I’ve been maintaining this development blog (on and off) for almost four years, now. In that time,I’ve managed to complete eight “game in a week” games (one of which went substantially over schedule), and one major other project. Professionally, I’ve been a key member of the programming teams releasing three commercial console games during that…
Very minor update today, since I didn’t have much time to code, but got a few things implemented. First, VectorStorm materials now have an optional “layer” value. This value defaults to zero. Within a scene, material batches are drawn in order, according to increasing “layer” values. This allows us to force transparent geometry, such as…
Setting up multithreading code is complicated! Here’s what’s new: Set up a generic “task management” system for MMORPG Tycoon 2. Systems generate “tasks”, and tasks are assigned out to worker threads, which work on those tasks, and then let the main game know when the tasks finish. Heightmap building now uses these generic worker threads,…
Apologies for all the similar screenshots lately; it’s what happens when I’m working on the behind-the-scenes tech, instead of new features. So I’ve finally finished converting the world across to being generated in a background thread. This means that as the player moves around the world, there are no longer any frame rate stutters as…
Just got back from Freeplay. I think my talk went relatively well; had a painfully dry throat until some event organiser kindly brought me a bottle of water, and it took the audience a little while to warm up, but we eventually got there. I got through all the topics I wanted to cover, and…