Publications
Books
Een barbecue met 100 Chinese meiden
Een barbecue met 100 Chinese meiden. Een treinrit door de sneeuw. Een duik in het diepe. Een trekking door modderige rijstvelden. Een zoektocht naar wilde dieren. Een ontdekkingstocht door adembenemende tempels. Een boottocht naar het paradijs. Een fietstocht over het platteland. Een wandeling over een mijnenveld.
In 170 dagen kan veel gebeuren.
Kerst vieren in de jungle. Bakken op een tropisch eiland. Slenteren over de markt. Wandelen tussen wolkenkrabbers. Slapen in de boomtoppen. Knuffelen met tijgers. Bidden met de monniken. Oog in oog staan met gruwelijkheden. Feesten op het strand. Oversteken tussen tientallen brommers. Rondstampen met olifanten.
In 170 dagen kan heel veel gebeuren.
Nieuwe landen ontdekken. Nieuwe steden verkennen. Nieuwe culturen leren kennen. Nieuwe mensen ontmoeten. Nieuw voedsel leren eten. Nieuwe talen leren spreken. Nieuw natuurschoon bewonderen. Nieuwe gewoontes aannemen. Nieuwe geuren opsnuiven. Nieuwe ervaringen opdoen.
In 170 dagen kan heel erg veel gebeuren.
In dit boek neemt Jassin Kessing de lezer mee op een groot avontuur door verrassend Azië. Stap in zijn voetsporen en ervaar zelf het machtige China, het mystieke Tibet, het hippe Hong Kong, het fascinerende Vietnam, het ontspannen Laos, het roerige Cambodja en het stralende Thailand!
Azië 2.0
Bijzondere bezoekjes, doldwaze dansjes, fantastische families, flitsende festivals, geschminkte geisha’s, klassieke kleding, komische kinderen, mediterende monniken, melige mensen, Spartaanse scholen, voortreffende voorstellingen, vrolijke vrijwilligers en een warm weerzien.
Akelige apen, dreigende draken, hordes hanen, irritante insecten, koppige koeien, massa’s muggen, veelkleurige vissen en vliegende vlinders.
Boeiende beelden, dunbevolkte dorpjes, geurige gerechten, glorieuze geschiedenis, grootse gebouwen, halve huizen, Hollandse historie, klassieke kastelen, kleurrijke koepels, lichtgevende lantaarns, machtige metropolen, majestueuze markten, puike plaatsen, smakelijke sushi, stinkende steden, tropische tuinen, trotse tempels, verraderlijk vervoer, waardeloze wegen en zalige zwemlocaties.
Beeldschone bergen, betoverende bloemetjes, bloeiende bloesem, hoge heuvels, levendige landschappen, prachtige parken, reusachtige regenwouden, stralende stranden, vurige vulkanen, warme wateren, woeste wandelingen en zinderende zonsondergangen.
Na Een barbecue met 100 Chinese meiden keert Jassin Kessing terug naar het adembenemende Azië! Azië 2.0 beschrijft alle avonturen van een prachtige reis van 199 dagen door de Filippijnen, Japan, Zuid-Korea, Indonesië, Maleisië, Singapore en Nepal!
Thesis
Services in Game Worlds: A Semantic Approach to Improve Object Interaction
Delft University of Technology, 2009
To increase a player’s immersion in the game world, its objects should behave as one would reasonably expect. For this, it is now becoming increasingly clear that what game objects really miss is richer semantics, not eye-catching visuals. Current games’ lack of semantics is mostly due to the complexity of designing semantic objects. If game designers would have to design all semantics by themselves, and game programmers would have to implement the handling of these semantics, game development time would increase enormously. The goal of this research is to improve the semantics of game objects (or more properly, entities) in virtual worlds, resulting in more and better object interaction in games. This thesis proposes a solution in the form of services, describing interaction possibilities between entities, and a structure that makes it easier to specify them. An example of this is the service of a vending machine, which exchanges a coin supplied by a player for a soda. By introducing several components, such as classes, attributes and actions, a service is defined as the capacity of an entity to perform a particular action, possibly subject to some requirements. To incrementally specify and add services to game objects, a three-phased methodology is presented. This approach has been implemented and validated by means of a prototype system, which enables a simple and intuitive definition of services in an integrated environment. By using two different editors, services can be defined during the game development process. In turn, a semantics engine is charged with all service handling during a game itself. It is concluded that if game designers are presented with the tools to easily add semantics to game objects, these objects become aware of their services, therefore facilitating more and better object interaction, resulting in a much deeper gameplay experience than in current games.
Papers
Services in Game Worlds: A Semantic Approach to Improve Object Interaction
Jassin Kessing, Tim Tutenel, and Rafael Bidarra
Proceedings of the International Conference on Entertainment Computing, 2009
To increase a player’s immersion in the game world, its objects should behave as one would reasonably expect. For this, it is now becoming increasingly clear that what game objects really miss is richer semantics, not eye-catching visuals. Current games’ lack of semantics is mostly due to the difficulty of game designers to realize such complex objects. This paper proposes a solution to this problem in the form of services, characterizing classes of game objects. An example of this is the service of a vending machine, which exchanges a coin for a soda. A three-phased methodology is presented to incrementally specify and add services to game objects. This approach has been implemented and validated by means of a prototype system, which enables a simple and intuitive definition of services in an integrated environment. It is concluded that game objects aware of their services facilitate more and better object interaction, therefore improving gameplay as well.
Designing semantic game worlds
Jassin Kessing, Tim Tutenel, and Rafael Bidarra
Proceedings of workshop on Procedural Content Generation for Games, 2012
Current game worlds often fall short in providing consistency between the visual representation of the world and the way it feels, behaves, and reacts. This problem partly originates from the goal oriented and cost-effective nature of the game development process, which mostly favors ad hoc solutions for one particular game, rather than investing in concepts like reusability and emergent gameplay. In broader terms, we observe that game worlds miss semantics, and we argue that its deployment has the potential to bring about the consistency missing in their content. Therefore, we present a novel approach aimed at enriching virtual entities in game worlds with information about their roles, how they relate to others, and how they can affect and interact with players, NPCs, and with each other. We discuss several requirements to achieve these goals, and introduce a semantic model to represent game worlds. In order to support and validate this model, we have developed Entika, a framework to facilitate the deployment of semantics during game development, as well as its maintenance during run-time. Furthermore, we briefly discuss several applications that demonstrate the power of this semantic model for game worlds. After careful evaluation of our semantic game world model and framework, we conclude that a semantically rich world representation can substantially assist designers in creating much more consistent game worlds.
Semantic crowds: reusable population for virtual worlds
Nick Kraayenbrink, Jassin Kessing, Tim Tutenel, Gerwin de Haan, Fernando Marson, Soraia R Musse, Rafael Bidarra
Proceedings of International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications, 2012
Recent advances in crowd simulation techniques have led to realistic agent and group behavior through elaborate behavioral models, complex motion planning algorithms and impressive physics systems. As many crowd simulation solutions typically target only specific types of environment and scenario, a variety of special-purpose methods and systems has emerged that are hard to re-configure and re-use in other contexts. Solving this situation demands a higher-level approach that takes re-use and configuration of crowds as a priority, for adequate application in a broad variety of scenarios, virtual environments and interaction with the entities present in that environment. In this article we propose semantic crowds, a novel approach that allows one to re-use the same crowds for virtually any environment, and have them use the objects available in it in a meaningful manner, without any modification. To have the agents autonomously interact within any virtual world, we minimize in them the information relative to what objects do and how to use them. Instead, that information is stored in the objects themselves, which the agents can then query, based on what they plausibly want to achieve. To facilitate creating such crowds, we developed an interactive crowd editor that provides high-level editing parameters for defining crowd templates. We illustrate the flexibility of semantic crowds by means of two cases, in which we let the same crowd populate quite differently configured airport terminal environments. These examples also highlight that this modular approach easily combines with your custom implementations of agent behavior model and/or motion planner.