All Ramblings

Really Cool Stuff

I was downloading the latest good game episode only to find that for some reason the download runs faster when I'm using the internet to view webpages ( a mystery even to me, but alas 3 Mobile Broadband aren't the best of ISPs ) and decided that I needed to be web surfing in a more productive fashion than merely dicking about.

So I decided to look into some physics stuff for DexPP. What I want to do with DexPP is to create an interface much the same as DirectX has an interface for audio/visual/input/network/etc except this interface will be used for physics. And it was at this juncture that a quick google search and a few clicks later brough me to these two websites:

Newton Dynamics SDK

This looks like a pretty solid SDK for physics in games. They claim it behaves naturally and the video demonstration on the side appears to rival havok physics. And what's more, the SDK appears to be released under the GNU license.

Physics Forums

This looks like a pretty valid, and traffic heavy physics, math and engineering site. I believe this website could be a valuable resource for anyone with interests in these fields.

So there you go: Two websites you would be better off reading than this one. So hurry up and check them out!

Ciao, Kyall

My first go at A*

So I'm having my first go at creating an A* path finder, using flash, currently hacky as hell, done in AS3.

Not so great as of yet as it does generate loops, fails to find the shortest path, and in cases goes way off course before it finally gets back to the right node that it needs to move along in order to reach the goal node.

Doing this up for Ben's flash game that he wants to make, the RTS cults, figured I'd get this working first before going much further. Right now the a start algorithm is only half implemented, and in a shoddy hacky fashion. Hopefully I'll get the time I need to implement proper use of the open list concept, and then have it full implemented then tidy it up.

Source:

Demo:

Instructions:

Click in a square to set the start, click somewhere else to set the destination.

Blue nodes represent the active searching path.

Black nodes represent the found path.

Yellow node represents path impossible.

Welcome to the mind dump

Welcome to my little peice of the net which I am now - as Ben has robbed me of the blogging ability on the front end of team equidna, going to start using as a mind dump for game design/development/programming observations and concepts.

The beauty of this is that for too many years we have had this website in which I was incapable of blogging anything because whatever it was it had to be relevant to the team. Now I can just blog stuff relevant to myself, how fantastic.

So keep on the look out in these pages for general rants on what's pretty cool and what's pretty not.

Bye now, Kyall

Dex2.0 - The third revision of dex

I have begun work on my third iteration of my Dex engine. The original design goal of Dex was to wrap OpenGL and other APIs in device interfaces to create an clean/easy/cross-platform base for engine development. And after nearly three years I am finally getting around to this task.

But those three years weren't necessarily wasted. In those three years I learned how to build a lot of components in game engine from resource managers to skeletal animation systems.

And so once the base device interface has been completed and implemented across at minimum Windows & Linux using DirectX/OpenGL/OpenAL I'll be grabbing the source code from previous engines and porting them to Dex2.0 which should, within less than a few months, give me an easy to use, well designed, cross platform game engine to call my own.

After that it's going to be all about taking it next gen. Lighting & Material effects are the main priorities after the device interfacing and old source porting. Which should result very quickly in a game engine capable of rendering assets with high visual quality.

But that being said. Just watch this space for updates on how I deal with wrapping the devices or creating/porting engine components.

Arivadaci, Kyall