Defining Awesome

Btw. Thanks for all the Birthday wishes 3 days ago!

Here are some things I have been thinking about lately for Link-Dead. Sigvatr, if he’s not fantasizing about Ed Gein, is probably too, but I don’t know for sure cause he doesn’t have teh internetz at the moment.
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I realized I can’t stream collision maps cause the server needs it all loaded at once. I’m researching how Box2D can handle a big world.

http://ping.fm/Xd5tU seems like the games mainstream is catching up on heavy metal. Tim Schafer + Jack Black = reason to buy a PS3?

To test out the new tile engine I made a simple yet effective random cave generator. Here you can see a video of a physics-based character walking on a very large randomly generated map. The map size here is 13312×13312 pixels and was generated in about 23 seconds. The world size can be of course infinitely large (well as large as your hard drive). This is possible because I only stream the part of the map that is needed at the moment. On the video you can see that there is only part of the map visible at any given time. This is to show you how it works. New map parts are loaded when needed. Of course in the full game the loading won’t be visible at all.

Got an optimizing algorithm problem here. Maybe you can help out with some idea or pseudo-code?

I have a bunch of lines, but as you see on the picture they are not optimized. What seems one line consists of many points on the same line. I want to remove those points so that I have only the necessary points building the lines.

Tile engine works with physics. Lots of code written, it is 75% complete. What’s left is optimization & integrating it with the map editor.

Here are some quotes from people working at Valve that Ifound most useful. From the site: http://ping.fm/E9pJs

We start with a statement of the design goals for a small section of the game and try to keep the pure design phase very short, preferring an imperfect prototype to a perfect design. As soon as we have that imperfect prototype, we play-test it to see if it achieves its goals. If the experience is fun even in prototype form we know we’re onto something. If our early play tests yield ideas for ways to improve the prototype, we try a few of those and then test again as soon as possible. So the heart of our design process is very iterative and everyone from the cabal watches every play test to apply their expertise to the game experience

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I’m adding some game development veterans to my contacts on the social sites. So far I got David Perry of Shiny Entertainment and Richard Huenink from 3D Realms.

Duke Nukem Forever is no more. This article makes me think http://duke.a-13.net/. Lots to learn from their mistakes.