Awoken

I'm gonna chime in real quick and give my two thoughts.. I can understand where @Fulcrum.013 is coming from, from my own experiences. There are people out there who feel secure in knowing they have the documentation to support their knowledge. In my own experience, not having a degree, I can attest to the difficulty that come with trying to be taken seriously. Unless you've successfully established yourself in what-ever field you're interested in people outside of the industry will not take you seriously. If you have a degree, masters or Phd, people outside of the industry will take you seriously and assume you know what you're talking about. This can play into a person's confidence in even attempting to cut out on their own and become self employed. I can understand where @Rutin is coming from. There are many successful and established individuals within many industries who've never had formal education. I suppose it depends on the personal motivations of the individual as @L. Spiro was saying. I'd be willing to bet that unless you want to be self-employed, or something related, then it'd be a difficult trek being taken seriously. Not to say it can't be done. Just entertaining a tangent here, but I'd also say that those geographic areas where employment opportunities are lowest ( economic stagnation, rural areas, etc.. ) having a formal education will help as opposed to those areas where there are many economic opportunities and a greater emphasis on innovation.

@Plotnus, you should take a look at what @EddieK has been doing. His latest blog is here His is an example of a programmer collaborating with an artist. The game looks much more professional now that it has that artistic touch. But he didn't just start collaborating right off the bat, he developed the concept and functionality of the game before he partnered up with an artist, which in my opinion is the way you should do it. So don't be discouraged if at first the art isn't to your better standards. If you can provide a sufficient demo of what you're trying to create and effectively communicate your vision, you shouldn't have to much trouble finding an artist looking to collaborate.

How is Frogger Universe coming along?

As I was thinking about all this I was kinda envisioning 'wouldn't it be cool if...' scenarios, I don't know realistic these ideas are but I seeing as the floor is open: There are a multitude of independent developers out there who've marketed their games and are available for purchase on many platforms. If I want to buy a game for my computer I go to steam, if I want to buy a game for my phone I go to the Google Play store, if I want to play flash games I go to newgrounds, kongregate, onemorelevel and so on. The only place I can think of going to play games that are in the making is either steam( I've got to search them out myself and know ahead of time what I'm looking for ) or a kickstarter campaign. In my opinion they both have their draw-backs, steam doesn't provide enough community support( as far as I'm concerned, maybe I'm wrong ), and kickstarter's only give out IOU's on a one time all or nothing campaign. I wonder what kind of an audience there is for a location that provides it all, community, trial, fundraising and purchase abilities. Those are loftier my thoughts. This is something I was planning on doing, having two separate blogs and tying them to the same project page, hope nobody minds. [ edit: I was thinking, under our avatar picture is our user name, awards we have won and groups we're apart of. What if too we could choose one game's PLAY button and the title of the game to also be displayed? Of course that game would be have to be hosted on GameDev or available for download via GameDev maybe. ]

does the lava slosh around?

@Gnollrunner, can you explain this part "We also use our unit sphere to help the horizontal part of our voxel subdivision operation. By referencing the unit sphere we only have to multiply a unit sphere vertex by a height value to generate voxel vertex coordinates. Finally our unit-sphere is also used to provide coordinates during the ghost-walking process we talked about in our first entry. Without it, our ghost-walking would be more computationally expensive as it would have to calculate spherical coordinates on each iteration instead of just calculating heights, which are quite simple to calculate as they are all generated by simply averaging two other heights." A little more?

anyone know how to get Youtube to properly record the number of views an embedded video gets? For months I thought nobody was clicking on my embedded videos because on my youtube channel it's reporting very few views. The latest videos I embedded for my last blog post are still showing 0 and 1 views respectively.

I like your idea for a Frogger game. To me it seems very novel, I'm inspired.

Hello GameDev, I've been busy working on Dynamic Assets. In order to successfully incorporate them this time around I've needed to include a whole host of programming across all the servers for this game and I thought 'why not do a blog about the servers'. I've never programmed a server before this project and really have no idea what I'm doing. I just get stuff working and I'm happy. But seems Node.js is very intuitive and it is so simple that you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure stuff out. But a quick overview of my servers and why I have 3 so far and will probably have 5 or 6. Relay Server The relay server hosts the website and is responsible for user authentication and what-nots. While users are connected to the simulation the relay acts as a relay ( imagine that ) between all the clients and the back-end servers. It relies on socket.io to communicate with the clients and zeromq to communicate with the back-end servers. Data Server The data server holds a static version of the world and all it's contents. It's purpose is to provide all the information needed to a newly connected client. This way the demand for data isn't hampered by newly connected clients while the simulation is running. Of course it needs occasional updates and the terrain changes and the assets change. And soon too updated Simulin positions. Simulation Server This hosts the path-finding and tiny bits of user functionality that I've Incorporated thus far. But basically the simulation server is the work-horse behind the simulation, or at least will be. I plan on breaking this up into 3 separate servers. My wish list is to have 2 path-finding servers which each host world information necessary to path-finding and then requests are toggled between the two ( cut my pathfinding time in half ). And an AI server which will handle what it is the Simulin are doing. -------------------------------------------------- Now my assumption is that each new instance of a Node.js server will utilise it's own processing core? Am I wrong about this? I sure hope not because I figure that if I break the needs of the project over multiple servers it will make better use of a computers abilities. Maybe each Node.js server will operate in parallel? Because I'm using many different servers to do all the stuff I need to do it's taking a much longer time to program all this. Plus, I recently switched all my THREE.js geometry over to buffergeometry. The servers hold world data information according to vertex objects and face objects, but the clients hold world information according to buffer arrays which require a little trickery to update correctly. Keeps me on my toes. ----------------------------------------------------- Anyways, here's some video's to check out of my website And here is a video of three connected clients. One client is adding stuff to the world, the other two are receiving the updated content. from a different perspective. Thanks for checking it out!

Well that's true. I suppose I could just draw everything, scan it all and then move pictures around, haha.

Unfortunately I don't think I'm going to have the time this month. I was kinda hoping to work on animations maybe, but I don't even know if I'd finish in time. But if I'm struck with sudden inspiration I'll be participating for sure.

100% And promotion is something I been thinking a lot more about lately which is why I've brought it up here. To be honest I'm daunted by the task of promoting my game. I kinda feel like I'd literally be throwing money into the wind. I've got a lot more to learn about this and I'm starting my search, and dialogue, here. I'm bringing this all up because I've been thinking about my blog, and what generally gets a blog featured. When a blog is featured it will gain more views and therefore gets more exposure. I've noticed that If I mention my project unirule in post somewhere, like I just did, the number of views it gets will jump by about 10 in a days time. If I make a technical blog exploring the code and logic of my approach to solving a problem it may be featured. This is great because that means more views. However; that kind of blog caters to a very niche group, mainly the people hanging around GameDev. But I've been thinking more about making blogs that explore more how the game works as opposed to the technical underbelly in hopes that a game player will become enticed to try my game. Where do I go to create those kinds of blogs? I could and will make them here but there seems to be a conflict to me.

Since coming back from my little summer break I've been trying to sort through some concepts I have about GameDev and what it is intended to provide and not provide. I figure I'll just start a dialogue and maybe that'll clear up some of my questions. As I understand it GameDev.net is a website where people come to make games and get help making games. For the most part those who stick around for longer periods of time ( say in excess of a year ) have some involvement in programming, game creation ( board games being an example ), are aspiring artists and or musicians. I'm assuming for the most part people who seek this site out are looking to make a computer game. However I've been using this site to do two things, get help making my game( which has been fantastic ), and promote my game. Now that my little framework is getting close to being workable enough that I can begin programming the games dynamics, I've become more interested in promoting it. I'm going to bet that there are other game creators here who would also like to promote their games. There are promotional options within GameDev such as advertising on GameDev, and any would-be traffic that checks out a persons blog or indie showcase. Now on the outset there seems to be a conflict for me and how I'm using this site, GameDev attracts people who want to make their own games, not necessary look for games that have been created by the community. Why would anybody come to this site to play the games we've created? So I'm just throwing this out there because I'm wondering what the vision for GameDev is, is it a place to incubate an idea until it's strong enough to stand on it's own two feet, set forth into the big real world and.... good luck out there ( goodbye waves ) hahaha. But no in all seriousness, I don't know what the goal is there seems to be a loose end... Thoughts?

No way... seriously? I'm inspired. So you created your own development studio? Did you get grant funding or something?

Great looking frog, well done.