One continual problem that games have to cope with on modern game consoles is the speed with which data can be loaded from modern high-capacity storage devices (generally some form of optical disc). As games have become larger and larger, it takes longer and longer to load the data from the disc. CDs, DVDs, UMDs,…
I’ve mentioned before that one of the big reasons for stopping development on MMORPG Tycoon 1.1 and jumping straight into 2.0 was that I was adding enough customisation that I couldn’t cleanly fit everything on-screen using that vector font any more. Here I’ve got a side-by-side comparison of the (current) design GUIs from MMORPG 1.0…
So it’s been an extremely busy day today. Today I revamped a lot of VectorStorm’s underside, in order to support this magical feature that I’ve been wanting for a while; the ability to do the old style “bright vector glow” at the same time as rendering other geometry normally. Long-time readers will have noticed that…
There’s an old maxim amongst programmers, that premature optimisation is the root of all evil. Or to put that in a less glib way, it’s generally a bad idea to perform optimisations before your program is completed, and it’s always a bad idea to perform optimisations if you have no way to check your performance…
It’s amazing what a few tiny water ripples will do for a scene. Water effect heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Their water effects aren’t quite appropriate for this game, but their approach to handling water totally got me thinking in the right direction, so kudos to them! Also kudos to Alex…