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550 days ago
Introduction I am writing a re-make of Populous: The Beginning. A legendary game that was years ahead of it's time (what more do you expect from Peter Molyneux?). Initial Ideas Populous is played on a height-mapped sphere, and I am not willing to fore-go that concept: but it does pose a few problems. Singularity This is what people call the convergence at the north and south poles of a sphere. There is a solution that is very effective, described by Paul Borke. In his implementation he pre-treats the texture. I am going to derive these values at runtime, for both the heightmap and the texture. By doing this I will gain the advantage that the landscape can have a higher resolution than the actual heightmap used (important for my CLOD algorithm). CLOD All the CLOD algorithms (for landscapes) I have seen so far use Geospheres, which I am now certain are not nessecary. They use sub-divisions and are a nightmare to implement. The camera is on a fixed-orbit around the ...
628 days ago
Trees and Anonymous Delegates Something that I found to be really useful with the new .Net 2.0 anonymous delegates is "actioning". Scenario I had a situation where I was recursing through a tree to perform some action against all the items. Lets set up a simple tree node: public class TreeItem : List<TreeItem> { public string Text; public TreeItem(string text) { Text = text; } } The old way Using the old naive way we could do the following: static class Program { static TreeItem RootNode = new TreeItem("Root"); static void Main() { // Fill the tree with useless data. RootNode.Add(new TreeItem("Node 1")); RootNode[0].Add(new TreeItem("Node 1.1")); RootNode[0].Add(new TreeItem("Node 1.2")); RootNode.Add(new TreeItem("Node 2")); RootNode[1].Add(new ...
647 days ago
One of the things I have started seeing in the industry is the importance of developer vision. You actually get to factors influencing developer vision: the actual developer's vision and the box that you place them in. Developer Vision I have started noticing that some developers write much better code than others. There are several influencing factors but the most important one is pride. I am proud of my code, 'ugly' code (read Hungarian notation) annoys the hell out of me because it just shows lack of commitment to the public interface. If a developer can't take the time to try and understand code they should seek another job or hobby. Which brings me to my second point: public interface. You could write code that would take other developers (and potentially yourself) a very long time to program against, or you could bite the bullet and make a masterpiece in the first place. It will save you time down the line and you may find that you can reuse your code. But that isn't ...
674 days ago
Eskom. A single word that now inspires hate and remorse in every single South African. Especially those in my industry. ZAY2K10 Bug I'm coining it. We have all heard of the Y2K30 bug (which is 10x more lethal than the Y2K strain), but here is a new one. South Africa and the 2010 Soccer World Cup. There are going to be huge infrastructure problems in South Africa when thousands of demanding tourists cross our border. It won't only be a electricity problem, but I can tell you what will causes it all: a power problem. The Current Government and Situation The current government is corrupt and completely and utterly unorganised. They resort to giving their top brass multi-million Rand bonuses; when, firstly, they don't deserve those bonuses and secondly, they can't afford those bonuses. They run essential services like they are capitalist ventures: sure they might publicise the telecoms and electricity providers - but certainly, as far as electricity goes, competitors are illegal. ...
674 days ago
I'll make my first real post an introduction to Cosmos (which neither stands for something nor does not stand for anything). Cosmos is an open source operating system written in 100% pure home-grown C#. How do we do this? Il2Cpu IL2CPU is a compiler that compiles CIL (Common Intermediate Language) to ML (Machine Language). CIL can not be run directly on a CPU (currently, at least): but it is what C# compiles to. ML is what your CPU understands. To get around the issue of needing ML at some point we inline assembler into C# (but it is strongly typed and all that amazing goodness). We can 'plug' methods in the corlib (.Net base library) and replace object and method implementations (this is a work in progress - a lot more needs to be done on the front of plugs). Why IL? So why are bothering to use IL in the first place? Languages that compile directly to ML generally suck (that includes 'hardcore' C/C++), why? ML is unsafe - write buggy programs (which even the best ...
