I think I played, or rather, tried to play Dungeons & Dragons sometime in the late 70’s. Once. Considering I was a Tolkien fan and had read quite a bit of Michael Moorcock‘s “Eternal Champion” stuff (especially Elric), in addition to being an avid reader of Heavy Metal, one would think I was a natural for D&D. But for some reason it didn’t click with me. And from the description of the forthcoming Dungeons & Dragons videogame, it probably won’t be my goblet of tea either. But eventually it might. From this article on C|Net:

Indeed, Tom Nichols, Turbine’s vice president of marketing, said that while it won’t happen in the earliest versions of the game, which is now in beta testing, the hope is that in the not-too-distant future, D&D Online will feature user-created content. That could include such things as custom dungeons and the ability for dungeon masters to manage campaigns rather than groups of players going on quests directed by the game itself.

Did someone say “user-created content”? This sounds like an opportunity to mash-up the technology behind “Spore” (see previous posts: 1, 2) with an established game that needs that kind of flexibility. Now that would pique my interest.

Via Boing Boing comes word of an open source version of Dance Dance Revolution called StepMania. While familiar with Dance Dance, I’ve neither played it nor given it much thought. But this bit over on Boing Boing caught my attention: “Two dance pads plus a USB controller are about $30 (shipping included) on eBay and they work great with Stepmania… even on my Mac.” Wow. That’s inexpensive. Certainly someone out there is modding the Quake 3 source to take advantage of something like this. Keep on the lookout.

The ever-dependable BusinessWeek has an informative article on the growth of Industrial Design in China. For Core77 forum readers, much of this is already known as some knowledgeable forum members have previously posted chunks of the same info online, while some other Western designers have either made the move to China or are trying to find work in China and discussing those things (from salary negotiations to corporate culture). But the article does an excellent job of synthesizing all those bits into a nice whole. From the problems of design piracy and increased offshoring to the Chinese success stories, it wraps a number of issues into an easy-to-read piece. Highly recommended reading.

Let the rest of the net post images of concepts from the big automakers, I have more fun looking at the stuff people do for fun (or their portfolios). I found this one, Nitin Designs “Shakti”, over on the CGTalk forums. I was going to post one of Nitin’s earlier concepts a while back, but never got around to it. You can check out all the images for the above design and read the comments related to it here.

{Image Copyright © 2005 Nitin Khosa/Nitin Design}

By now many of you have heard of Google Earth or MSN Virtual Earth, or seen their images used on the evening news. If not, then you’re probably at least familiar with Yahoo Maps or MapQuest. Well, there’s been plenty of buzz surrounding this stuff, and the MIT Technology Review site has a really nice article explaining it all. So if you’d like to get a better handle on where it came from, what it’s about, and what it could become, then check out “Killer Maps“. That way, when people start annotating real world maps with virtual constructs, you’ll be half way to understanding what’s going on. Can hardly wait for the AR stuff.