MAKE linked to my terrain project and since then a few people have expressed interest in the code. I’m not sure why this is catching on now. I tried putting the story on digg a few days ago and it was more or less ignored. Go figure.
Anyway, I’ll go over the project and will probably be releasing the code this weekend. If anyone else is interested, just drop a note in the comments. Thanks.
UPDATE 2/25/2006: I have now released the source code.
Because I don’t have anything clever to say right now, I’ll just post this picture. I can’t even think of a good caption, so you’ll have to come up with something witty on your own.
Do your best, I’m counting on you.
Last weekend I wrote about my enduring affection for System Shock. Now from Mike’s Pensieve I learn that there is a game coming that re-unites the System Shock 2 team to try to recreate the magic of the original games. It isn’t based on System Shock, but it IS based on the ideas behind it. The game is called BIOSHOCK, and isn’t due until sometime in 2007.
They don’t seem to have a website going yet, but the guys over at SSHOCK2.com have gathered a bit of info, or perhaps rumor, about the game. Instead of being set in space, it looks like the game is set in an underwater lab, so it still has the isolation and solitude of the original. It looks like the game has even more open-ended gameplay.
There isn’t much news available, but here is what I could find:
Ken Levine (General Manager at Irrational Games) interview with IGN
The Looking Glass BIOSHOCK fansite
Here is a first-look overview of the game, courtesy of the From the spamming shills at Gamespot
A BIOSHOCK fansite based in the UK. These guys have a heap of screenshots worth seeing.
The game doesn’t even have an official website yet, and I don’t expect we’ll see anything we can sink our teeth into, news-wise, for many months.
It’s going to be a long year. Sigh.
This is very amusing. Bring a towel.
This December I got my first cell phone as a gift from my wife. I’ve used them before, but actually owning one has given me some time to really think about this technology and how I use it. Now I have a question: Why are these things so damn small?!?
I’m only 5’11, so I’m not an unusually large man. My hands are normal sized, and yet cell phones always feel so tiny in my hands. Using the pad to enter numbers is difficult without a tool, because the buttons are smller than my fingertips. When I hold it up to my face it feels like I’m talking into a toy. Its too short, so that when unfolded it audio input is aimed at my cheek. It’s too narrow, and doesn’t really fit into the palm of my hand the way a mouse or electric shaver would. I can’t imagine how big guys even make use of these things. The audio output is so small that it does a poor job of covering my ear, thus letting in a lot of external noise. This isn’t just my phone, this is every cell phone I’ve held in the past couple of years. What’s going on here?
I understand why there was such a push to make phones smaller in the past. The first cell phones were clunky and heavy. Nobody wanted to talk into a brick. But the trend of smaller phones has progressed to the point where it no longer makes a lot of sense. I assume this push is in response to consumer demand, but I can’t imagine why people want phones this small.
What I’d like to see in a phone:
Make the phone about 25% larger. Use some of that extra space for more battery. Use the rest of some sort of internal cushioning or shock absorbtion. Drop support for watching movies, downloading songs, playing music videos, video games, and all of that other non-phone junk. I’m sure that won’t make the phone lighter, but it will get rid of a lot of needless clutter in the interface. You won’t need to waste so much surface area with web interface style buttons, which will free up space on the keypad so that the buttons are useful to adults. All of this would make a phone that is sturdier, more practical, more stable, and (most importantly) easier to use. I’d rather have a great phone than a mediocre phone that is also a mediocre video player / gameboy.
But that’s just me.
So, I submitted my terrain series to digg. Let’s see if anyone diggs it?
See the step-by-step of building a terrain rendering engine. This series starts off in a world of blue wireframe and develops into a nice texture-mapped world of mountains and valleys. You can read the technical details behind development, or just gaze at the pretty pictures.
UPDATE: Later. Nope. Only six people found it interesting. Tough crowd. Tough crowd.
Just testing the “blog this” feature on Flickr.
While we’re here: Why “Flickr”? What’s wrong with “Flicker”? Need to buy a vowel? Carpel tunnel kicked in when naming the site? Any suggestions on how we should pronounce this without adding the non-existant E?
Maybe deliberatly misspelled stuff is trendy. Maybe I should start calling myself Shams.
I’d be so hip.
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
T w e n t y S i d e d
