20100625
I've been MIA for the past week and a half or so. I guess I've mainly been playing Dawn of War II, but I've also been working with a one, Scot Bailey, on a project that I've titled 'Wall Unit 700'. There's several posts referencing it earlier in the year. So far we have all the fins cut out, and we're figuring out all the steel we need to order. It should be pretty cool. I also have more pictures to put on here, but unfortunately, I can't find the cord that connects my camera to my laptop, so those will have to wait until I can buy a new one.
20100617
No Clipping
The term ‘no clipping’ is a popular misnomer for a cheat in first person video games which disables player/environment collision detection. Put simply, the cheat allows players to fly about and around the built environment: through walls, through ceilings, through floors. The cheat is a misnomer because ‘clipping’ specifically refers to rendering, and not collision detection; however, due to the proliferation of the term, I will use ‘clipping’ to refer to the phenomenon.
The cheat is useful for developers to see the entire level at once and to bypass certain areas for debugging so they don’t have to play the entire game through. What makes this particular cheat interesting is the unique view it gives the average gamer and the parallel that can be drawn between the average person and architecture in general. What the user of a building sees is what the architect wants them to see: the interior and the exterior. However, there is so much more to a building than just those perspectives, and the key to understanding a building more than experiencing one is in drawings.
One of the oldest views used to describe buildings is the section. In a section view, the building is cut at a particular line, and we can then see all the spaces in a vertical orientation, unlike the plan, which shows horizontal orientation of space. In plan, the spaces around the building are the immediate site context, which usually consists of other buildings or streets or the countryside. In a section, however, what’s above the building is sky and what’s below is solid earth, both unusable for human experience. Video games with no clipping turned on give access to these previously unusable areas, and granting unique views of the built environment.
In modern games, the built environment is all you see. Everything that the game wants you to see is on your screen. In this screenshot from Call of Duty: World at War, the no clipping cheat shows the environment as a sectional type drawing, with ambient objects visible and the floor completely gone. It is essentially a mixed plan and section, allowing a better understanding of the level, but no experience.
Final Fantasy VII, released in 1997, takes a different approach to the presentation of the game environment. Instead of the entire level filling the screen, what you get is specific renderings of different rooms. As you move from room to room, the image changes, but as you move within the room, your view stays the same. Sometimes in the environment, such as air ducts and small interiors, the space around the environment is rendered in black, showing that the area is inaccessible. But it not only shows that the area is inaccessible, it reveals how the section of the game world is represented in Final Fantasy, and is certainly more diagrammatic than realistic. No cheat is required to view the level in this manner, it just is presented that way.
In video games, all it takes is a simple cheat code, and the entire environment is digital, and will remain as such. For architecture, however, all drawings have some sort of requirement to be grounded in reality. Structure, enclosure, and gravity are all realities which influence design, representation, and theory in the field. When digital models are made, in game design or architecture, the designer is given the power to design in completely three dimensions with infinite amounts of orbital views. However, as I first mentioned, the user can only experience the building or game environment in a very specific view and dimension. This fact must always be present in the minds of designers, especially with the proliferation of parametric design tools in architecture.
The cheat is useful for developers to see the entire level at once and to bypass certain areas for debugging so they don’t have to play the entire game through. What makes this particular cheat interesting is the unique view it gives the average gamer and the parallel that can be drawn between the average person and architecture in general. What the user of a building sees is what the architect wants them to see: the interior and the exterior. However, there is so much more to a building than just those perspectives, and the key to understanding a building more than experiencing one is in drawings.
One of the oldest views used to describe buildings is the section. In a section view, the building is cut at a particular line, and we can then see all the spaces in a vertical orientation, unlike the plan, which shows horizontal orientation of space. In plan, the spaces around the building are the immediate site context, which usually consists of other buildings or streets or the countryside. In a section, however, what’s above the building is sky and what’s below is solid earth, both unusable for human experience. Video games with no clipping turned on give access to these previously unusable areas, and granting unique views of the built environment.
In modern games, the built environment is all you see. Everything that the game wants you to see is on your screen. In this screenshot from Call of Duty: World at War, the no clipping cheat shows the environment as a sectional type drawing, with ambient objects visible and the floor completely gone. It is essentially a mixed plan and section, allowing a better understanding of the level, but no experience.
Final Fantasy VII, released in 1997, takes a different approach to the presentation of the game environment. Instead of the entire level filling the screen, what you get is specific renderings of different rooms. As you move from room to room, the image changes, but as you move within the room, your view stays the same. Sometimes in the environment, such as air ducts and small interiors, the space around the environment is rendered in black, showing that the area is inaccessible. But it not only shows that the area is inaccessible, it reveals how the section of the game world is represented in Final Fantasy, and is certainly more diagrammatic than realistic. No cheat is required to view the level in this manner, it just is presented that way.
In video games, all it takes is a simple cheat code, and the entire environment is digital, and will remain as such. For architecture, however, all drawings have some sort of requirement to be grounded in reality. Structure, enclosure, and gravity are all realities which influence design, representation, and theory in the field. When digital models are made, in game design or architecture, the designer is given the power to design in completely three dimensions with infinite amounts of orbital views. However, as I first mentioned, the user can only experience the building or game environment in a very specific view and dimension. This fact must always be present in the minds of designers, especially with the proliferation of parametric design tools in architecture.
20100616
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20100603
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