July 16, 2009
Been playing with the explosion generator some more. (The reason is that I am working on a Flash-based game, and I need bitmap based special effects.) Combining a stretched sphere function with turbulence biased along a directional axis, I've created a fireball, animated over time and good for shoo…
July 11, 2009
Did some tweaking to turbulence and intensity scaling, parameterized everything to be animated by curves, and slapped together a really quick layered test, and here is the result:
(Note, I accidentally over-wrote an existing expl.gif in my webspace, so if you get a kind of smeary-looking explosion,…
(Note, I accidentally over-wrote an existing expl.gif in my webspace, so if you get a kind of smeary-looking explosion,…
July 10, 2009
Quite awhile back, in this and this journal entries, I explored generating explosion sprites for animated 2D sprite-based explosions. Recently, I revisited some of that in order to create better, or at least different, looking explosion sprites. Don't get me wrong, in a layered system those generat…
May 13, 2009
So it's been an interesting three or four weeks. Before I elaborate, I would just like to comment on the massive motivational boost to one's planning that can be granted by spending an entire night (as I did last night, and as I will again tonight) immersed in the sticky, foul-smelling, black-mayon…
April 13, 2009
I've started on the generic wilderness sub-map generator for Archipelago. Although I might have to change the name, since the world generator still doesn't generate a system of islands, but rather still just a single continent.
Go check out the blog to see what I've been up to there.
Go check out the blog to see what I've been up to there.
April 06, 2009
Work continues on the old school RPG. Following the example of several luminaries of the journal pages, I've started a separate blog. This blog is about my various Accidental stuff, including the current old school project. I'll try to confine any Accidental posts there, and use this space for othe…
March 21, 2009
Spent a few hours today tinkering around and came up with this:
It's a simple tilemap in the 'old skool' style, top down and cheesy. The map displayed is just a simple random scatter, no tricks. The interesting part (to me) is that everything is randomly generated, including the tile graphics. New t…
It's a simple tilemap in the 'old skool' style, top down and cheesy. The map displayed is just a simple random scatter, no tricks. The interesting part (to me) is that everything is randomly generated, including the tile graphics. New t…
February 17, 2009
Because relief maps are so much more interesting to look at, here is a composite of 4 images showing mountains with varying levels of erosion overlaid with their corresponding drainage maps, generated as detailed in the previous entry:
I'm working on possible schemes for enumerating and naming the v…
I'm working on possible schemes for enumerating and naming the v…
February 14, 2009
I've been revisiting my island/continent generation stuff, and have started on something that I've been puzzling over for awhile: generating rivers on a randomized fractal terrain cheaply. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I've come up with an approximation to erosion by simulating raindrops prop…
January 29, 2009
Despite sworn oaths, I've gone back to plumbing. This post isn't about the goods/bads of that. It's about something I've been learning over the past several years, partly as a plumber, and partly as... well... everything else.
Confidence. I have always sort of lacked it. You can see that lack brimmi…
Confidence. I have always sort of lacked it. You can see that lack brimmi…
November 24, 2008
As programmers, we are accustomed to dealing with images in RGB format. It's the 'native tongue' of the hardware, after all; RGB is the format the graphics card uses to move pixels around. The actual pixels themselves are comprised of clusters of red, green and blue units, so the translation from m…
October 30, 2008
If you want to eliminate the optical illusion that confuses the eye and makes the previous floors look like the mortar lines are outset, you need more realistic lighting than just bump-mapping. For this version, I simply imported the heightmap into Blender, used it to displace a finely subdivided p…
October 24, 2008
After posting the previous, I kept on tinkering and removed a few steps from the process. It didn't make sense that I kept having to bounce back and forth between the GIMP and the Accidental tool, so I proceduralized the entire thing, removing the GIMP stages completely. The result can be found her…
October 21, 2008
Making Programmer Art: Tiling Rough Stone Floors
Dungeon floors. You've seen 'em, I've seen 'em. We've all of us died on 'em at some point in our lives. Here is a fairly simple method I've come up with for creating a rough-stone paved floor texture that tiles, suitable for entry in the category of P…
Dungeon floors. You've seen 'em, I've seen 'em. We've all of us died on 'em at some point in our lives. Here is a fairly simple method I've come up with for creating a rough-stone paved floor texture that tiles, suitable for entry in the category of P…
August 01, 2008
Getting back to the randomly generated island...
I had mentioned in a previous post that I was thinking about doing a Dragon Warrior-ish type of game, with a randomly generated world. You know, with an absurdly scaled player avatar wandering around a stylized world map with mountains and forests and…
I had mentioned in a previous post that I was thinking about doing a Dragon Warrior-ish type of game, with a randomly generated world. You know, with an absurdly scaled player avatar wandering around a stylized world map with mountains and forests and…
July 26, 2008
After the last journal post, I got to thinking about how I tend to not like the layouts that accretion algorithm generates, especially with large numbers of boxes. There tends to develop a very tendril-like, tentacled appearance to the layouts, as later boxes append themselves to protrusions, thus …
July 24, 2008
In the previous journal entry, I got into a bit of a discussion with Daerax about randomly generating dungeons. As I have described before, I typically use a system of progressive refinement, wherein I begin with a rough layout, and iteratively refine each piece of the whole, using randomization to…
July 19, 2008
I still need to refactor a whole bunch of the noise library and associated source, but I'm uploading a zip of it anyway. Included is all source for the integrated Lua interpreter, based on the source for the official interpreter, with the noise library stuff added in. The package includes a pre-bui…
July 17, 2008
Got the colormapping back up and running, and worked out a bug in the color curve as well. Tired now, and the Nyquil is kicking in.
July 14, 2008
For several years I've had it in my head to make an old-school Dragon Warrior style RPG, only with randomly generated maps and areas. Sort of toward that end, I've revisted my island generator, rebuilding it with the updated noise library. Above are a couple of examples, elevation only; I'm redoing…
July 08, 2008
Still tinkering away at the noise library, squashing a last few bugs and cleaning stuff up. The idea to allow a fractal to have any basis function for any layer was a good one, but it did add some complexity. It makes it harder to just get a quick fractal up and going. So I added functionality to b…
June 28, 2008
I've been revamping the noise library (again). Initially, it was modelled after libnoise, as a chained module system. It is still a chained module system, but I have redone things a bit differently. Before, the fractal-type modules (fBm, billow, ridged, etc...) were hard-set to be of a specified ba…
June 21, 2008
Just got back from the honeymoon and assorted business. Good times were had by all. Got home yesterday and we settled down to the business of starting the new life together. This is the first time in over two weeks I've even been able to turn the computer on.
And, of course, my computer died. My des…
And, of course, my computer died. My des…
May 27, 2008
Finally got off my lazy butt and implemented a hackish sort of terrain erosion in Accidental. Been playing with various somewhat-realistic hydrology-based models, but most either netted poor performance or poor results (due to ambiguous specifications in the tech papers, and/or my poor efforts at i…
May 25, 2008
Over the weekend I spent some time surfing through Googles of the usual set of topics, wrapping my head around the whole world of random generation again, and I stumbled upon Wireworld. I remember playing with Conway's Game of Life in college, and since then I've dabbled a tiny bit in cellular auto…
May 18, 2008
So, I'm getting married in a couple weeks.
Oh, wait, forgot to say hi. Hi. Been a long time, I know.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Marriage...
Kind of excited for it, actually. 33 years seems to me about the right length of time to be single, and since I turned 33 just a few days ago... well, here I …
Oh, wait, forgot to say hi. Hi. Been a long time, I know.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Marriage...
Kind of excited for it, actually. 33 years seems to me about the right length of time to be single, and since I turned 33 just a few days ago... well, here I …
January 05, 2008
Since recaps of 2007 seem to be in vogue, I figure I should jump on the bandwagon. This'll be short.
In 2007, I did...
Not a danged thing worth mentioning. Seriously, it was a pretty wasted year. Woot! for laziness. Thank you, and here's to hoping 2008 is just as good. Cheers.
In 2007, I did...
Not a danged thing worth mentioning. Seriously, it was a pretty wasted year. Woot! for laziness. Thank you, and here's to hoping 2008 is just as good. Cheers.
December 09, 2007
No, really, it does....
Also, there is some weirdness afoot on gamedev.net. For awhile now, occasionally when I am trying to load the site on my lappy, I get the message in the status bar about waiting for e.nvero.net, and Firefox hard-hangs and I have to kill and restart. It's happened about 8 time…
Also, there is some weirdness afoot on gamedev.net. For awhile now, occasionally when I am trying to load the site on my lappy, I get the message in the status bar about waiting for e.nvero.net, and Firefox hard-hangs and I have to kill and restart. It's happened about 8 time…
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