Instructions: Copy/paste this into your functions.php (TODO: convert it to a standalone php file, and make it into a plygin you can activte/deactivate) Create a new menu item of type “custom URL” Make your URL “http://#latestpost:category_name” where “category_name” is the name of the category whose latest post you want to […]
programming
167 posts
A few months ago I ran a survey to find out which programming-languages people were using with Entity Systems: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/18JF6uCHI0nZ1-Yel76uZzL1UfFMI21QvDlcnXSGXSHo/viewform I’m about to publish a Patreon article on Entity Systems (here if you want to support me), but I wanted to put something up on my blog at the same […]
TL;DR: experienced CEO/CTO/TechDirector with long background in programming, sales, and business management (Corporate, iPhone/Android, Games, Education) looking for strategic roles in USA, UK, and Asia. After a year-out to do a post-graduate degree in Education, I’m looking for something new and exciting to do next. My primary goal is to […]
Unity3D has a great core architecture – it’s easy to understand and use. However, it has some significant flaws. One of the recurring problems I run into is that Unity requirs you to have precisely one “Scene” at any one time, but often you need to have multiple scenes at […]
One of my hobby projects is a testament to the Ultima and Elder Scrolls games – a massive open-world, where everything you do impacts the world around you. This has long been promised by commercial games – and it sucks from a gameplay perspective; it’s just not fun. But a […]
One of Unity’s dirty secrets is that (out of the box) it’s plain awful as a prototyping tool. You can fix that, but it requires quite a lot of work. I’m going to start publishing my fixes one by one. Here’s the first: a test-bed for making custom meshes.
If you do any non-trivial customization of Unity Editor, you’ll almost certainly extend EditorWindow. But Unity (to date) refuses to tell anyone how to do this legally, or what the contracts you’re being held to are. Without that, many plugins on the Unity Asset Store are wrong and buggy, and […]
This has come up a few times, and I ended up replying on Twitter: @t_machine_org any thoughts of using 128bit guids for entity-ids? too big? — Richard Kogelnig (@RichardKogelnig) June 9, 2015 But that’s a crappy way to find things later, so I made a quick-and-dirty infographic with a few […]
Slides from my talk last night at Unity Brighton. Three parts: First: introduction / overview of Entity Systems, and why you care (as a “person who makes games”) Second: Progress so far: screenshots of the Unity Editor with explanation of the new features I’ve added Third: Challenges and solutions I’ve […]
Recap: previous posts on Unity3D and designing an efficient Entity Systems add-on library, using structs to store data in C#. But …
Here’s a game: Player Inventory Gun 1 AmmoHolder Gun 2 AmmoHolder Some of those are 3D visual objects: Player, Gun 1, Gun 2. Some of those are abstract concepts, or data: Inventory, AmmoHolder. (in a Diablo clone, the Inventory might be a visual object, but only when you bring up […]
How do you program a “level”? This is not usually a problem in a game engine, but Unity requires you to isolate each “level” as a Scene. And Unity’s Scenes have some strange design choices (bugs?) – IMHO they were designed for toy projects, not for production games. Here’s a stream-of-consciousness […]
This one has annoyed me for years: Unity’s OnMouseDown has never really worked. (NB: it works perfectly if you make a scene with a single cube; but that is not a game. It breaks completely as soon as you add multiple objects, colliders, etc to a scene) The main reason […]
When you first install Blender, DO THIS! Menu: File > User Preferences… > System When you look at objects in edit mode, they’ll look something like this: Why? Blender makes it very easy to get a face back-to-front. Or to have two faces overlapping. Or … any number of other […]
PDF here: rotations-in-unity-a-guide-by-t_machine_org Image preview because WordPress HTML doesn’t embed PDF previews (Ah, I’ve been spoilt by Gmail!):
Slides from my talk earlier this evening: LUUG-2015-Editor Customization-v1.3 And if you were there, and haven’t read @lucasmeijer’s blog post yet: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/06/24/serialization-in-unity/
The author of Advanced Inspector gave me a free copy over Christmas. I’d considered it many times, and always ended up choosing not to buy, and write my own fixes/workarounds instead. So I was keen to try this out on a hobby project and see how well it works in […]
Ask 10 game developers if you should use more script code or less, and you will get 11 different answers. They are all correct: it’s very situation-specific. Use of scripting languages is highly dependent on the humans and the practical / project-management issues. Why?
I needed fast, efficient, … but powerful, adaptable … pathfinding for my hobby project. My minions have to fly, walk, crawl, teleport, tunnel their way across a procedural landscape. Getting to that point has been tricky, but the journey’s been interesting. We want something that intelligently routes creatures around obstacles, […]
This is a blog post I wrote 6 months ago, and my life got too busy to finish it off, finish testing the code, improving the text. So I’m publishing this now, warts and all. There are probably bugs. There are bits that I could explain better – but I […]