July 09, 2009
Don't you hate it when you're writing some new image loading or texture drawing code but don't have any suitable test images? I always waste lots of time looking for a "nice" image to test with, and often end up drawing something with distict pixel values so I can pinpoint where any given image loa…
May 06, 2009
Sometimes you get an idea that's a little bit oddball but for some reason you can't get out of your head and just have to run with it. This has been bouncing around my head for the last couple of days and has just been translated into code:
Yes, I embedded a web server inside of Rescue Squad and as …
Yes, I embedded a web server inside of Rescue Squad and as …
April 27, 2009
After I upgraded to a 720p display format (rather than just 800x600) the framerate took a little bit of a dip on my slower machine. Understandable really as it's drawing quite a few more pixels - 921k rather than 480k in the worst case, ignoring overdraw. I've spent the last few days optimising the…
April 15, 2009
I decided that the searching aspects of the gameplay are largely ruined by showing a larger area of the map at larger resolutions, so I've ruled that out as a possible way of dealing with multiple resolutions. Instead I've decided to pinch a trick from console games - the game world will internally…
April 12, 2009
So I was screwing around with some random bits of polish in the game and realised that I havn't tried fullscreen since I got my shiny new widescreen monitor a few months back. Unfortunately since the game is always rendered at 800x600 (and therefore a 4:3 aspect ratio) it looks a bit rubish when st…
April 11, 2009
The results are up for the 2009 4k competition, with my NiGHTS 4k entry coming a rather satisfying 11th! W00t!
Unsurprisingly (and deservingly) Left 4k Dead takes the top spot, and the worryingly addictive Bridge4k second. In fact pretty much all of the top games are worth playing, there's a surpris…
Unsurprisingly (and deservingly) Left 4k Dead takes the top spot, and the worryingly addictive Bridge4k second. In fact pretty much all of the top games are worth playing, there's a surpris…
April 08, 2009
After getting back from holiday (and recovering from), progress on Rescue Squad 2 has been nice and steady, with lots of little tweeks and additions making it into a more rounded game. Most obviously I've drawn a handful of new sprites required for the new features, and to make the levels look more…
March 22, 2009
Kotaku put up an entry about the 2009 4k competition closing and mentioned NiGHTS 4k as one of the ones to check out. Woot!
The judging should be finished anytime soon, and while I don't expect NiGHTS 4k to be in the top games (the quality bar has been very high this year) I'm interested in hearing …
The judging should be finished anytime soon, and while I don't expect NiGHTS 4k to be in the top games (the quality bar has been very high this year) I'm interested in hearing …
February 09, 2009
Just released into the wild is Analog version 0.5, now with a proper home on the internet with downloads, a feature list and screenshots. It's a freeform map editor for 2d games that's based on vectors rather than being tile-based.
Continued here...
Continued here...
January 31, 2009
Since it's the new year (yes, I'm a little slow catching up with things) I've been giving the site a bit of an overhaul. I was never really happy with the old theme, due to it being very dark narrow, making it a bit awkward to read on certain monitors and. It was also pretty restrictive in terms of…
November 15, 2008
Just playing around with level scripting now that my map editor is pretty much working as I want it. Jython seems to work really well as a scripting language, and is very easy to intergrate. [grin]
Vimeo video.
Incidentally, if anyone knows what magic voodoo you have to do to get vimeo videos embedde…
Vimeo video.
Incidentally, if anyone knows what magic voodoo you have to do to get vimeo videos embedde…
August 05, 2008
So the theme voting for LD48 is up, and as usual there's a whole bunch of interesting ones but nothing that really jumps out and grabs me. And a whole bunch of others which could be quite horrible to do (like "Film Noir", which is a nice idea but would be very content heavy and hard to do well in t…
July 30, 2008
It looks like there's another Ludum Dare 48 hour game programming competition starting soon, so I'll hopefully be taking part in that. Spread the word and join in - the more the merrier!
Meanwhile, back on my main project, I'm having much trouble with just trying to get a simple "chase player" behav…
Meanwhile, back on my main project, I'm having much trouble with just trying to get a simple "chase player" behav…
July 24, 2008
For the last few days I've taken some time off from the AI work to mess around with some graphical effects, and in particular I've been experimenting with a 2d ambient shadows effect. This is inspired by the Screen Space Ambient Occulsion (SSAO) effect which has gotten popular lately, and is largel…
July 18, 2008
The physics behind a jump in a platformer is pretty simple and something I must have written a thousand times, but having an AI player jump and land where it wants to is considerably trickier. My initial attempt was to string a bezier curve between the start and end points and just make it follow t…
July 10, 2008
So I've been going through as much stuff on behaviour trees that I can find to try and figure out whether they're going to be appropriate for what I'm doing and how they actually work. "Behavior Trees for Next-Gen Game AI" is very comprehensive and well worth a watch if you're interested (despite m…
July 07, 2008
Enemy behaviour in my current (as yet unnamed) game hasn't come on very far - just a single enemy with a traditional hard-coded finite state machine (done the old-school way, with a big switch statement). Which was initially fine as it let me get some of the more important low-level details into pl…
June 17, 2008
My website has been neglected lately, so I've decided it's time for a makeover. As well as a fresh new look and a new url I've decided to move my journal from GameDev.net over to here. The reliability of gamedev has been pretty low recently, and I've much more space and flexibility over here for th…
June 01, 2008
No proper update this week, because my website literally exploded:
Which only highlights how much I actually use it …
Quote:This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room.
Which only highlights how much I actually use it …
May 26, 2008
Firstly, I reached 1000 comits to my SVN repository, which is nice.
Following on from the previous shadowing work, I've been adding proper night time rendering for those late night missions. It uses most of the same rendering code, but instead of starting with an all white lightmap and drawing in da…
Following on from the previous shadowing work, I've been adding proper night time rendering for those late night missions. It uses most of the same rendering code, but instead of starting with an all white lightmap and drawing in da…
May 20, 2008
I've never been entirely happy with the shadows in Rescue Squad - they can't be transparent since they're made from multiple sprites, and so would cause ugly double darkening when they overlapped. The solution to this is to make them solid black (as seen in this screenshot). This creates it's own s…
May 05, 2008
Work on the sequal to Rescue Squad continues, and over the last couple of weeks I've been moving towards having proper landscapes instead of just random building sprites dotted around the map. On the code side there's been the additions to the level editor to support layers and grid snapping, and I…
April 27, 2008
I seem to have inadvertently made distance maps popular at the moment. As well lonesock and NineYearCycle experimenting with it, kevglass (author of the rather cool Slick library) has added it to Slick's font tool. [grin] You can use the "Heiro" link on the right to give it a go.
In other, less exci…
In other, less exci…
April 16, 2008
In the spirit of sharing, here's the shader source and the image preprocessing source for the alpha magnification code.
GLSL fragment shader:
GLSL fragment shader:
uniform sampler2D textMap;
void main()
{
vec4 baseColour = vec4(0, 0, 1, 1);
baseColour.a = texture2D(textMap, gl_TexCoord[0].xy).a;
const float distanceFactor =…
April 13, 2008
As mentioned in this post, I've been having a crack at Valve's Improved Alpha Tested Magnification technique. I've mostly just been hacking around to see what the results are, so it's all rather special-cased and hard-coded at the moment, but it's enough to see if it's worth carrying on further.
Her…
Her…
March 24, 2008
So I found that the built-in SpriteBatch in XNA sucks quite badly, most frustratingly it doesn't provide you with any means of setting your own projection matrices which means I couldn't change the origin to where I wanted it to be (lower left, instead of top left). So I grabbed some replacement co…
March 19, 2008
Behold! Yet another side project to get distracted on!
Ages ago I had the idea of doing a Bubble Bobble clone to test out a graphics library I was writing at the time. Bubble Bobble was chosen because it's quite a simple game in terms of mechanics but still really good fun to play. And this week I s…
Ages ago I had the idea of doing a Bubble Bobble clone to test out a graphics library I was writing at the time. Bubble Bobble was chosen because it's quite a simple game in terms of mechanics but still really good fun to play. And this week I s…
March 09, 2008
Work on the new project continues well, even if there's not much visual progress. I've finished the waypoint generation now, so here's a slightly more interesting screenshot of a generated waypoint graph:
You can see how it'll only allow enemies (or anything else following a path on the network) to …
You can see how it'll only allow enemies (or anything else following a path on the network) to …
March 01, 2008
I've been stuck in a coding rut for a while, but managed to pull myself out of it in the lst month finally. And now I'm up to the point where I might as well give people a glimpse of what I'm working on. [grin]
SVN
I was running a tiny linux box on my LAN as an SVN repository, but since moving house …
SVN
I was running a tiny linux box on my LAN as an SVN repository, but since moving house …
January 03, 2008
Happy new year everybody!
Since it's a brand new year I thought I'd have a look at what I got done last year and see what I'd like to do this year. I seem to remember wanting to finish at least one game to a fun, playable and polished state, and I think I managed that with Snowman Village. As well a…
Since it's a brand new year I thought I'd have a look at what I got done last year and see what I'd like to do this year. I seem to remember wanting to finish at least one game to a fun, playable and polished state, and I think I managed that with Snowman Village. As well a…
Advertisement
Popular Blogs
Advertisement