I highly recommend against being a morning person. As a morning person, you may consider it a virtue to be able to spring out of bed excited to start your day. The flaw with this approach to life becomes apparent when you spring out of bed too swiftly, bend down to grab your shirt too eagerly and end up pulling your back out.
You have been warned. Please govern yourselves accordingly.
Continue readingMy brother-in-law’s making a squad-based point-and-click adventure mystery game set in near-future Florida. If you like point-and-click adventure games, check it out on Kickstarter!
Continue readingWanted to show off the BDcraft textures I’ve been using.
Jump in and build something! Demo world is here
Continue readingCutouts are a way to render objects that are fully transparent in spots, without actually doing alpha-blending or pre-multiplied alpha stuffs. More on those can be found in this article: GPUs prefer premultiplication.
Here’s a great example of cutouts in Minecraft. Notice that the tree is made up of cubes which have a leaf texture applied to them. The texture is transparent within the space surrounding each leaf. No blending occurs; you can simply see through the transparent bits:
Continue readingWhen I started working on this project nearly a year ago, the frame rate rarely stayed consistent as the player moved around the world. The engine was simply allocating and discarding too much memory, resulting in frequent pauses in gameplay as the interpreter ran garbage collection. As I re-wrote more and more of the game engine, I came to understand exactly which types of objects and arrays I needed to allocate, where I could cut down on allocations, and where I might use an “object pool” to stash allocated objects for re-use. The old engine used typedarray-pool, but I’ve decided to create my own object-pool.
Continue readingI’ve finally rounded out some more features that I felt were necessary for a somewhat-compelling demo.
Open Google Chrome then click here to explore and build: http://voxeling.greaterscope.com
Recent updates include:
The voxeling engine now supports textures with transparent cutouts. Thus, leaves!
Will write about what I’ve learned along the way later. Check the voxeling project on github to see what it took, or to play around with it on your own.
Continue reading
The ISS has been housing astronauts continuously for the past fifteen years (press release here).
That’s cause for a celebration!
Continue reading