Mostly geometry
Can we do to web services what Linux did to the operating systems? Imagine what the web with a P2P GitHub, a P2P YouTube, a P2P Twitter, a P2P Google search, and so on. But getting started with P2P services remains difficult, because: There is no P2P PostGRES! This is a very hard problem, so Continue reading "Peer-to-Peer Ordered Search Indexes"
When I was younger I invested a lot of time into studying geometric algebra. Geometric algebra is a system where you can add, subtract and multiply oriented linear subspaces like lines and hyperplanes (cf. Grassmanian). These things are pretty important if you re doing geometry, so it s worth it to learn many ways to work with them. Continue reading "Geometry without geometric algebra"
Large voxel terrains may contain millions of polygons. Rendering such terrains at a uniform scale is both inefficient and can lead to aliasing of distant objects. As a result, many game engines choose to implement some form of level of detail based rendering, so that distant terrain is rendered with less geometry. In this post, Continue reading "A level of detail method for blocky voxels"
Been a long time since I ve written anything here. Lately I ve been working on a new multiplayer WebGL voxel engine for codemao (an educational platform to teach kids programming via games). It s not live yet, but a bunch of neat ideas have come out of this project. In this post I want to talk about the Continue reading "Voxel lighting"
Previously in this series we covered the basics of collision detection and discussed some different approaches to finding intersections in sets of boxes: Collision detection (part 1): Overview Collision detection (part 2): Box intersection Today, we ll see how well this theory squares with reality and put as many algorithms as we can find to the Continue reading "Collision detection (part 3):…
Last time, we discussed collision detection in general and surveyed some techniques for narrow phase collision detection. In this article we will go into more detail on broad phase collision detection for closed axis-aligned boxes. This was a big problem in the 1970 s and early 1980 s in VLSI design, which resulted in many efficient algorithms and data structures Continue reading "Collision…
Collision, or intersection, detection is an important geometric operation with a large number of applications in graphics, CAD and virtual reality including: map overlay operations, constructive solid geometry, physics simulation, and label placement. It is common to make a distinction between two types of collision detection: Narrow phase: Test if 2 objects intersect Broad phase: Continue reading…
Last time, I finished up talking about latency issues for networked video games. Today I want to move onto the other major network resource, which is bandwidth. Compared to latency, bandwidth is much easier to discuss. This has been observed many times, perhaps most colorfully by Stuart Cheshire: S. Cheshire. (1996) It s the latency stupid! Though Continue reading "Replication in network games:…
Last time in this series, I talked about latency and consistency models. I wanted to say more about the last of these, local perception filtering, but ended up running way past the word count I was shooting for. So I decided to split the post and turn that discussion into today s topic. Causality Sharkey and Continue reading "Replication in networked games: Space/time consistency (Part 3)"
The last post in this series surveyed replication in network games at a high level. In this article and the next, I want to go deeper into the issues surrounding replication. One of the most annoying aspects of online gaming is latency. Latency, or lag, is the amount of time between when a user pushes a button Continue reading "Replication in networked games: Latency (Part 2)"