A blog about my rantings, including Games, Game Development, Gaming, Consoles, PC Gaming, Role Playing Games, People, Gaming tips & cheats, Game Programming and a plethora of other stuff.
News has broken that Electronic Arts (EA) has agreed to a sale reportedly worth around $55 billion to a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund alongside Affinity Partners and JPMorgan Chase. That's an extraordinary valuation. EA is one of gaming's oldest and most recognisable publishers. Whether or not you're a fan of its catalogue, few companies have had the influence EA has had…
Well, politics aside I thought I'd talk about my game engine and some of the new terrain systems I'm working on. There have been a couple of images and videos on the old YouTube channel with some of the examples, but here's a still for your enjoyment... See the MASSIVE tree remains on the peak it was to place trees (of the correct scale) into a natural pattern I then turned. I started with the…
Here I am again, being political, I watched Question Time last night... And I have to say I wasn't impressed with very many of the members of that panel. The standout moments being the childish faces the Green Candidate pulled when members of the Green Party were quoted back to them. The Liberal Democrat candidate and Reform candidates coming across as very nervous, or certainly not as confident…
I do try to avoid being too political here on my blog, however seeing this in my YouTube feed.... After I read the UK news this morning.... Has infuriated me: Why mainstream UK Media, why is this NOT front page news here? Why is not on UK Sky News, why am I having to see it via Australia!?? It really is enough to make you believe the media is somehow controlled & influenced by the government…
I won't be linking the content, however earlier today some video of "Blackbird" leaked, it was syndicated on some news outlets, such as the Metro. I have to say I have no idea from where the files came and it really quite annoyed me. On a personal level, no-one I know of has nor ever tried to leak anything about that brilliant project; and as one of the first engineers on the task of bringing it…
Viewers of my YouTube channel will know I have horses, we lunge, ride, trap & carriage drive and generally really enjoy them, keeping them and ourselves entertained. They are pets and massive parts of our lives. The eagle eyed of those viewers will have noticed over the last two years we have been training our Cleveland bay, he arrived from the breeders Mr & Mrs Orange at Kenley Cleveland Stud.…
This is a topic I have visited a few times over the years: 2016 , 2016 on SDL2 , 2019 , 2023 on control block , and I visited it professionally on the now cancelled AAA MMO Game Engine with Zenimax Online; the specific pattern within which came from my original 2016 post, just with a few tweaks and expansions over the years. Its just one of those things which comes up time and again in the C++…
I'm back on my home game engine and I need an area damage effect, which can apply to all the members of a team/party.... The trouble? How to synchronize this over a network connection. First of all, I know for certain that the server running my game world knows the center of the effect, and it knows the radius of the effect. And it does tick the effect application against each player whether their…
I was intrigued recently by a video from LindyBeige about Roman War Waggons , during which he brought up that some folks argue about how a horse might have been tacked to a wagon in that era. Where by some etchings show only a single "pole" attaching a wagon to oxen or horses. I looked at the image and wondered perhaps if it was a full length trace, which would be on the wagon frame, but he was…
No, I'm not talking about horses this time.... Lets talk engineering, what is a fence? A memory fence or barrier is used to order reads and writes around certain operations called Atomics. This ordering ensures that both communication of the value from the register in the processor is correct between all the cores/threads running and the cache within the chip as a minimum, and may even leave to a…
I've had one of those moments where I have posted and just feel the need to elaborate on the topic, I enjoy that feeling, so here goes. I posted about prototyping and that is such a very loaded word and indeed quite a broad subject, I'm not delving into anything specific in that field; however I am going to talk about my intent in why I enjoy revisiting, refactoring and the benefits I have found…
In software engineering I am one of those people who like to embrace change, I will in my own projects and even in professional situations (time permitting) stand up a new version of existing functionality in a side-by-side manner to try out new things, seek better solutions or performance or simply to understand how someone else's solution solved for the problem at hand. This mentality broadly…
I've had a little bit of a roller coaster few weeks, I would recommend anyone feeling life taking them and rushing them to try and find a minute for yourself, take a breath and slowly exhale. Having had my moment I set about keeping myself distracted, this meant returning to my home game engine, and it has to be remember that is an engine the 3D game you've seen me making my demos from is just one…
When I started working as a programmer, my days began with a ritual that felt entirely normal at the time: over an hour of inbound commuting into the city, and then another long outbound journey home. Time, energy, money — all drained in the process. It was the cost of doing business, or so I thought. Then the pandemic hit, and everything changed. Practically overnight, that daily routine…
Modular Ship Building system.... Yeah, so I've played about with compute shaders and high res oceans for, well for too long, I do want my game to have a low-poly feel so I've returned to focus in that direction. Today beginning my modular ship building system, I can build a ship to place into the play space out of discrete pieces. Since I'm using an Entity Component System this is trivial, I just…
This is a very hard post for me to write, not only am I personally and quite emotionally involved, but I am also still under a strict NDA and as such I can only point you to search the internet for many of the other leaks on the topic. But finally I can perhaps explain why the number of blog posts I have been making has dried up; I often said it was because I was busy. On January 2nd 2019 I walked…
This post title might look mightily like the post I made in January it is related, but we're going to discuss a different part of my Entity Component System and that is the containers backing my type registration and the actual values stored per component. I've seen a few different entity component systems and I'll draw parallels with a few well known public domain ones. The first is EnTT, it uses…
Today Microsoft Outlook is back at it's old habits of being utterly dreadful. So I need to put "29th" with the the in superset, it used to do this itself, but not any more.... now you get "2 h" in normal and "9t" in superset... Dreadful!
I've literally been inundated by a message about my XVE project, specifically calling out why I have the temerity to describe it as an "Engine when it looks do basic?" My over simplification in reply being that an engine can be anything you please, the engine is simply the framework within which the content can execute. This applies to Unreal, Unity, Godot all of them, if you have something which…
For about two years I've had a home game engine project, this has just been a little sandbox in which I have been able to experiment with graphics API's, systems, memory, threading models and other such "Game Engine" like things; it has simply been a learning aid to keep myself invigorated. You see I work on a AAA game engine, for a game yet to be released and that engine does a lot of things its…
We are at the change of am epoch, moving from a time where we would mockingly tell someone to read the manual when they became stuck to now having to literally instruct people to read the screen. "READ THE SCREEN!" If it is not an in your face, center of screen obscure everything until you dismiss it; or worse still a ping followed by a side of screen chat bubble; then users simply do not engage…
Very quick one, I've taken delivery of a new Graphics Card... (oooooo ahhhhh). And it's a seed change for me as this is my first ever AMD graphics card, so this is of course going in my own main PC, which itself is my first ever AMD CPU powered machine I am therefore all Team Red for the first time ever... EVER! I have been so excellently impressed with the performance of the Ryzen Zen 2 chip at…
Let us talk Software Design, let us talk about code locality. What do I mean by locality? Well, in Software Engineering we often talk about code being self documenting, a fabulous place to be if the code performing the work is right in front of you. But to be honest systems get pretty big pretty quickly. So you're very much more likely to me making calls to API's or just bunched of functions you…
Today I bring you a story, a true story, from my very own past. You may have seen the "broken feet" link on this very page, so yeah I broke both my ankles at the same time falling off a roof. Fast forward just under two years and I need an operation as the joint are going bad. On the day of the operation I am handed a lovely double hospital gown and the lady checks who, what and why I am there...…
Time for another story from my tech history, this time I point my torch of memory at one of the first larger systems I worked on from start to finish (nearly 10 years). I think I can say the product name of this particular system, it was called Phoenix and it wasn't a bad idea, to be honest, as with nearly every project I've ever worked on we needed more documentation and design; those to…