Nikolai Faaland has a website

A few times I've gotten a notion to do simulations of simple board games.  I was inspired by playing Chutes and Ladders with my son.  I realized that I would much rather write a computer program to play this game for me, so I did.  It could play 2.8 million games per second, and I collected some data: Average game is 18.7 rounds, with 73.4 spins. Shortest observed game was 7 rounds, longest 145.  The ladders help more than the chutes hurt. Players going first have an advantage. Most of the game is spent on the bottom half of the board. Heat map of most common player positions // 100 entries, containing the space number you should move to. // If a ladder, contains a number higher than the index it's at // If a slide, contains a smaller number than the index it's at // If neither, contains its own index. int[] spaces; // current space each player is on, size == 4 int[] players; while (true) // keep playing 'til someone wins {   ...

When the Kinect for Windows came out I had an idea for Halloween, and so I used a Kinect plus the SDK version of Virtual Earth 3D to make an eyeball that would follow your movements and make scary sounds if you got close. This first version was on a computer monitor that I put in a window next to the front door.  Over the years I switched to Unity and added a bunch of different texture variants, 3D models, particle effects and the like.  The current version is projected on a sheet covering my garage.  Kids really seem to like the jump scares. The delay in the jump scare scream is because of a setting I was using for a bluetooth speaker.  It seems every year there's some sort of little hurdle.  I fixed it in time for the kids to see it though!

My most successful side project happened when Windows Phone 7 came out.  WP7 was actually pretty good, and I wanted to get in on the ground floor of its app market.  So I did, with an evolution of the drawing apps that I'd done for the Zune HD. I called it Draw Free! (well, the first version was called Draw! but that was back when I had an illusion that people might want to pay for it), and it had a pretty sweet interface that could adapt to different ages of user.  It was all written in Silverlight with all drawing (stamping, alpha blending, image processing) done on the CPU in C#. With Windows 8 I rewrote it in XAML and using SharpDX, which allowed me to use shaders (!!!).  This version was eventually ported back to Windows Phone, and is in fact still available .  On Windows 10, search in the Store for "draw free". You like how I kept the rainbow house theme across every version I made? Honestly it's a good app, and over the years has just abov...

When I got a Zune HD, I noticed that all the other parents could distract their kids with apps on their iPhones.  No in a fit of pique, I wrote several apps for the Zune HD.  They got picked up by an enthusiast site and as I recall it got several thousand downloads.  So, like, 10% of Zune users?  Har, har, har...  Yes the comedy was all gold back then.

Back in 2007 or so I was working at Microsoft on Bing Maps, and I decided to make an ajax map of Ultima 7 The Black Gate, and Serpent Isle.  I used Exult to output the game's raw map imagery, chopped it into tiles, loaded them onto AWS, and made a website.  It got noticed by a few enthusiast and even mapping sites, but after some hosting hiccups I took it down (and some people even noticed that). All that's left online is a couple low-res images in a post about it. At that time, Bing Maps had a 3D control (that I also wrote a lot of) called Virtual Earth 3D, so you could sort of fly around Britannia on a globe.

My name is Nikolai.  I've worked for Microsoft and Google and that was super interesting and all, but this is a website I will use to talk about silly projects.