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I’ve done it! I finally got rid of Shamus! Now I rule Twenty Sided! Mwahahahaha!
Good thing Rutskarn was able to hire those Algerian terrorists. Even though they might not have actually been terrorists. Or Algerians.
Or people.
Okay, so Shamus might have just gotten sick and didn’t make it to the recording session. Which means he could recover and be back to posting on this blog any day now. Cherish the Shamelessness while it lasts!
Perlin Noise is a technique for quickly generating a metric crapload of really interesting pseudo-randomness. “Interesting” in that it forms nice organic patterns instead of pure random noise. “Pseudo Random” in that you can give it the same input and get the same output. “Crapload” means that you can make a final data set thousands of times larger than the noise you start with.
Note that in the context of this project I’m going to discuss Perlin in terms of 2D images, but I’m using it in 3D. It’s just easier to show you what we’re doing in 2D.
We begin with a basic image of really random noise, which I will depict as a 2D greyscale image. The more random the better. We want areas of light, dark, and medium brightness. We want it to be really diverse overall, but have small local clusters of bright or darkness. We don’t want large areas to be homogeneous, and we don’t want the small areas just just be a scatter of white and black pixels. We can accomplish this a lot of ways. I could churn out a bunch of values in a random number generator, for example. Or, we can just open up a new image in your Photoshop of choice, crank up the noise filter on a blank image, and hit save.
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Awesome, right?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Octant Part 4: The Beautiful Noise”
Link (YouTube) |
This was supposed to go up yesterday, but Shamus had some sort of inexplicable problem when he tried to watch it. On an unrelated note, I would like to point out that Shamus is a crotchety old man that doesn’t have time to figure out you youngins’ newfangled “internet videos,” thank you very much.
This morning I sent in today’s column, clicked over to Penny Arcade, and saw they have a comic about this very same issue.
Qt is a cross-platform application and UI framework with APIs for C++ programming. In English, that means it’s a bunch of software that you can add to your project to make programs with a GUI that will run on Windows, Linux, or Mac. This is actually a big deal. There’s a reason that so few programs are cross-platform: It’s hard to write code that will run anywhere.
I know I keep sending you back to the Object-Disoriented Programming post so often it sort of feels like a Rickroll at this point, but this is a really important problem. C++ itself is very barebones. It doesn’t load fonts. It doesn’t understand images. It doesn’t understand windowed environments. To do these things you need an SDK. You’ll need one for each new thing you want to do. Each one might tie you to a particular operating system, and they’re very likely to conflict with each other in annoying ways. By the time you get all the stuff you need for GUI, images, sound, graphics, threading, and input, your project will be this Frankenstein’s Monster of sewn-together systems. And you haven’t even started coding yet!
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Octant Part 3: Using Qt”
Link (YouTube) |
When you meet the kidnapper, it shows him drop a flare and seem to wipe out a bunch of Taken at once. This led me to the incorrect conclusion that flares = grenades. This came back to bite me when you’re supposed to hold them off. I was using them all wrong. I kept throwing them down, trying to figure out why the flares weren’t killing my foes like I expected. Do I need to be closer? Do I need them to cluster up more? Then when the guy told me to hold them off, I’d already run out. Oops.
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The source for Project Frontier is now available on BitBucket. I’m really hoping you find it to be useful. I’m very sorry to see I left the codebase in such shabby shape.
The program defaults to re-loading the last save you played. If you’re running it for the first time, then it doesn’t do anything. Bring down the console with ~ and type:
game new 1
You can replace the 1 with any number you like. That’s the seed number used to create the world. Different numbers will lead to different worlds. (The screenshot above is from right near the spawn point in world #1.)
Looks like it also defaults to wireframe on, textures off, shaders off. That’s dumb. Sorry. In the console:
render.shaders=1
render.wireframe=0
render.textured=1
That should put you in a good place. Also use:
mouse.invert=1
If you’re a mouse-inverter. Use
flying=1
Or:
flying=0
To turn flying on and off. The WASD keys move you around. Right-click enters and exits mouselook.
Missing textures are represented with a checkerboard pattern.
Please let me know if you have any other problems.
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
T w e n t y S i d e d
