GIMPs font rendering leaves a LOT to be desired.

I took these pictures of last year's March 3rd lunar eclipse in the UK with a Canon EOS 350D and the 70-300mm IS lens. Exposure? Initially, 1/320s, f8, ISO 200 - and eclipsed, around 1/30s, f5.6, ISO 1600.

(Something about telling myself OH YOU SILLY TWIT REMEMBER TO TAKE YOUR TRIPOD WITH YOU NEXT TIME - the shots were all hand-held! It's pretty straightforward to get some half-decent pictures, and with a bit of work some excellent pictures are there for the taking. Hope the weather's good - it was utterly fantastic for the eclipse I saw...)

While we're on the subject of Atari keyboards, the keyboard on the Atari ST deserves at least an honorable mention in this worst of list. The layout wasn't insane. The suckiness of this keyboard was both subtle and gross. On the gross side, they had a very mushy feel with no tactile feedback.

All that really means is a license change and, well, in the meantime, didn't everybody already kinda move to WordPress anyhow?

All that really means is a license change and, well, in the meantime, didn't everybody already kinda move to WordPress anyhow?

So what do I want instead? Give me environments! Give me worlds! I want freedom to explore, to find out of the way nooks and crannys, and more than one way of getting from point A to B. I want to solve problems using logic, not by playing "guess what the game designer wanted me to do or go next"? Game designers: Create a living, breathing, interesting world, and then let your players enjoy their time here. Stop shoving the player along a conveyor belt.

I wouldn't describe myself as a level designer, rather just a mapper (or map designer if I want to sound posh). But I've made the moderately popular MINERVA single-player mod for Half-Life 2, which people keep claiming is quite good - it's got an interesting world to explore (if you can see it in the distance, you can get there pretty much always), and while it's fairly linear it does have a couple of branches, double-backs and efficient use of architecture. It's definitely not a long, solitary corridor with no turning back...

The book review is interesting because the book sounds like it's managing to focus on things which I've never really thought about - I've never decided to build ' Also in my eyes, parts of the list are the wrong way round - don't take the chapters' ordering as some kind of specified route as to how things must be constructed, rather than aspects to the whole process. Theirs:

• "Defining the Game"
• "Enemies and Obstacles: Choosing Your Challenges"
• "Brainstorming Your Level Ideas" ... "delves into the creation of concept sketches and reference images, the creation of a level's storyline, the drafting of a level description and the design of the puzzles and scripted sequences within the level"
• "Designing With a Diagram" ... "the scope and order of levels within the game" ... "lay it out in diagram format by creating a grid"
• "The Template"
• "Improving Your Level,"
• "Taking It to 11" ... "architectural style, the addition of details like trim and borders, the appropriate use of textures and props, and the like"
• "Ship it!"

My utterly awkward route:

• Think of a setting. Metastasis was basically ISLAND!, while the upcoming Out of Time is CITY! - this helps with...
• Think of an ending. This is the most important part of the whole experience, and will define the beginning. For Metastasis, the beginning is basically the reverse of the ending.
• Think of a middle, and of the whole plotline. This defines what the available enemies will be (the selection needs to be plausible to fit into the plotline - no striders 500m underground, or zombies wandering around a tightly controlled and maintained Combine facility).
• Define and build the architecture. Build it appropriate to the setting and plotline, and with an eye on enhancing details which provide interesting gameplay. You know the beginning and end, so you need something to constantly drive the player towards the ending. Give them something to fight for, and they will. Pull, don't push. Metastasis's architecture changes throughout - and tells a lot of the story though how things are constructed. The game is a result of the architecture, not the other way round. I've got some ideas involving architectural styles imparting major themes and plot-points in Out of Time too - except this time it's borrowed from different areas of the real-world Warsaw...
• While doing all that, add the gameplay! In Metastasis, there was a section which I never bothered adding any enemies to - it was far too atmospheric and interesting just wandering through a seemingly abandoned World War Two-era base to spoil. If I'd decided 'NEED COMBAT-FREE SECTION NOW' before I'd bu

So what do I want instead? Give me environments! Give me worlds! I want freedom to explore, to find out of the way nooks and crannys, and more than one way of getting from point A to B. I want to solve problems using logic, not by playing "guess what the game designer wanted me to do or go next"? Game designers: Create a living, breathing, interesting world, and then let your players enjoy their time here. Stop shoving the player along a conveyor belt.

I wouldn't describe myself as a level designer, rather just a mapper (or map designer if I want to sound posh). But I've made the moderately popular MINERVA single-player mod for Half-Life 2, which people keep claiming is quite good - it's got an interesting world to explore (if you can see it in the distance, you can get there pretty much always), and while it's fairly linear it does have a couple of branches, double-backs and efficient use of architecture. It's definitely not a long, solitary corridor with no turning back...

The book review is interesting because the book sounds like it's managing to focus on things which I've never really thought about - I've never decided to build ' Also in my eyes, parts of the list are the wrong way round - don't take the chapters' ordering as some kind of specified route as to how things must be constructed, rather than aspects to the whole process. Theirs:

• "Defining the Game"
• "Enemies and Obstacles: Choosing Your Challenges"
• "Brainstorming Your Level Ideas" ... "delves into the creation of concept sketches and reference images, the creation of a level's storyline, the drafting of a level description and the design of the puzzles and scripted sequences within the level"
• "Designing With a Diagram" ... "the scope and order of levels within the game" ... "lay it out in diagram format by creating a grid"
• "The Template"
• "Improving Your Level,"
• "Taking It to 11" ... "architectural style, the addition of details like trim and borders, the appropriate use of textures and props, and the like"
• "Ship it!"

My utterly awkward route:

• Think of a setting. Metastasis was basically ISLAND!, while the upcoming Out of Time is CITY! - this helps with...
• Think of an ending. This is the most important part of the whole experience, and will define the beginning. For Metastasis, the beginning is basically the reverse of the ending.
• Think of a middle, and of the whole plotline. This defines what the available enemies will be (the selection needs to be plausible to fit into the plotline - no striders 500m underground, or zombies wandering around a tightly controlled and maintained Combine facility).
• Define and build the architecture. Build it appropriate to the setting and plotline, and with an eye on enhancing details which provide interesting gameplay. You know the beginning and end, so you need something to constantly drive the player towards the ending. Give them something to fight for, and they will. Pull, don't push. Metastasis's architecture changes throughout - and tells a lot of the story though how things are constructed. The game is a result of the architecture, not the other way round. I've got some ideas involving architectural styles imparting major themes and plot-points in Out of Time too - except this time it's borrowed from different areas of the real-world Warsaw...
• While doing all that, add the gameplay! In Metastasis, there was a section which I never bothered adding any enemies to - it was far too atmospheric and interesting just wandering through a seemingly abandoned World War Two-era base to spoil. If I'd decided 'NEED COMBAT-FREE SECTION NOW' before I'd bu

Bah. For my thirteenth birthday, I got money towards a microscope. Not any old microscope, mind - but one sold by a local scientific supplies outlet. (The vast, thousand-page catalogue was also great - full of proper laboratory supplies of every possible description!)

It was made in the Soviet Union. Unpacking it from its elastic bands, crinkly yellow-brown paper and unprocessed cotton wool was a fantastic experience.

I've still got it, too - and only realised a month or two back that its LOMO manufacturer is that LOMO - all I can say is that its optics are way better than the cameras...

Five or six years ago, I strapped a tiny composite video camera to it with an intriguing assembly created out of Lego. I got some half-decent results, too. Having said that, I'd still love one of these modern toy efforts. Lugging around a huge box filled with cast-iron optics isn't so much fun nowadays... ;-)

Got a copy of Episode One, and want some more single-player Half-Life 2 before going all orangey with the Orange Box on Wednesday?

I prescribe my own MINERVA, complete with needlessly cryptic website.

Random games journalist types are quite keen on it. No bribery was involved whatsoever, honest. Other links? Wikipedia! My blog-thing! ... Um ... Valve Developer Community! Even Steam!

Described by random inhabitants of the internet as having: "extremely bad writing", with "some of the most dreadfully boring environments you'll ever see" - the "puzzles and triggers in the game are horrific", and "combat is done exactly the wrong way" - what are you waiting for?

Got a copy of Episode One, and want some more single-player Half-Life 2 before going all orangey with the Orange Box on Wednesday?

I prescribe my own MINERVA, complete with needlessly cryptic website.

Random games journalist types are quite keen on it. No bribery was involved whatsoever, honest. Other links? Wikipedia! My blog-thing! ... Um ... Valve Developer Community! Even Steam!

Described by random inhabitants of the internet as having: "extremely bad writing", with "some of the most dreadfully boring environments you'll ever see" - the "puzzles and triggers in the game are horrific", and "combat is done exactly the wrong way" - what are you waiting for?