New content on the way
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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.
Finally caved in
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Things I liked this week :
- Getting the Oculus Rift DK2 :)
- Harlequins getting a try bonus point win for a change!
- The first Destiny House Of Wolves expansion trailer
- The sunshine!
- Guardians Of The Galaxy, finally watched it, great entertainment
Things I didn't like
- The 'backlash' at Valve's paid mod announcement
- Having trouble removing all the stutter on the DK2 in Elite Dangerous :)
Start your engines....
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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...
New year, new host
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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 :)
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