Ideas for my Dissertation?

Hi,



Last year I started my dissertation for my university course, the course is Computer Science: Games Development and for the dissertation I just had to have an academically viable area of research that I could write a report on (~10,000 words) and produce a software prototype. What I decided upon was "An indepth study in Dynamic Audio in Computer Games", with my prototype focusing on using the principles of chaos theory to produce music in realt-time (only Midi) during gameplay that would change depending on the gameplay. I then decided to defer my final year due to family stuff and will be starting the whole year again from this september. This gives me the oppurtunity to not only start again with a new dissertation but also get a head start on it before I actually start uni again.



One of my ideas was to do something with Augmented Reality but now I'm not so sure, so if you have any ideas what so ever please post them, basically I now want to use jME to do something as it looks amazing.



Many thanks



Graham

Humm, one thing I can think of right now is "volumetric geometries".



Imagine a geometry of a wall. What happens when you hit it with, lets say, a car?

1 - Apply a decal?

2 - Destroy it in some pre-defined fashion?

3 - Model it as separate breakable physical objects?



These are the "hacked" ideas that everybody tend to use.



What if you could "remodel" the geometry on the fly based on collision information. The idea is to augument some geometries with more material information such as density, hardness, etc, and sculp new polygons (extrude, scale, extrude again, move, etc…), apply new textures and recaulculate physics geometries. Everything on the fly.



There´s a lot of things that can be done and this is still an open area in academia, with some things published, but no final words.

I like the idea, definitely sounds interesting and will place it on my list of possibilities but I think I want something that focuses less on the graphics side of things. Plus one of the main reasons I struggled with the dynamic audio project was the lack of material focusing on it, most of the academic stuff regarding dynamic music was too subjective rather than technical and there wasn't much at all about using chaos theory for music in computer games which made the literature review very difficult. The software part of it was going pretty well. So with your idea I may end up with the same problem of less than adequate academic papers on it.

Well, that's the reason I told you the idea. If there are few papers, it is a good area to start exploring and try to place your flag on…:slight_smile:

you may also think about physical sound creation… heard once of it, and found it quite interesting.

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/kvdoel/publications/denDoel_Pai.pdf

cool, that would be quite interesting i think.

i was wondering the other day how and what sounds to add the the physics playground.

@perick



The problem is that without sufficient academic material on the subject I am unable to write a literature review which is a big part of the dissertation.



@.:emp…imm0|82:.



I really like the sound (pun intended :slight_smile: ) of that idea and will again be placed on my list of possibles.



@everyone



I will be having a meeting on the 9th with my tutor to discuss all my ideas and choose a suitable one so if anyone else has any ideas then please list them. Whomevers one I choose can have their name in my dissertation if they want on an "Inspired by…" line if they so desire :slight_smile: Now if that doesn't persuade people to give me ideas I don't know what will.

Ah yea I read a bit about cellular automaton functions during the initial stages of my dissertation as a possibility for dynamic music creation so yea it is another good and interesting possibility :slight_smile:

Are you talking about a doctoral dissertation, btw? (if yes, why do you call it "final year" - doctoral dissertations incl. research take 4-5 years here)

This is just a one year thing that takes the place of two individual modules. I still have the other normal 6 modules aswell. It's not like a PHd where that's the only thing I would do for 3 years or however long those are.

n1 thx … will be a good bedside reading :slight_smile: