Virtually indistinguishable from magic

I shouldn’t be up this late but I couldn’t resist writing (mind you I start work really early…yolo). I am going through this moment where my brain is on high alert packed with large quantities of ideas waiting for me to unload on Microsoft word. You can possible assume that this feeling I am having is the same feeling JK ROWLING had when writing for Harry Potter. Ok. I am being ridiculous and should stop right now. I really need to get back to reading books! It’s so hard to read in the age where everyone has an electronic device and can access the World Wide Web; without even thinking the first thing I type on the web address is ‘facebook’. I AM HOOKED TO ZE INTERNET AND SLOWLY BECOMING A DEGENERATE. I HAVE A MASTER’S DEGREE. WTF AM I DOING!?!?!??! Good night my fellow readers … wait I don’t have any. What am I saying?    Peace,  Sha-BANG. P.S Cant stop listening to this song: 

You think that pulling a girl is as easy as ‘ABC’ but in reality that is not the case. It is a very complex process which requires huge amount of brain power… I kid. I don’t know where the single ladies ‘hang’ because every women I tend to meet has a boyfriend. I normally find this out in the middle of the conversation and that’s when you feel like a bomb has been dropped right in front of you. Sometimes you feel like you just want to be direct right from the beginning so you don’t want waste your precious time: Me‘ Do you have a boyfriend?’ Girl. Yes Me. Deuces (walk out like a boss) After a number of tries and failing I’ve decided to give up and grrrr every time I see a happy couple making out and express their dying love to each other. p.s this is not serious im just having fun. I haven’t written in a while hence why it’s so short.

Recently I've been using Game Maker to make some game prototypes and I've been wondering why it's frowned upon by a wider community of developers. It's been a decent way of getting some ideas on the screen so far. I want to try justify why someone who isn't experienced in programming shouldn't feel inferior for using it. That said it isn't without its pitfalls and I will mention some of the disadvantages I've discovered as well. C++ is an industry standard for making games. It's also an impossible thing to decipher. At first it seems like an animal that only people who have sat through a masters degree in computer science can tame. Game Maker has its own programming language. It's a dedicated scripting language serving one purpose in one environment. It's straightforward, and the documentation is all contained within the program. It's also a good stepping stone in attempting to tackle harder languages, since you get a hands-on idea of h...

Flying in games which are not designed from the bottom up as flight sims will inherently be cartoony. I've previously wondered why Battlefield and ARMA didn't make an effort to make the flying portions of their game at least replicate the feeling of flying in a more realistic way, often assuming it was a conscious decision to not implement rigorous physics. The reason they don't is quite simple: their maps sizes are way too small to allow for anything close to realism. The diagonal distance across a typical Battlefield 2: Project Reality map will be something like 5.7 km (4 km width & height), and the for the Limnos island in ARMA 3 is something like 35 km (25 km width & height). For infantry and land-based warfare, these numbers really aren't bad and are on the order of what you'd expect the scale of a conflict would be at (though tanks actually also fight each other over several kilometers), but here is a minimal argument for why planes cannot work at th...

I haven't always played many simulation games in any sensible way. Sims like IL-2 or FS9 , after a few sorties, or a couple circuits and ramming into buildings, I readily bounced off of. The exception to all of this, and the origin of my increasing interest in sims was when two years ago I bought Take On Helicopters and enjoyed flying the campaign. Take On Helicopters did a great job recreating Seattle in the most convincing way I've ever seen a city rendered in a videogame . Though it might seem superficial to say that it took a detailed environment for me to become interested, I think it's difficult if you aren't a pilot to be motivated to play a simulator given the reputation newer flight sims have. In any case, environments have always been a defining feature of flight sims so I really shouldn't feel too bad! Free-to-play has been a fantastic way to keep me flying lately. I found a friend in Microsoft's free-to-play game Flight . Flight does a decent...

This is episode 5 of the accompanying podcast to this blog. In this episode, we're joined by guest Ped, who is working towards becoming a cab driver but, as we mention but fail to explain anytime during the podcast, has a past as a civilian pilot. Conor joins us again and may as well be regular! We talk about planes after a visit everyone but Ali has gone on to the RAF museum near Edgeware, London. We then  **spoil**  Jane Eyre but it's probably been around long enough to not need a spoiler warning. This podcast is a little longer than usual, but don't worry since there's an intermission! We discuss (click below for Ped's very own photographs of these planes!): Part 1 Short Sunderland , Eurofighter, Hurricane fighter, Falcon 4.0 BMS , Taranis , F22 Interceptor video , Wolfenstein 3D video . Part 2 Dune, American Gods, Aleksandr Orlov's A Simples Life, Harry Potter series , Heart of Darkness. "Imagine what worlds were there" [#5, 49min30] ...

I've been tinkering for a little while on something quite ambitious (for me, anyway). I've sort of hit a knee-high wall in progressing it further so I thought I'd show what I have and talk about the things I found hard when writing it so far, before I vault my wall and carry on. Making sketches and notes to figure out designs. This is a sketch of a artillery car from a 1939 Polish train. (Don't google 'armoured train' because then you'll know this is the first thing that comes up!) The basic idea is a singleplayer videogame in which you command an (armoured) train across vast landscapes. You progress by transporting goods from town to town and hopefully turning a profit so that you can kit out your train to better fend off baddies. So far, so gamey. I wanted to rely on some optional storytelling, presented  in text form to fill in the gaps and make the world make a bit of sense, and to give you a reason to keep exploring. An aesthetic aim would have b...