Thursday, 19th October, 2006

Limbo - Turning world platform game?

Filed under: GameDesign, Games — dominique @ 03:56

Wow, have a look at this game concept video:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=13937&type=mov&pl=game

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Friday, 13th October, 2006

Trusted Computing - Video

Filed under: Planet Earth: Society And Politics — dominique @ 05:08

Got a link from a friend about a well done video:

Video about Trusted Computing

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Wednesday, 11th October, 2006

VT SDK: little trick for BuildingBlock development

Filed under: Virtools, Virtools SDK — dominique @ 05:10

There is a little trick one can find in a sample of the SDK in regards to parameter indices inside BBs. Ever had the case where you were writing a BB and suddenly you wanted to insert i.e a InputParameter? If your code is more complex you maybe just add it at the end to prevent changing all the Input-Parameter queries.

If you use ENUMs instead, you can easily reorder and insert new paramters. For example 

// Input Params
enum
{
    PARAM_CHARACTER = 0,
    PARAM_SKIN,
    PARAM_ANIM,
    PARAM_AMBIENT,
    PARAM_FACE,
    PARAM_CLOTHES,
    PARAM_HAIR,
    PARAM_BRAIN,
    PARAM_STATE
};

// Settings/Local Params
enum
{
    PARAM_CONSIDER_AMBIENT = 0,
    PARAM_CONSIDER_PLAYER
};

[....]

// example usage
CKCharacter* charc = (CKCharacter*) beh->GetInputParameterObject(PARAM_CHARACTER);
(etc  …)

Any reordering is now not braking the code anymore. Inserting now only needs changes in two places: enums and proto-definition.
Very nice idea! Thanks to whoever it had.

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Monday, 2nd October, 2006

TomF says: problems with precision? use int64!

Filed under: GameDev, Virtools — dominique @ 09:36

I guess most Virtools users already wondered over the precision problems when using vectors. For example: you enter a number and it transforms to a different value (or changed after reloading), or you iterate through some partitioned dimension and the accumulation of all the steps is not equal to the original dimension size.

Tom Forsyth is a programmer at Rad Game Tools, he is also very present on several GameDev related mailing lists. He published a couple of interesting articles - for example about shadow maps (for Startopia) and he also has an interesting blog. There he explains the precision problem with floats and it’s also understandable for non-hardcore programmers like me ;)  He mainly refers to large-scale worlds but I guess it has a much broader effect. I wonder if other projects do consider this? I think, I mostly see floats everywhere …

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