Whats going on !?

So it’s been quite some time since I last blogged, a lot of stuff happened since, so it’s about time I’d blog again. The experimentation project in the end didn’t turn out to go very well in the end. Problems within the team and lack of motivation caused us to get behind schedule and deliver a game which wasn’t really remotely finished (at least, to my standards) but I guess my expectations we’re too high to begin with. Nevertheless I did finish it, and the only thing left to do is write a document on how best to incorporate Ogre3D within a game (engine). I finished some courses as well luckily; I did a course on Path Planning and Crowd Simulation which was really cool, and I retried for Motion and Manipulation, which is essentially a robotics course mostly related to planning paths for robots that have a certain degree of freedom, forward kinematics for robot arms (and thus also skeletons in games), high level collision detection and the grasping of objects and such. The course has a lot of things in common with other courses like path planning, but also computational geometry and virtual worlds which itself is mostly about physics and network related aspects of virtual environments. Having finished that course which was actually my last one, I am now preparing to begin my Thesis project

In light of my thesis project therefore, I will try to blog more and focus a bit more on the subject of my research, which is about path planning for characters in virtual worlds, specifically related to constructing paths in complex 3D environments (environments which have tunnels, bridges and such). I’m not yet sure on where to begin, but I will make it thorough and worth reading for one I’ll cover A* of course, one of the most famous of path finding algorithms, but I will also move on to other things, like navigation graphs and navigation meshes, and also some lesser known methods such as the corridor map method which is being developed at Utrecht University (and where I will be working on to do path planning in 3D environments). I might also consider several methods to simulate crowds as well, since games tend to get larger and larger and therefore whole cities are being populated with characters which move through the city (for example in the Assassins Creed series and the Grand Theft Auto series). To be continued…

Blues for the red sun

I realised I haven’t posted in a while so here is a status update

I’ve installed a twitter add-in on my blog to keep you up-to-date on small blog related things, surfing the hype. I think its a rediculous concept in-all especially when it is used by large commercial news website and others, because I really don’t care if they just placed a new news item on the news site. I discover new news when i actually visit, so adding twitter is just out of context there. I like the micro-blogging aspect though, but people abuse it to enlighten us followers that they are taking a crap. I try not to abuse it, and make it relevant to this blog so that it keeps interesting. So much for that

The experimention project is going along. I’ve been setting up the main game structure, and I’m working on the whole camera system. The camera system is something I’ll be going into further in a later post, because it is also my main research topic. We are roughly four weeks in production, and we’ve got a flock of birds flying around and interaction between the flock and the thing we call sources, attracting the flock when clicked upon. We’re currently working towards an alpha version which includes the city as well, to get a nice impression of what it is going to be like.

DreamBuildPlay has started and me and a couple of guys are making a game for it. We have some really cool ideas to elaborate on. We are aiming at combining aspects of geometry wars and more classical vertical-scrolling shooters like raptor or tyrian. Simple, slick graphics and chaos is what we’re aiming for, and 3D ofcourse. More later on that, as it is XNA I will probably do some articles on it.

This weekend is LudumDare weekend and I’m attending. Voting for a subject is this week, and until it gets underway on friday night. Then its 48h of game making mayhem. Some guys at ludumdare irc are doing daily sketchblogs to improve on their drawing skills. It sounds interesting enough so I’ve decided to give that a try as well; I don’t know when though, but probably soon enough .

Thats it for now, until later

Misdirection

Justa quick addition:

<p style=”font-style:italic;text-align:justify;”>

So theres the secret to fooling wordpress into using italic if the <EM> tag is overridden by the CSS you can’t edit because you don’t want to pay for it

A new Ludum Dare is coming up also in the weekend of 17th – 19th of april just so you know. It will be the 14th time it is being held, and I am obliged to enter the competition now, since I failed to do so the past three LD’s. If i ever manage to find an excuse for not competing this time, it ought to be really really good Go check out www.ludumdare.com for more info.

Settled and Back once again:)

Hey guys, Im still here

I’m almost fully settled in into my new apartment, which turned out very neat and stylish to my opinion. The only thing lacking now is a proper internet connection which is bound to arrive within two weeks, so im working through mobile Internet at this moment.

Lots of stuff going on lately, which I really enjoy. I’m currently in my experimentation project at school which is really educational and intense, very cool. Like every year, some students are selected from university to participate in a cross-educational project with the Utrecht School of Arts (HKU), specifically the faculty for Game Design and Development. One game you might know of that is a game that came from such a project is de Blob which was originally made by students from HKU and University of Utrecht as The Blob (sorry that its not in English ), for the purpose of promoting the new to build station area of Utrecht, of which of course the client was the city of Utrecht. Last year, other students had built another game for the City of Utrecht, called Plan-it. Faith now decided that the group that I am part of has to build a new game for the city of Utrecht, in which we have to build a game that relates to the to be implemented tourist road sign system in the city. The team I am part of consists of nine people, and three of us including me are GMT students, five are HKU GDD students and one guy is a HKU media management student. It is a nice group in all, I think there’s a lot of talent and knowledge present within in the group. We’re now almost 4 weeks in and are in the concept phase, in which we apply some very nice practical game design process on which I will definately elaborate further in a future blog perhaps later this week, as game design and the process of game developent are two of the things that intrigue me a lot.

Btw, nvidia released its book GPU Gems 3 to the public. Must read

Long time,

Hi everyone, its been a while. Next to gaming my ass of on Fallout 3, Mirrors Edge and Gears of War 2, i’ve been grinding uni and working a lot, and I found a place to live so I’m in the process of moving on my own as well. Busy, busy, busy

I’ve quit my job as a game developer as of today, because I want to spend more time on uni and finish my master on Game and Media Technology. Its going reasonably well, I hope to do my experimentation project in the next two semesters, as well as some seminar on Path Plannig. Currently I am doing a course on geometric algorithms (Computational Geometry) which is somewhat hard, but very cool since it involves geometry. I then only need to do one more course before my I can start graduation project.

Fallout 3 is very nice. I’ve put a 60 or so hours in there and I’m not nearly there, allthough I am allready on level 20. Graphicswise it looks allright, but not nearly as good as Gears of War though. The continuality between background and foreground in GoW is really nicely done; I would really like to know how they managed to do such a thing efficiently. Storywise GoW2 has a bit more cutscenes than GoW 1 which is regrettable if you ask me, because the power of the game is to me is on interactive immersiveness. The horde mode is insane however and very amusing with four players. Finally, Mirrors Edge is very neatly done in general. The storyline is a bit short and it may be a bit too fast paced however, it could be a better game if this was dealt with a bit more carefully. I also cursed because I shot one police officer in level 2 and died, and in the end didn’t get the achievement for completing the game without shooting cops; that was a bit unforgiving all-in-all.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles rocks by the way. It is one of the better series out there at the moment, and it totally catches the eerie vibe the first two movies also had. Summer Glau plays a new model of terminatrix with more human emotional systems. She was captured by John Connor in the future and sent back to present day to protect John from dying and to prevent skynet to take over the world. It is definately a series worth checking out.

Back.

Hey everyone. Since I didn’t post something since the beginning of august, I might let you know that I’m still alive here I’ve not been into XNA much lately, since the project I was working on at work has been put into the fridge for now. I have been doing research on the capabilities of the Wii with the Wii devkit for our first Wii title which is going to be in production within a month I hope. I shall be talking about some technical stuff on that as well, as far as the NDA is not limiting that ofcourse.

I’ve also started taking classes again at university, so all in all I’m quite busy. The class I’m doing is called motion & manipulation, and is concerned with forward kinematics, motion planning, collision detection, and more.

I’ve been thinking about the blog and my activity on it, and I’ve decided to broaden it up a little, also commenting on whats happening to games and the industry in general. I play a lot of games, and I’ve got some strong opinions about them that I’d like to share, so stay tuned!

Some nice blogs

I’ve added some nice blogs to links, all of them are game development related and most of them are about Microsoft XNA. Microsoft XNA is a free to use framework for aspired and professional game developers to give a head start on developing games for Windows and XBox 360. It basically came as a replacement for managed directX and thus it is .net based. Note that I’m not saying that its easy, because its not an engine. This means that you will still have to program things the same level as like frustum culling, batch rendering and up when you want to do a decent 3D game.

I use XNA at work where I’m writing an engine for use in future XBLA titles, and these blogs either have come in handy for in depth information on certain topics or are just an interesting read. Shawn Hargreaves for one is a developer on the XNA framework itself, and Catalin Zima and Benjamin Nitschke are Microsoft XNA MVP’s. Andy Patrick is a guy who used to work at Rare, but abandoned professional game development and is now using XNA to make games as a hobby. He shares some nice inside tips and tricks which are not commonly known, which is really cool. Clinton Keith’s blog is all about Agile Game Development, which to me is an interesting topic.

Blog

So I’ve created this blog like a year ago and didn’t do anything much with it, until i found out i still had this blog just this week. I’m going to try and blog some stuff here about game development, which was actually my initial idea when i created this one. I hope it is going to be useful, and i hope I’ll keep it updated regularly, which is normally the hardest part with blogging.

Next to challenges that I come across at work and education, I also am going to try to do some stuff in my spare time. I allready have got some ideas for that, of which the first idea is to create a content loader for Microsofts XNA based on fractal terrains. From there I will try to continually add new features.

When it is successful i will try and move it onto a private server to accommodate some extra idea’s I’m having (for one, I hate the fact that I can’t modify the CSS), but we shall see for now how it turns out