I wanted to try the latest version of Artemis, and I had an old game project that was quickly written in OOP style. So I went looking for an ObjC port… Existing port: outdated There was a port linked on the Artemis site that was OK – but had no […]
Yearly Archives: 2013
88 posts
In 2014, I’ll be making a new game in Unity that makes intensive use of an Entity System. This will give me lots of ammo for a new post exploring the pros and cons of Unity’s “partial” Entity System architecture. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the last […]
I maintain a medium-sized open-source project. I welcome bugs and ideas via GitHub’s excellent “Issues” tab. Some Issues are well-written, others are not. Strangely: Issues get resolved fastest are often the shortest – as little as 2 or 3 sentences. Doing it “right” is easier than I expected…
Recap: Texturing in OpenGL can be achieved in two separate ways, using different API’s and hardware features. The preferred, modern approach – procedural texturing – uses nothing more than a Fragment shader (this is really what Fragment shaders were created for: Texturing). Part 5 (Textures: 1 of 3) covered that […]
Quick and simple conversion of Life into an actual game (instead of a mathematical “game”): https://thomashunter.name/games/strategic-game-of-life/ A couple of observations: “Life” makes for a terrible game: it’s far too complicated to translate between “Thing I want to achieve” and “how I would choose/use/combine the pieces at hand to achieve it” […]
Like half the planet, I use WordPress as a blogging platform. There are many good things about it. One of those used to be Akismet (if you ignore the slightly unpleasant sales strategy: it’s free, if you give WordPress some personal details) – but today I hit a very serious […]
This is a post for every iPhone/iPad developer. Every day, we try to use “best practices” when writing code, and building apps.
OpenGL Texturing has been re-invented multiple times, with different hardware implementations each time. As a developer, you need to be comfortable with all of them.
Apple invented “bundles” and “frameworks” to greatly improve the ease of development and maintenance of OS X projects. They are really good. But Apple modified Xcode to try and stop people using these on iOS. I don’t know why. Today I delved into this to find out the correct, working, […]
I got an email this morning noting that my blog was taking “forever” to load a single post. A quick check, and I found that it was running 70x overloaded, due to a vast number of spammers trying (and, in every case, failing) to submit wordpress comment-spam. No spams will […]
Game Development Principles I’ve recently been working with a group of teenagers, helping them learn to program for themselves, and build their own iPhone/iPad/Android games. So, when Cengage offered me a review copy of this book, I thought it would be a good idea to have a look and see […]
(this is a post mainly to document some new features and fixes I’ve added to SVGKit version 1.2 today – they are already on the main development branch (currently: 1.x), ready for use) SVGKit overview, November 2013 While a group of us were cleaning up and improving SVGKit about 2 […]
I’ve got a long-running project around rendering 3D Earth in interesting ways. It’s being used in a game project, and some non-game stuff too. Here’s a recent screenshot: I added a particle system that uses Vector Fields to move the particles based on arbitrary incoming data, and then wraps it […]
I was asked this recently in private mail by someone heading off to University / College. For people choosing between a Computer Science/Software Engineering course vs. a Game Design / Game Development course, I’d said: If you love games, you’ll do both anyway; one you’ll learn in lectures, the other […]
Recap: Part 1 – Overview of GLKit Part 2 – Drawcalls, and how OpenGL code is architected Part 3 – Vertices, Shaders and Geometry Part 4 – (additions to Part 3); preparing for Textures …but looking back, I’m really unhappy with Part 4. Xcode5 invalidates almost 30% of it, and […]
UPDATE: This post sucks; it has some useful bits about setting up a breakpoint in the Xcode debugger – but apart from that: I recommend skipping it and going straight to Part 4b instead, which explains things much better. This is Part 4, and explains how to debug in OpenGL, […]
I’m writing some KISS tutorials on using OpenGL ES 2.0 in iOS/mobile, because I was frustrated that most of the tutorials on GL ES used incorrect or outdated approaches. (I’m using the OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide as my baseline, along with my own experiences of game-programming, and checking it […]
(this is Part 3; Part 1 has an index of all the posts) We finished Part 2 with the most basic drawing of all: we filled the screen with a background colour (pink/magenta), but no 3D objects.
The old PAYE tools was bad, really bad – I saw it generate the wrong figures once (i.e. actively costing UK small businesses real money for HMRC’s carelessness). The new one is great – but it hasn’t been tested properly. The install instructions are wrong, it installs illegally on OS […]
We already had to do this a year or so ago when Firefox developers tried to force a bad UI paradigm on us. Now they’ve done it again, and added a new way to turn “new tab” from something that does what it says, into something that does stuff you […]