This one took me longer than expected – my previous experiments with terrain rendering simply used a flat blue surface surrounding the land mass to model water, and I had wanted to implement a system to render water for a while now. I knew that there was an article describing a sample implementation in the…Read more
programming
Sky Rendering
Moving on from techniques for generating terrain for now, I started looking at how to generate a background for my rendered scene. So far I had been using a solid background color but I wanted something more interesting. Since the scene background in a typical game will obstructed in many places, most game engines do…Read more
On Playing God
The next game I want to make is going to be a god game. The term was coined back in the 8-bit days to describe a type of simulation game that imbues the player in with god-like powers while putting him in charge of a group of artificial beings. While the specifics vary between different…Read more
(Just Like) Starting Over
Here’s the thing… I find myself coming up with a new game idea once or twice a year. Usually at that point, I drop everything else I’ve been working on and focus all my free time for the next 2 or 3 weeks on it, until I gradually lose momentum. While those initial bursts are…Read more
TIS-100
Despite picking up a bunch of must-play AAA titles and experimental indie games during the recent Steam sale, I’ve spent the majority of my play time on a game about programming a fictitious computer from the dawn of the age of technology. TIS-100 is a puzzle game at heart, but what captured my attention was…Read more
Implementing a Java Agent (Part 3)
The previous posts in this series described how to create a Java agent and how to dynamically attach it to a running JVM. Once the agent is running, you may want to interact with it, for example to collect data from it or to execute specific methods on demand. Today’s post will show how to…Read more
Implementing a Java Agent (Part 2)
In the first part of this series, I demonstrated how to create a Java agent and attach it to an application during startup. It is also possible to dynamically attach your agent to a running program, as long as you have permissions to access the JVM. The updated source code is available for download. The…Read more
Deciphering Blade Runner
I have been doing some research into voxel rendering techniques as of lately. While the whole approach has fallen to the wayside a bit with the advent of 3D accelerators, I still find it to be a uniquely elegant approach to modeling and rendering objects in software. As part of my research, I thought it…Read more
Drools Netbeans Plugin
Having become fed up with Eclipse, I’ve found myself using Netbeans for my day-to-day work more and more in recent weeks. As a replacement IDE for Java development I’m pretty happy with it, though the one thing I found lacking was support for the Drools rule engine. While you can certainly create rule files in…Read more
For King and Country
I recently felt the urge to take some time off from the long-term game project I had been working on for most of this year, so I decided it would be fun to have a little weekend hackathon focusing on a small project. After the recent game-jams I had participated in as part of a…Read more