Dawn of the Geeks

Lode’s Computer Graphics Tutorial

That’s a good resource for information about various graphics rendering concepts including Raycasting. I was looking at his code and noticed he used the “Scalar” keyword to define variables. Turns out it’s an SDL thing. A scalar can either be a float or a double. This allows you to switch between the two without changing your code to see how it affects the rendering.

Rather than using the SDL keyword I’m just going to use a #define to see how the performance of TMRGE is affected by a lesser precision variable type. The other thing I can do is change the plotpixel method to go directly to video memory. The way it works now is that the background is rendered, the walls are rendered, the sprites are rendered and then the whole thing is copied one pixel at a time to video memory.

What would be better is to simply pass in a pointer to the Wolf5K class to the video memory and draw directly to that. That should speed up the framerate quite a bit. Hopefully I can do that without making the code too SDL specific. The idea is to make it easily portable to any platform.

See the Trailer for the new King Kong movie.

Apparently in the alpha release the girls don’t show up until you shoot them. Then they just stand there. I’m not sure why it would do that in the release but not when I compile and run from Visual Studio. The firefly’s work fine. They move around and light the area up just like they’re supposed to and it’s basically the same logic for the girls.

I’ll have to look into that some more tonight and try to get that fixed.

Playing it a little more I noticed little dots running around the floor. Turns out those are the girls. For some reason, they just aren’t being rendered right until you shoot them. In higher levels, some girls are rendered running around and others are just dots on the floor. I also found out that the lights aren’t being cleared out between levels so as you progress the level has more and more lights flying around.

On a 2.2Ghz P4 I’m getting about 10fps. A 3.0Ghz P4 gets about 15fps. I think the biggest bottleneck is the 64-bit math for everything on 32-bit systems. But, we’ll see if I really need to sacrifice the ability to read the fine print on wall textures to get a playable frame rate.

Anyway, that’s why this is an alpha release.

On screens, but not store shelves: Casual games

Since the release of “Diner Dash” late last year, the hand-painted, drag-and-drop game quickly became the most requested item on major online game sites, including Yahoo Games, Real Arcade and Shockwave.com. Peter Seung-Taek Lee, co-founder and president of GameLab, said “Diner Dash” remained in the top five best sellers of downloadable games, showing considerable shelf life for a video game that never existed on a shelf.

“We wanted something that people can easily relate to,” Lee said. “There is something about very simple play that gives pleasure. You can just click on it and enjoy the game.”

John Welch, president and chief executive of PlayFirst, a publisher of casual games, including “Diner Dash,” said the $20 game had sold more than 50,000 copies and continued to sell about 1,000 a day.

And games like “Diner Dash” have become big business. Casual games–generally simple-to-play, short-duration games that are graphically unsophisticated–will represent about $250 million a year in sales, Welch estimated. They are a small but growing sector of the overall United States game industry, which is expected to generate $8.4 billion in sales in 2005, according to a forecast by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

For those who want to “break into the business” it would probably be a good idea to start small and not break the bank. Games like Tetris are rediculously popular and clones are pumped out by the dozens by amatures each year (I made that up, it’s probably not entirely true). My first big game was “Pimp’s Quest” for the TI-85. It’s spawed awhole new class of games and took only a month for me to code. You simply don’t have to spend much or any money to create a popular game. You just need the talent and a good idea. Games only cost money to make when you have to buy the talent.

Fortunatly for me, I’m satisfied digging through the dumpster so to speak for anything I need for my little projects that I can’t create myself. TMRGE isn’t costing me a dime to make. But the Real Time Software Rendering Tutorials are bringing in quite a few dimes every month. Unfortunatly, that’s literal. But, with a real project being built from the tutorials, hopefully TMRGE will bring in more visitors and more interest in what I’m trying to teach people.

AMD Sues Intel for Antitrust

AMD said Tuesday it filed an antitrust complaint against Intel, accusing the chip giant of coercing computer manufacturers such as Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Gateway, and Hitachi to buy microprocessors only from Intel.

AMD’s 48-page complaint filed in federal court in Delaware claims 38 companies have been victimized by Intel and alleges that Intel unlawfully maintained a monopoly on x86-based CPUs. AMD contends that consumers have suffered as a result of Intel’s alleged behavior.

AMD charged that Intel forced major computer makers into exclusive deals in return for cash, discriminatory pricing, and marketing subsidies. The complaint also accused Intel of threatening to retaliate against computer manufacturers that put AMD CPUs in their PCs.

test

Boffins create zombie dogs

US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.

Pittsburgh’s Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject’s veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.

I’ve already mentioned these sites but apparently the DNS entries took longer than expected to propogate. Making use of www.wannabrowser.com it seems that everything is good to go now. So I’ll post the sites again if you’re interested in trying break things.

http://stress.embeddedplus.com and http://ftp.embeddedplus.com

Also, the ftp address is also an ftp server. There is an anonymous account if you want to try to break that as well.

You’re not allowed to hack anything other than these web-sites. Doing so may result in prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. You may not attempt to hack any hardware such as routers or modems. If you do not understand what is and what is not allowed, that is not my responsibility. By using these sites in any manner you understand and agree to these statements. You also agree that this is temporary and that after the alloted time to test out the servers is over any attempt to hack anything may result in prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.

When the test is over it will be announced at www.icarusindie.com

Have Fun.

Wolf5K

It’s been a very long time since I first began picking it apart and translating it. Looking at the directory dates for the various lessons, it looks like I started it last year in July. Which actually sounds about right. Summer is the time when I can find the time to work on pet projects. Going through the code more for The Most Rediculous Game Ever I’m finding out more about why certain bugs exist. In the original version, enemies will occasionally get stuck in walls. This happens because the sprite gets too close to the wall and the player is positioned in such a way that the rotation of the player puts the sprite entirely behind the wall. And since the AI dictates that if you can’t see it, it doens’t move, it gets stuck.

The way I fixed that with The Most Rediculous Game Ever is by adding a line of sight algorithm. Rather than just checking the next step to see if it’s valid, I check the entire motion. Since TMRGE uses time based motion, it checks to see if, going in the same direction for one second will result in a collision with the wall, the object changes direction. This seems to be a sufficient solution. Proper collision detection couldn’t be done in Wolf5K due to size constraints. It would also slow down the game quite a bit. With C++, the hit to performance is negligable.

Another problem that existed with the original shows up when you die. Rather than checking if the current y position of the pixel for the sprite is on the screen and only drawing it if it is, the starting y is set to 0 if it’s less than 0. The result is that the monsters fall into the floor with you rather than the sprite being clipped like it should be. A hidden problem is the background. When you fall into the floor the background isn’t adjusted for the height difference. This isn’t an issue with the original since the background is pure black, but TMRGE uses a multi-colored background and at some point it needs to be fixed so that the background is redrawn from the new perspective when the player dies.

Another possibility is increasing the complexity of the background. Rather than using a fixed background (which is very fast), it would be possible to implement something like the original DooM uses. However, that would require drawing the background every frame pixel by pixel rather than doing a simple memory copy. It would look a lot better though and the background would then be able to rotate when the player rotates.

But, part of what makes this game rediculous is implementing advanced graphics techniques into a primitive rendering method that was first used in a commercial game in 1992. Wolf3D pushed the limits of modern hardware back then. Now the goal is to see how far modern hardware can go in 2005. Some of the things I want to do are lighting, bump-mapping and shadows.

The Virtual Planet Explorer

A European Union program has helped several European partners to develop the Virtual Planet (or V-Planet) software, which will enable its users to browse and interact in three dimensions with any part of our planet, according to IST Results. “Using Vplanet Explorer, anyone can set off on a journey to discover new regions in 3D, rather than staring at a flat map and trying to picture its scenery,” says Eric Martin, coordinator of the IST project. The software can also be used for technical simulations and has already been used by both Airbus and Boeing. It should be available this summer for about 10,000 euros (about $12K).