date_range 14/02/2012 22:52

Some interesting patterns I came up creating bullets in my doomed purposeless space shooter. At this point it crashed, but performance was still great!

date_range 13/02/2012 16:02

So I found out some interesting things today at QANTM. Firstly the entire campus is moving in less than five weeks and somehow I was never informed but ah well. Secondly, the course I had today, ‘Managing New Media Projects’, involves an entire tutorial group which in my case consists of 28 people working together to develop a simple game. The purpose of this course is not the actual end product but the process of project management. In both cases of this and the actual project, it appears that out of all 28 people, I’m the only programmer. Oh ****....

date_range 11/02/2012 23:16

Over the past two days I’ve made my little SFML & TinyXML powered project. Today I implemented input, which in the case of SFML already having an input system all I needed to do was forward the hooks to the game entities in my entity manager. Right now it isn’t much; quite literally just some simple sprites on the screen, but the actual core mechanics are more or less done. I’ve made a short and fairly meaningless recording of XML configs that at this point pretty much determine all the content in the game, and it will most likely stay...

date_range 11/02/2012 00:41

With my second year of Uni starting next Monday and having done mostly contract work I haven’t exactly been able to do everything I wanted to do in terms of programming. I was somewhat considering writing my own DirectX 11 rendering engine, although at this point I’d rather wait and see what my final project ends up being – it helps to know if it’s even going to be 3D or not. With that said, with the exciting addition of networking, AI, Ogre 3D, new media business compliance and managing new media projects comes the first proper time when, as...

date_range 23/12/2011 22:45

Since my blog isn’t looking so intense and action packed this month I guess it’s time for another post! I was actually quite tempted to write a nice article about my particle rendering engine that ran using a very, very flexible data driven plugin system (aka support for scripting/modding). Unfortunately, all three sources of back-ups are gone from my project files. First I whiped an entire 2 terrabyte hard drive, which was basically the main location of my most recent files, then a solid state drive failed which, as it was in a RAID volume at the time could not...

date_range 22/11/2011 18:38

As it’s yet again been some time since I’ve last posted anything, I’ve decided to post some info on my Octree terrain engine that I’m submitting sometime later this week as an assessment piece. Below I’ve copied and pasted directly from a document that I’m submitting as part of a detailed analysis of my development cycle. I’ll see if I can upload a demonstration executable along with its source code later when I revise the code a bit more, as right now it’s a bit of a mess with comment blocks everywhere. GAM204 Octree Technical Analysis By Johan Rensenbrink As...

date_range 29/10/2011 21:06

Although it’s somewhat delayed, I’ve got the excuse of my solid state drive’s life coming to an end, etc. etc. Source is included in the ZIP. Download

date_range 25/10/2011 16:44

The above screenshot actually marks the final part of the math demonstration, with the rendering already done. Again this is just demonstrating the basic abilities of DirectX 9, but regardless this was quite a fun little project. I’m not entirely done yet, with one more feature left and one more attempt at stressfully trying to fix my blending mode demonstration (since I’m having some issues setting blending operations correctly in regards to simple additive and subtractive modes). Once I do, however, which will be tomorrow sometime since I’m taking a little break, I’ll upload it here if you desperately want...

date_range 23/10/2011 03:00

Stencils appear to be quite a tricky thing to get working well in DirectX. They’re extremely handy, but they’re not one of the easiest things. Fortunately I was able to implement a pre-existing shadow example that showed a teapot shadowed on a white plane and implemented it into my own engine. You can immediately see the FPS isn’t at a very pretty value. This is for good reason however. I may not be using any optimization techniques such as portals yet, but my code is structured quite well. It just so happens that the model that is being shown has...

date_range 20/10/2011 22:51

The primary domain which is currently set as renscreations.net will be transferred over to renscreations.com in roughly two weeks, just be aware some downtime is expected and the website will no longer be accessible from renscreations.net so if for some bizarre reason you do visit my website, please use the .com extension, thanks.