Virtually indistinguishable from magic

Hype over the new Elite game has made me think about how amazing the older titles were too. I've not got much to say except that it's nice to look back to see how far things have come as well as look forwards and be excited about what's being created. Elite 2 came out in 1993 already then more sophisticated than many modern games. It couldn't even rely on modern standards like hardware rendering to achieve its visual representation. I like to think about the crazy triangulation happening in the background, the very aggressive LOD techniques behind the atmospheres, planets and stars, and the way data is handled at different scales (I've read forum posts which say that you can't have very large scaled games because a floating point variable can be only so big, but that's definitely not true if you have logic contained in different length scales. - This might be a little deeper and worth thinking about). And here is a video of 21 years of progress. Cont...

This is a pretty video-heavy post. I wanted to keep the numbers down but it's nice to be able to directly show what I am talking about. Sorry about that! Keep that tab-opening finger on the trigger! I recently realised that my younger self spent a lot of time  in some  very  interesting virtual spaces . If you'd followed those links you'd have found that they are all different games which involve sitting in a spaceship, zooming around and blowing things up. They belong to a fantastically nerdy game genre, 'Space Sims'. The wonderful coincidence that space is very empty and that 90's video cards could only manage a few thousand triangles meant that these sort of games were everywhere. As the 00's rolled in, and as Star Trek stopped being shown on TV for the first time in decades, this genre died out miserably leaving only few poorly translated games coming in from the East. Time's moved on still, and very recently mysterious market forces (crowdfundin...

I post a lot of videos and links onto my facebook page. I don't really know how many people watch or follow those links but I just do it anyway. I post stuff partly so that I can remember the things I find and go back to them one day. It's like fancy bookmarking. I've figured maybe I could collect everything here as well for convenience, and maybe put down some thoughts while I'm at it. Maybe I'll make this a weekly thing! Here is a fantastic link about direct observation of evolving species.  Several generations of colonies of bacteria were growth in a 20 year ongoing experiment, observing how bacteria with any useful mutations win out against the others. These researchers found that after about 30,000 generations the bacteria evolved to eat an entirely new sort of food! As usual, there's a bit of technical debate about what the observations mean but I can't say I understand it. I also actually always wondered if this was a study that people did befo...

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...