It's been a while since my last update, which was a rather optimistic attempt to hack Oculus support into Freespace Open. This did not happen. In fact I had a series of failed attempts to implement Oculus support into some barebones OpenGL projects. The initially quite clear and concise Oculus SDK documentation has now sadly fragmented so the sample code is out of sync with the documentation, and the heavy changes in each version were becoming a nightmare. I don't want to be a graphics or engine programmer so I have just parked that and started targeting my efforts at projects that are more useful to me in my role as a gameplay programmer.
To that end, I started learning UE4, which takes care of all the engine stuff for me so I can concentrate on gameplay implementations, and is a great way for me to get up to speed on C++. I've been messing around with an implementation of Conrad Parker's boids pseudocode...it works pretty good and I've made quite a few modifications to speed up performance in a gamedev context. I've drafted part 1 of an article covering this, and I'll get the phase 1 code up on github and get it published soon. I will be continuing with that work a little more, adding more advanced behaviours, terrain avoidance etc.
