A new trailer for mod-project-gone-pro Nuclear Dawn was released yesterday. I’m glad to see a project I’ve worked on for 2 years coming close to release. Nice how they seem to have nailed the RTS overview and node structure system, all running on the Source engine. All the best & congratulations to Interwave Studios!
Aug 212010
Aug 162010
Just a quick thank-you to the guys at Zombie Cow Studios. In exchange for some bug reports on their newest game Privates, I received an e-mail yesterday with free download links to their back catalogue, including the well-written point-n-clicky adventure games Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentlemen, Please. Thank you, kind sirs!
You should definitely check out Privates. It’s a game which was released by Channel 4 in the UK as an information game about STD’s and sex education in general. Don’t take it too serious though – it’s incredible fun, the dialogue is witty and the game contains a bunch of references to other games. And really now, how many games feature a level which takes place inside a cervix. Really. Downloads here!
Aug 022010
I’ve spent the day reading up on shadowing techniques for real-time rendering which can be used in the Ogre3D project I’m working on. I was not familiar with the details of the shadow volume method using stencil maps. It’s actually pretty clever, and it’s interesting to read how John Carmack (ID Software) developed the depth-fail-method (also known as Carmack’s Reverse) to be able to use the stencil shadow technique in scenes where the player/camera was inside the shadow volume. This is how they established the shadows of those things creeping up behind you in Doom 3.
Here’s a comparison I performed in Ogre3D:
Some good resources (some outdated, but the basics still apply):
Jun 142010
Yes, I know, more comics … Thesis was finished this morning, so more interesting stuff to come!
For now, enjoy this great comic which came with the Team Fortress 2 mac update. I think it’s great how people using (traditionally) different systems can play on the same servers now.
Also, the porting of the Source engine to OpenGL is exciting. The benchmarks still result in sub-par performance compared to native DirectX on Windows, but the fact that a big game developer is making a big move to an open standard is interesting. It’s hard to find specific info on how they do it, but they seem to use some kind of emulation layer which maps DirectX-calls to OpenGL – Okay, this is oversimplified, but the point is that it’s not native OpenGL.
This also means that that Steam is coming to Linux, and with that, even more developers might be interested in releasing games on the 3 main PC platforms (Win/Mac/Linux), and thus using OpenGL as a standard. And yes, a Mac is a PC. It’s a computer. You operate it, it’s on your desk. That’s a personal computer. Case closed.
Jun 042010
From the great Penny Arcade:
Apr 102010
Some pretty spectacular views in Just Cause 2 (a recommendation). Too bad no documentation on the cloud/sky tech is available. If only more game developers published presentations and papers about aspects of their in-house tech… (good example: Valve).
Feb 202010
I’ve been trying to work out a good CPU-accelerated version the my suggestive contours algorithm during the last few weeks, and after working through some technical difficulties, I managed to compute and draw regular contour lines this afternoon:
Hard to see? I know, it looks craptastic.
But after an afternoon of reading tutorials, bulletin boards and newsgroups, I know why. And I think it’s going to help me write a better thesis, so this delightful saturday wasn’t completely wasted. Conclusions behind the cut.
Jan 272010
The last few months my jaw dropped to the floor so many times reading about and experiencing the new DRM systems deployed by game publishers I think it’s going to stay there forever. A couple of tales straight out of the hell a paying customer has to go through to get his/her game working follow behind the break.
Game companies need to understand that once pirated copies are, by all means, easier to activate, use and get support on compared to their legal counterparts, it’s time to pause and reflect, instead of shoveling yet another inherently flawed activation procedure on the pile. (Update: Tsk, tsk. It’s like they do it on purpose.) (Update 2: A nice article on SavyGamer)
In the second semester of this year, I’ll have to apply the suggestive contours algorithm I’ve implemented in an interesting way, in order to have some experimental results upon which I can base my thesis. A report on what I found out behind the cut.
Continue reading »
A couple of weeks ago I purchased Borderlands, but only recently I found some time to install and run it. The hours that followed were a frustrating journey into performance issues, bad port quality and a first-hand experience on how having consoles as a primary market, in the end, backfires on us all. Continue reading »
