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.:be A bee.:: Distinction / u19
The project .:be A bee.: by fourteen-year-old pupils Armin Ronacher and Nikolaus Mikschofsky revolves, it is true, around cute little bees, but is a fantastic and complex economic simulation. The main goal of this game is to market one's own honey in a profitable way. Surveying the bees and catering for their training and food are just a few of the duties awaiting the player, while an extraneous beehive adds to the difficulty of these tasks. ".:be A bee.: was developed between November 2002 and March 2003. The idea occurred to us when Niki’s sister got a beehive. We really liked the social life of the bees, and their diligence impressed us. So we launched “Bee Manager 2002”. This was what we first called be a bee. It all began with a simple Qbasic application. Within the same month we ported it all to Delphi. Though here the programming turned out to be a lot more complicated. We developed our own script engine which did the calculations. Displays are up-dated only once a day, but calculations are made every second. The first view was from one fixed camera position and had a single field of vision, which left little scope for action. Perhaps the graphics were, at first glance, somewhat better, but the bees looked out of place and the fun was missing. The next step was to implement the new functions and interiors. At this point, the interiors were still being displayed in the same window as the overall view, which meant you couldn’t see the exterior at all. At the end of January we had the idea for finalcut. finalcut was the name of the previous .:be A bee.: version. This was when we began constructing the first 3-D views of details. Weather effects weren’t implemented yet, so the first 3-D pictures weren’t very good. That we were able to use 3-D pictures at all was thanks to Corel Bryce5. At the time we had 3 PCs at our disposal. We installed the 15-day test version on PC1. On it we designed the bees and the 3-D interior views, these haven’t changed much since v1. This is also when we made the be a bee short film und the Active-4 logo. After 15 days of testing it all out, we were done playing around with 3-D - though we did store the data on our PCs. In January we needed new versions of the pictures. We did the exterior views on PC2. We installed it all there a second time. And this was when the first version of the guidebook evolved. Also the structures for views of details as well as the cinema came into being at this time. The last step was to implement the music and FX parts. Until March 19th we worked on animating the bees which, by the way, was done by Niki." (Armin Ronacher / Nikolaus Mikschofsky) | |
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20.8.2003 |
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© Ars Electronica Linz GmbH, info@aec.at | |||||||||