Project
My goal this semester is to further develop the Max MSP game I made in Task 3, but to make certain factors in the game be controlled by some random process or variable in our everyday environment. For example the current weather/temperature or a dripping sink.
I found a nice patch online, that gets weather information from the "McDonald Observatory" at Mt. Locke in Texas website. find the website: http://weather.as.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/latest_5min.cgi find the patch: https://cycling74.com/forums/how-to-input-weather-data-in-max/
It works quite well and you get changing data you can use for anything. The problem is, even if the weather information is updated quite often, compared to other weather stations or websites, it's still updated only every five minutes and sometimes the received data isn't altered for an hour or longer. So this might be a bit unfitting to interfere with such a fast going thing like a game, you would need to play for half a day to see any changes.
An idea would be that the weather data changes the way the interface or the opponent looks. This could be a funny surprise every time you open the game. But still, there may be a lot more potential in other ideas.
A dripping sink could also be used to control or alter something in the game. I found a nice sensor that reacts to water being poured on it. It may arrive in the next 1-2 days s let's see what we can do with that!
An idea would for example be, to give a second person a water pistol, and every time they manage to aim and hit the water sensor the game get's harder, so they can both play against each other, but in two very different ways, one digital and the other one analog, but still they can play alongside each other.