Working on my 2d bone editor...

2D Fluid Physics Gameplay

Another interesting use of physics by Strange Loop Games.

Shadow Gameplay

Found this while browsing around the other day.

Soulreaper Console

While looking for some sort of console for XNA games the other day, I came across Neoforce Controls. It's an awesome GUI package for XNA, in the alpha stages of development. I downloaded it, and made my own little console ;).

I know.. not a very exciting screenshot

Trying out Unity3D

Face Recognition Based on Fitting a 3D Morphable Model

Abstract

"This paper presents a method for face recognition across variations in pose, ranging from frontal to profile views, and
across a wide range of illuminations, including cast shadows and specular reflections ..."

Get the paper here.

This technology is just insanely cool! I'd like to see games adapt this technology to get more diverse (not to say realistic) looks on their characters. There are alot of gameplay features that could be derived from this tech as well. One could for instance use the ability to simulate weight gain and loss as a status indicator of how well-fed the character is in a survival game.

The Animal Farm Research

I just discovered The Animal Farm Research which is a coding blog containing a lot of information on procedural content generation (and coding in general).

Quote from Gamedev:
The screenshots are part of my research. The buildings models are generated 100% procedurally according to a shape grammar specified by Wonka and Mueller (with som extensions/modifications), which is similar to an L-System but acts on building components instead of performing string rewrites. The grammars are capable of a lot more, but unfortunately my artistic talents and architectural knowledge are somewhat limited.

There's a data mining component in the background which can refine the grammar according to user likes/dislikes, but it's hard to illustrate that here.

My next steps are to extend shape grammars to generate random dungeons, act as string rewrite systems (ala L-Systems), and generate certain classes of textures. I'm also working on generating an entire building in the geometry shader. Some of this is detailed on my research site, but I admittedly do not update that as much as I should.

Dawn of War hacking again

I haven't had the time or effort to code much lately - the job's taking up most of my daytime and I'm usually too tired to code when I get home. But I've managed to dedicate a couple of hours the last couple of days to try and make some advancements on Soulreaper. Lately I've been thinking about the possibility of making the game 3d. I've not decided to go with this option though - I'm just checking out the possibilities. As a part of this, I've removed the dust from my old project of hacking the DoW texture, model and animation formats, and added texture preview capabilities to my model viewer.

Models and textures are taken from Dawn of War by Relic Entertainment

Back to a garbage collected environment...

C# has ruined my tidiness. Somehow I expect the garbage collector to come and clean up my apartment as well. Lately I've been doin' mainly two things: working and playing computer games (WoW and some 360), so I haven't had much time/energy to clean up ;).

Oh, I actually haven't written it here - I got a Xbox360 for my birthday. My parents and friends got together and bought me one of the best presents ever! You should have see my face when I opened it up ;). Thanks once again!

Anyway.. back to the matters at hand. I've just started coding again, and while googling for some XNA information, I came across this short article about the .net garbage collector and XNA's ContentManager. Check it out!

Wet Dreams

BioShock is one of the games I'm definitely looking forward to! We know that it's got a powerful rendering engine since it's based on Unreal Engine 3, but what makes it stand out is its custom water rendering. Irrational Games have just released another teaser and this time around it's all water rendering - check it out.

If you're interested in water rendering then check out these link:

• Animation and Rendering of Complex Water Surfaces
• Gamasutra - Deep-Water Animation and Rendering
• Gamedev - Realistic Natural Effect Rendering: Water I
• Gamedev - The Water Effect Explained
• Realistic Water Rendering, by Yann L
  

GDC 2007

Check out the notes from the tutorial day titled "Core Techniques and Algorithms in Shader Programming" at GDC 2007.

XNA Game Studio Express Update

Oh joy, oh joy! XNA will finally get bitmap based font support amongst many other updates - check out the list here! Now if only they get Reflection.Emit so we'll get some serious scripting possibilities (one can dream!)

The Xbox 360 Dissected

I just found this page which I'm reading for breakfast. It should bring me up to date on the 360 hardware.

Edit: I found out that it was a bit outdated after I wrote this, but it was interesting reading none the less.

I'm currently trying to come up with the core engine design for the current game I'm working on with a friend of mine. Multithreading is the way to go if you've got processing needs - and even though our first game is a sprite based arcade game, it doesn't hurt to plan ahead. If all goes well we're planning on using the same core engine for other games, so it has to be able to scale up.

Check this out:
Coding For Multiple Cores on Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows

XNA and Video Safe Area

I just realized something. Coding for the 360 and PC at the same time isn't only sweet - as I've just realized when remembering that there's something called safe area in TV editing. Here's a simple way to display these areas - and now to find a good way to handle them both on PCs and TVs. I guess I'll bring the notion of safe areas into my base canvas class, which is a wrapper class around the direct3d device I'm planning on designing to reduce the amount of re-coding basic gfx stuff.

Grass - and not the kind you smoke!

I've just found a great post about rendering grass with shadows which pointed me to this - the notes from a Siggraph 2006 presentation. Should be something for every terrain engine!

Simplex Noise

I just found a noise algorithm invented by Perlin to overcome the shortcomings of his Perlin Noise. It's called Simplex Noise and seems to be a great substitute!

XNA for Desk Clerks

Once more I'm working as a desk clerk.. It's an ok job and I really need the money for christmas presents ;). A fellow programmer and I have decided to try to cooperate on developing a game. I've previously made many attempts but I always end up with too many ideas and I scrap the project for something else. So this time we're planning it all in advance - milestones, coding practices etc. We've decided to test out XNA since it looks really promising and I expect it to take alot less time to develop a fully functional game in C# than in C++ (which is what I used for development a couple of years ago). I'll try to add the resources I use on this page to share with you all (not that anybody reads this blog anyway ;).

• XBOX 360 Homebrew
  
• XNA In-Depth @ Gamasutra
• A guide to cables and screen modes etc.
• XNA Express video tutorials
• XNA Resources
• The Ramblings of a Hazy Mind
  

Basic Game Engine Structure

I just read an ok article concerning how to structure your game into a set of screens over at Cornflower Blue - I've already read a similar article in one of the Game Programming Gems books but can't remember which.

Sweet nebula

A fellow gamedev member recently posted this in the "image of the day" gallery:


Now that's some sweet looking nebula and an interesting use of strange attractors if you ask me! The nebula is going to be used for Infinity, a space-based MMOG in development.

Slight modifications

I've been working as a desk clerk for the last week. It's been tiresome and I'm not used to getting up at 6 o'clock so I haven't been coding that much lately. The only thing I've done with my current projects is adding a "recent files" feature to ChunkyHacker and that wasn't much work since I got most of the code from this place: Most Recently Used (MRU) Menu class for .NET 2.0 in C#.

I did a couple of modifications to the source though. I added support for xml saving/loading instead of using the registry. I also changed the code that shortened the filename because it acted a bit strange. The code I replaced it with was ripped from Coding Horror and it uses the PathCompactPathEx win32 API function.

I'm expecting to get som code snippets from my projects in this blog soon, but first I'll have to find a nice syntax highlighter that I can use with blogger - if you know of one that's good then please do post a comment!