Cas (@PuppyGames) (of PuppyGames fame – Titan Attacks, Revenge of the Titans, etc) is working on an awesome new MMO RTS … thing. He had a weird networking problem, and was looking for suggestions on possible causes. I used to do a lot of MMO dev, so we ran through […]
network programming
16 posts
Here’s a great post-mortem on Growtopia (launched 2012, developed by a team of two) It’s slightly buried in there, but I spotted this:
I noticed a few months back that Pat Wyatt has been blogging rgularly and in a lot of detail last year. This (IMHO) is big news: Pat is an awesome developer who held key positions in the teams behind many of the bestselling computer games (e.g.: Diablo 1 + 2, […]
Hume just posted his Lessons Learned from the warmup for Ludum Dare 23 (48 hours to write a game from scratch – starts this weekend!) – and his positive experience using an Entity System. In his epic comment (sparked by a different Adam – not me, honest), is this gem: […]
I’ve recently been playing the excellent Realm of the Mad God – a very fast-paced 2d co-operative shooter. My feeling is that it’s going to be one of the most important games of 2011/2012, as it continues to grow in popularity. Typical experience of this game is that within 30 […]
There’s good reasons for adopting Mongo, I’m unconvinced (but open-minded) that performance is one of them. Here’s a ROFLMAO viewpoint on it: “If your write fails, you’re ****ed” Obviously, MySQL’s not perfect, but in most cases I’ve seen, it’s been lack of competence on the developer side, and the lack […]
I’ve just done a round of fixes for the source-examples of ES’s. Github projects updated on this page: http://entity-systems.wikidot.com/rdbms-with-code-in-systems Changed: Added a complete Java implementation of the most basic ES example Fixed some minor bugs in the Objective-C basic ES example; added some missing classes Added a missing class method […]
Spotted this (the notion “DevOps”) courtesy of Matthew Weigel, a term I’d fortunately missed-out on. It seems to come down to: Software Developers (programmers who write apps that a company sells) and Ops people (sysadmins who manage servers) don’t talk enough and don’t respect each other; this cause problems when […]
Conferences don’t make these public. But they should. So … here are the evaluations (from the audience) for our panel session at AGDC 09. Judge for yourself whether you want to attend any future sessions featuring us again (Adam Martin, Bill Dalton, Rick Lambright, Joe Ludwig, Marty Poulin). Head Count: […]
Slides for our panel arehere: “Killing mmo tech sacred cows.pdf”. Final panel was myself (moderating) and speakers: Bill Dalton (Bioware), Rick Lambright (Gazillion), Joe Ludwig (Valve), Marty Poulin (Shady Logic). PLEASE NOTE: WE DON’T REALLY ADVOCATE EXTREMIST RESPONSES TO TECHNICAL QUESTIONS; THIS WAS JUST A BIT OF FUN. (Mostly).
Really? O, RLY? Well, no, probably not – but this is the kind of opening statement I often make at industry-conference parties. In this rare case, at LOGIN this year, I was showing something on my laptop at the time and happened to *type* my opening salvo, rather than just […]
This week, a game service was announced that would stream games to your home TV without you needing to own a console or PC. A lot of people are wondering: are these guys smoking crack? EDIT: Richard Leadbetter at Eurogamer has an article with some great “side by side compare” […]
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22528 “It is probably safe to say that, despite decades of ever more spectacular Hollywood visions of extra-terrestial domination, humanity in its worst nightmares never imagined it would have to contend with spawn-camping aliens.” (also … If that article is accurate, sad but unsurprising to hear that (apparently) the underpowered […]
I wanted to knock something up for Facebook, and I thought I’d try out PHP development on my shiny macbook air laptop (I usually develop on a much more powerful windows/linux PC). This is tortuous, painful, and mostly undocumented on the official site. Sigh. After some experimentation, here’s how to […]
On this site I have a rather subtly-hidden Blog Roll. When I started blogging, the site had less on it, and the roll was easy to find – and short. Now it’s not. And it’s long. And each link on there has been carefully considered. There’s some gems in there […]
“The first thing to realize is that encryption of the data stream isn’t going to stop anyone serious.” – this page lists half a dozen conceptual ways that people will try to hack your MMO. It’s nothing like as exhaustive as the title suggests, but given it’s on Raph’s blog, […]