With a lever and a place to stand, Archimedes could move the world. One wonders whether he, too, was trying to avoid z-buffer imprecision. In a world that’s 20 kilometers on a side, OpenGL really doesn’t like looking at things which are very far from the middle;  all sorts of little glitches pop up as…

You’ll all remember the zones from MMORPG Tycoon 1.0;  you set level ranges on them, to specify the monster levels to be found within them.  In 2.0, these areas of your MMORPG world are called “Regions”, and will have editable boundaries and configurable graphics settings.  There will be impassable boundaries between all regions (once finished,…

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…