July 23, 2009
Hi guys, just a quick note to remind you that I'm still writing (very occasional) blog entries over at http://www.ebonyfortress.com/blog, and would love to see some of you posting comments. :)
May 18, 2009
As much as I like GameDev.net, I find the journal system here to be underpowered - no tags, no categories, posts disappear from the front page if they're too old, poor support for inline formatting, etc. This has made me hesitate to spend time putting entries here, and the last one was eight months…
September 01, 2008
Hello GD Journal, it's been a while. Mostly because the journals are still exceedingly well separated from the rest of the site. I have no idea whose journals are worth reading - any suggestions?
At work, our development cycle is coming to a close and I have lots of reflections on the development pr…
At work, our development cycle is coming to a close and I have lots of reflections on the development pr…
November 09, 2007
For so long we've seen newbies come on these forums, and say something like "I have a great idea for a game - how do I get it made?" The slightly more optimistic, or dare I say mercenary, may actually ask how they sell it, but the underlying concept is the same, in that someone with no knowledge of…
June 19, 2007
Imagine you are a squirrel. You're at the foot of a large oak tree, contemplating climbing it to feast upon the acorny goodness that it offers. You start climbing up the trunk, and it provides a single obvious and reliable route up the tree. Eventually you reach branches, where you can choose the o…
April 25, 2007
It's funny when people appear to live in some parallel dimension where they don't have to contend with the details of real life. Take this quote from "Efficient C++ Programming" in 2002:
Quote:The language extension never became part of the language, but the optimization itself has become nearly uni…
April 19, 2007
My short time in the games industry - 8 months or so - has been marked by inefficiency. I now have a good idea why games take so long and why so many projects are cancelled. Setting aside human error and egos, which are a major problem on the publisher side it seems, the development side is just pl…
April 02, 2007
Compiling...
\Dev\GameProjects\FSProjects\FSLibs\ServerLogic\Source\Actor_ServerLogic.cpp(1435) : error C2679: binary '=' : no operator found which takes a right-hand operand of type 'double' (or there is no acceptable conversion)
D:\Dev\CoreLibs\Reflection\ReferenceMetaProperty.h(75) : see …
January 14, 2007
I've had 6 or 7 people view this journal today, yet I haven't updated in a couple of weeks. This is above the normal level of traffic when it's fallen off the Developer Journals front page, so I wonder why this is. Has someone linked to it or something? It seems doubtful. If you know, leave a comme…
December 30, 2006
I've been arguing about object-relational mappers recently. For those unfamiliar with the concept (and unwilling to check Wikipedia ;) ), it's basically a library or class framework that allows you to use an object in an object-oriented program language and have it automatically backed by a relatio…
November 28, 2006
Apparently in Windows Vista, DirectSound will no longer be hardware accelerated under Windows Vista, going through the software mixer instead. ie. DirectSound just lost the 'Direct' aspect.
One reason for this is increased system stability, gained by moving things out of kernel space. A laudable aim…
One reason for this is increased system stability, gained by moving things out of kernel space. A laudable aim…
November 16, 2006
The primary problems I face on a daily basis with game development are often down to the amount of trouble you have to go through in order to get certain things done. Some tasks seem to be far more resistant to implementation than they ever should be, and this tends to lead to those tasks either be…
October 31, 2006
I am starting to learn how games fall behind schedule. An external producer comes in a week before the milestone and proceeds to request wide-ranging changes to functionality that has been in and working for well over a month, which could have been looked at and remarked upon long before. That is a…
October 29, 2006
Sometimes the way a game tells you it wants you to play, is not actually how the game encourages you to play. Recently I've come across two examples of this, quite different and yet equally frustrating.
First, Oblivion. This RPG scales monster difficulty roughly in line with player level, to keep th…
First, Oblivion. This RPG scales monster difficulty roughly in line with player level, to keep th…
October 26, 2006
I am very wary of comparing games to films, especially since the analogy is often used by (typically inexperienced) designers to argue that story is more important than gameplay, or used by clueless journalists to complain about the graphical quality of a computer game or the poor acting within one…
October 22, 2006
The more I work on 'real' games (and it's only been a little over a month so far, I admit), the more it makes me want to get back to working on my own stuff as well. Don't get me wrong, I love the work I'm doing. But like it or not, we all know The Industry is a slow moving monolith that doesn't of…
October 12, 2006
Myself and a co-worker are working on a contract for another company, so we have to work with their code and base a lot of our work on it. Today we had to examine one of their files in order to see how they're implementing a certain feature - all well and good.
But during execution, the game froze i…
But during execution, the game froze i…
September 22, 2006
Ok, so, some of you may be interested to hear that I'm in the industry now. Developing games, that is. The 'real' stuff, too: not mobile phone downloads or Flash downloads, but PS2 and PSP games. I even have the 2 devkits on my desk to prove it. I have docs for cool middleware like Renderware, Havo…
April 05, 2006
Here, another poster mistakes games for movies. Nothing against that poster: he's obviously new to things and it's an understandable mistake to make. This is something I used to see a lot of in the Game Design forum, where lots of wannabe film-makers see computer games as essentially being movies, …
March 12, 2006
At the moment I am getting a bit fed up of the way some open-source projects are getting developed.
First, Mozilla Firefox. I love the browser and couldn't use IE again. Opera is faster and less resource-hungry but lacks many of the nice extensions I've come to love in Firefox. But damn, the Firefox…
First, Mozilla Firefox. I love the browser and couldn't use IE again. Opera is faster and less resource-hungry but lacks many of the nice extensions I've come to love in Firefox. But damn, the Firefox…
March 03, 2006
It's been years since I had that 'Organising Code Files in C and C++' article published, so I think it's time I wrote another. Out of the following choices that appeal to me at the moment, what would you think would be most interesting or useful to Gamedev readers?
- "10 Reasons to write your next …
- "10 Reasons to write your next …
January 22, 2006
I use a lot of free and open source libraries, and the main problem I find with them is documentation. Strangely, it's rarely that there's a lack of documentation, but more commonly that the documentation provided is inadequate.
The typical incarnation of this is where someone has processed their en…
The typical incarnation of this is where someone has processed their en…
January 15, 2006
When it's just a fancy name for a bit of terminology, that's what. Somehow, especially in game design rather than game programming, people have seized upon the idea of design patterns and decided that a design pattern is a formalised name for a concept we see often. So we get articles like this one…
January 12, 2006
I posted on this about a year and a half ago, complaining that the state of Python web development wasn't moving forward in the correct way, and that the developers of various web frameworks were all resistant to change because they wanted to protect their work.
Well, to an extent I've been proven r…
Well, to an extent I've been proven r…
January 11, 2006
We're using CVS at work, which I always thought was a good idea, until I had to work with it for a while. Basically, in order to change a part of your project, you have to ask for the latest version from the server, make the changes, document what changes you made, and then resubmit it to the serve…
July 31, 2005
I have failed to keep this updated regularly, and for that I apologise. I hope to rectify this in the near future as I continue with the previous project, but of late I have been busy working, moving house, and so on. So I will just say this:
I just turned down the opportunity to become a well-paid …
I just turned down the opportunity to become a well-paid …
May 22, 2005
It never ceases to amaze me how foolish some people can be - or at least sound - when talking about computer programming. I used to think that intelligence was evenly distributed for any individual person, but in fact it appears that people can be incredibly good programmers or writers but utterly …
April 06, 2005
I am busy with my Masters coursework this week, so have had little time for game code. However I did implement the basic pixel-based movement, which for now seems to work perfectly. The changes involved:
- Calling the movement update more often
- Calculating a direction vector from the current positi…
- Calling the movement update more often
- Calculating a direction vector from the current positi…
March 30, 2005
After much wrangling with the useful-but-crashhappy KDevelop, I hacked in the latest stuff into my tactical shooter. It now has 5 characters on the map, each of which will follow its own path simultaneously. The swords are the characters and the blue colour is a path (which remains until it is ful…
March 30, 2005
After much wrangling with the useful-but-crashhappy KDevelop, I hacked in the latest stuff into my tactical shooter. It now has 5 characters on the map, each of which will follow its own path simultaneously.
As always, I prototype things in the quickest way possible to get them working and then mig…
As always, I prototype things in the quickest way possible to get them working and then mig…
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