DISCLAIMER: I wrote this piece for a South African Game Development Magazine prior to leaving South Africa. It has been some time since I send the piece in for copy-editing and have heard nothing back regarding it so I’m simply going to post it here. The topic is a matter of some debate and the below article is simply … Continue reading
WOOT! My thesis, the bane of my existence for the last 2 years, is finally done! Its basically a review of the video game pathfinding field as well as presenting a novel grid map search technique: the spatial grid A*. The version linked below is the final draft that is being submitted to my faculty. Thesis: Video … Continue reading
In a recent technical interview I got asked the following question: “if an explosion occurs i.e. from a grenade, how would you determine which characters in the game are affected”. This was a question that I couldnt answer at the time which annoyed the hell out of me and it’s been sitting in the back of my head … Continue reading
I’ve had some downtime lately and seeing as I wrote a basic shadow mapping demo, I figured I’d write a short tutorial on the theory and implementation of shadow mapping. Shadow mapping is one of those topics that tends to get explained in a overly complicated manner when in fact the concept is rather simple. … Continue reading
So I’ve recently completed my MSc thesis on video game pathfinding and I guess it’s a little weird for someone who spent the last year focusing on game AI and pathfinding to not actually spend much time blogging about it. I figured that I spent the time today and write a short post on optimizing … Continue reading
I recently posted about some preliminary results for my prototype algorithm, I now have the final results for both BGMAPs and my own set of RTS style game maps. Both sets of maps were sized at 512×512. The RTS maps are simple island style maps which I made more complex that the average RTS map found … Continue reading
It’s been a while since I’ve posted about anything pathfinding related. I’m currently wrapping up my thesis and once I finish work on this prototype algorithm all I need to do is write up my results and my thesis is complete. My prototype algorithm is based on a pretty stupid premise so I wont go … Continue reading
A lot of guys have asked me for advice on developing and debugging shader programs. Well, it’s a tricky topic to deal with. Tto be able to fully debug shader programs you will need either a shader IDE like FXComposer or a GPU debugging tool like Nvidia Nsight. These are both complex tools and beyond … Continue reading
I’ve spent the last few days working on my little NMD engine. I’m building the engine as part of my fulfillment of my masters thesis. I’m researching pathfinding in dynamic environments with the end goal of developing a working real-time pathfinding engine that can deal with dynamic environments. The game engine will search as my testbed … Continue reading
I just spent the better part of 4 hours writing a custom font rendering system using screen-aligned billboards and the geometry shader. Honestly, what a pain in the ass! I didnt want to use the D3DX sprite object and the font system mainly because it’s been deprecated and I also want to keep the engine … Continue reading
