On Crane Simulators and Game Creators

Attached here is the last of my Seattle pictures. I took this out of the car window while being driven to the airport and having a lengthy conversation about the incompetence of Seattle's administration. The woman who was driving had strong opinions about the general inability of the government to get anything done -- they always had to commission byzantine and expensive studies to convince themselves that it was a good idea before they could actually do anything.

The picture is of the docks, and was taken as we were driving along a raised highway. The huge bird-like orange contraptions are cranes; they're probably about 15 stories high, and are used for unloading the enormous containers used on cargo ships. This photo was taken the same day as the one below -- as you can tell, the weather got a lot worse.

Anyway, I was a little surprised to find myself chatting about cranes just a few days ago. I was at a housewarming party for my roommate's uncle, and several of the people there were game developers, ranging from professional to amateur. One of the guys developed crane simulators for his day job. Now, you might hear "crane simulator" and think of something like a flight simulator -- and you'd be close. The difference is that the crane simulator is huge. Think of a giant dome ten stories high, with an actual complete crane chassis sitting inside, complete with vibrators to simulate high winds and enormous projectors to cover the interior of the dome with a virtual harbor to practice on. I showed that guy the picture I took in Seattle, and he sort of smiled and said "yup, that's them."

Of course, most of what we talked about was making video games. There's an indie game developer night coming up sometime in April, and I'm trying to have something ready to show off for a change. Ammon has most of next week off, and we're going to stick our collective heads together and (hopefully) develop something fun. We'll see.

That is, if I can persuade him to tear himself away from dofus for a little while...