Category: Site

A long time since some updates, things have been pretty busy over winter, but finally the sunshine is back, and I'm able to start dedicating some time to my personal work. There's been some real interesting moves in the middleware market recently with Unreal Engine and Unity really competing hard for custom, and market share.

There's a lot I like about UE4 (particulary source code access), but ultimately I've decided that I'm better focusing my effort on Unity. I've not really used C++ in anger since university but I am pretty familiar with C#. I'm not going to become a great C++ programmer overnight either, and I'm not even that interested in the engine side of things, so I will be focusing on gameplay mechanics, AI and UI features, partly as they interest me, partly as it's my day job and I want to keep my skills sharp :)

I'll be writing article's semi-regularly along the way, might even stream on Twitch sometimes when I have a few hours to play with at the weekend. Stay tuned...

Category: Site

As per my previous post, I'd been having some trouble with managing my website on Azure (the service is great, the account management is not!), and Joomla was just residing on a freebie 20mb MySQL DB which was a) slow, and b) going to need replacing soon, so I've gone and switched across to a better value, better performing setup....got to keep those thousands of repeat visitors happy ;)

Had a great snowboarding trip to Kopaonik in Serbia last week, but naturally came back with a bad case of the flu so I've been hiding under a blanket feeling sorry for myself for days. I think I'm finally over the worst of it now though, and I finally have Unity open and working on my prototypes again :)

Category: Site

So my weekly posts thing hasn't really been working out, why? One word : Destiny. The game is very good and has had it's claws in me for a couple of months. Luckily I have now blitzed all the content so it doesn't require the relentless grind anymore :) 

What am I up to? I'm still jotting down ideas for a game prototype/learning exercise...the objectives are twofold, firstly to implement a fast AI system for fairly complex behaviours on 100+ actors in a single scene, secondly to make them look pretty with some shader programming exercises. I'm currently thinking that a largely input free AI sandbox would be pretty interesting to try out.

One other job....I'm going to install DD-WRT on my router and find a way to purge Taboola links from my internet experience. They are a cancer on the internet and drive me insane, be gone!

Category: Misc

Anyone that has studied game development has come across Bob Nystrom's excellent Game Programming Patterns site, well now finally the book is in print and eBook format :) Although all the content is still free on the website, I'd highly recommend picking up a copy, it's such a valuable resource and I find myself going back to it frequently to browse and be reminded of some bad habits I may be letting slip into my code!

I've recently been helping my girlfriend set up her own website and noticed how terribly slow the MySQL backend I'm using on here is.....might up and move the site at some point, unless anyone can point me in the direction of a good MySQL provider in the Azure Western Europe DC?