Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Useful links and a new perspective

I spent the last year programming lots of stuff, but with very little worth showing:

I got myself up to date with OpenGL 4.
I tried to learn OpenCL.  Will have to try again, though.
I wrote a terrain mesh simplifier, based on ideas from Shamus Young's Terrain Project.
I wrote an emulator for the DCPU-16 from Notch's new game 0x10c.
I designed ROBOL, a new programming language specialized for game AI and robotics.
I worked on a graphics engine based on dual-contouring of voxel data, deferred convex polyhedron volumetric lighting and portals, with gamma-correction, pre-multiplied alpha and dithering.
I wrote a buggy AI for a Tron lightcycles-like game as part of the Entelect R100000 challenge.

The graphics engine would be worth showing, except that I'm trying to implement it in OpenCL, and have thus far failed to really get it started.  Maybe I should try it in pure Java first...  modify the Cyclopean engine...

Meanwhile, I've decided to get away from 3-D graphics for a bit, and get back to simple 2-D sprites.  It's amazing what you can do with 2-D if you're artistic.  And the quality of my recent paintings do imply that I am sufficiently artistic.

Yesterday I had an idea for a project that would be simple enough to produce rapid progress:  A 2-D real-time RPG with a significant amount of modularity.  The modularity is needed so that I can start with a bare-bones game (i.e. rapid visible progress) and then add more ideas with time, until it has enough features.

Overall, I intend to update this blog every Sunday from now on.  I will mostly post about my new RPG: showing off screenshots, explaining design choices, hyping the innovative ideas, etcetera.  When I don't have time to work on the RPG, I will go more in-depth and technical on things that I did in my previous projects.

Hopefully, my new articles will teach others useful new tricks and give them understanding of some interesting algorithms.