Vindby

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Introduction

Vindby is a serious game about offshore wind energy. It is meant to teach the basics of wind farm development, based on a simulation using state of the art engineering models. Of course one can also play it simply for fun.

Vindby has been developed during a master thesis at NTNU, with support from a European research project.

Although meant to be as realistic as possible, there are many issues in Vindby that could be further improved. Feel free to contact us with ideas and feedback, and especially if you are going to write a master thesis at NTNU and would be interested in using this to contribute to the development of Vindby.

Download and installation

Vindby has been programmed in Python 3. The current version of Vindby is provided as a ZIP archive that contains all the source code. Alternatively, for Windows users a version is provided that contains a miniconda Python 3 environment. Use this if you do not have Python 3 installed, or experience problems with the source code only version.

This version of Vindby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license. You are free to use and modify Vindby for your own use, as long as you acknowledge its source and do not use it for commercial purposes.

In order to run Vindby, simply extract the contents of the archive into a folder and start PlayVindby.py

We have tested Vindby on recent Linux, Mac OS and Windows software environments. If it does not run on your system, you might need to update your Python version or try it on a different machine. We do not have the capacity to get Vindby to work in all software or hardware environments, so please do not contact us with requests for help or support.

Future versions of Vindby will probably be hosted on GitHub.

Further reading

The main principles behind the design of Vindby are discussed in the following journal article:

Please cite this article when publishing work discussing Vindby or containing results obtained with Vindby.

The following master thesis contains a few more details about the design of the Vindby game mechanics:

  • Dornhelm, E (2018): Simplified wind farm design as a serious game. Master thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU. Available here

Funding

The development of Vindby has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 642108.

Disclaimer

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.