Categories
entity systems programming

Artemis Entity System in ObjectiveC

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Existing port: outdated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 documentation or updates, and Artemis has moved on since then.

There were also no unit tests etc – and the current Artemis getting-started wouldn’t work with this port (because so much has changed). So I started a new port…

New port: ObjC Artemis 100%

Primary aim:

  • make it identical to the core Artemis.
Categories
computer games dev-process devdiary entity systems games design

2014 Entity Systems: what are your Unity3D questions and problems?

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 couple of years, but I’ve been unhappy with the draft posts, and didn’t publish them.

Over the next couple of months, I’d love to hear from all of you the challenges, confusions, problems, and questions you have about this. I’m not promising quick answers – but it will help shape the blog posts I write, and as soon as I have a good enough set of answers, I’ll start posting them :).

Categories
community dev-process programming project management

Reporting issues in Open Source software

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…

Categories
iphone programming

OpenGL ES 2 – Textures 2 of 3: Texture Mapping

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 in detail – but there’s another option: Texture-Mapping (also known as “UV Mapping”, it’s identical).

Categories
GamesThatTeach

GamesThatTeach: Conway’s Life, gamified…

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”
  • …Life using a library might work better, or Life with more human-friendly rules
  • Even in a simple form, the game aspects work quite well: you quickly start to learn *if you have a window open to Wikipedia or similar* how to remember and recreate the classic shapes
Categories
server admin

WordPress’s Akismet pushes Database to 30x real size

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 bug in Akismet. I’ve had to delete Akismet – but WordPress’s coders don’t clean up after themselves, so you have to do some manual clean-up too. Read on.