This blog has been quiet the over the past year. With this post I’m officially putting the Sanguis project out to pasture indefinitely. I have not worked on the project this past year and I do not expect to come back to it. That said, I’ve been very busy on other projects (and university) and some projects that began as university projects. I had been hesitant to write about my other projects here, because they weren’t Cutthroat Studios projects (in other words, they weren’t Sanguis related). But with the realisation that I won’t be coming back to Sanguis, Cutthroat Studios needs a new project. And I have a few just waiting in line.

Games and graphics are what brought me to programming. They’re what brought me to computers. I still have a deep interest in graphics, and that interest shows in the projects I’ve chosen to take on recently. That said, my interests have expanded as I’ve been introduced to more facets of computer science. Read the rest of this entry »

Engadget reports on a clock that runs on energy derived from digesting insects that it captures. They incidentally mention a Japanese project that worked on fuel cells that run on blood. The intended use was for embedded medical technology (think pacemakers) where the concept of a non-toxic fuel cell that runs on you makes a lot of sense, but I can’t help thinking of that terrible war of the worlds remake with Tom Cruise where the tripods go around harvesting people to fill their tanks full of blood.

Creepy huh? At least Skynet was solar powered.

I’ve decided to release a few classes that I think would be of general use under the MIT liscence.

JWCommon 2009-02-04 focuses on classes for storing, recalling, and grouping options. Options can be any named value that can be represented by a string. I had application preferences in mind when I wrote the code but there is no reason the code is limited to that use.

Features:

• OptionsManager – Store and lookup options by name and group
• OptionsFileManager – Save or load all the options directly to or from a file 
• Ini file format implementation provided, easy to add your own file format implementation.
• String conversion/parsing utility methods
• Clean object oriented design
• No dependencies on other libraries (other than the c standard library)

Download Source Package

Download MSVC2005 binaries

Read the rest of this entry »

The fundamental goal of a game AI system is to make the non player characters appear smart. Well, that may be over reaching a touch; making the non player characters appear not stupid is a high enough bar for my AI ambitions on this project. The problem is that it is very difficult to make an AI that can compete in a wide array of situations with even the most developmentally handicapped elementary school student.

There are a few impressive applications of AI concepts that have been developed but they all apply only to a very specific, or a set of very specific situations, and usually they have a lot of help. By a lot of help, I mean, autonomous vehicle systems that work splendidly as long as they are given gps waypoints every couple meters or warehouse management robots that read barcodes off the floor to determine where they are and are fed the locations of every other robot in the warehouse so they don’t collide. I certainly don’t mean to demean either of the two systems that I mention, but to my childhood-sci-fi idea of artificial intelligence, they seem like cheating. They would also fail to follow instructions that our hypothetical kindergartener could perform with ease, such as: “walk to school,” or “find all the red things in the warehouse.”

Well, if those seem like cheating, game AI will seem like reading the answer out of the back of the book. Or, in the case of my Pathfinding AI system, precalculating every answer, then just looking up the one that we need this time. Read the rest of this entry »

As my regular readers have already noticed, there’s been a bit of a slowdown in my writing lately. There’s been a slowdown in work on Sanguis and Ashes as well. I’ve returned to school to finish my degree in computer science. Wish me luck! I have my fingers crossed hoping that when I get out, degree in hand, there will still be an economy left in which to use it!

American english has a serious deficiency of truly shocking expletives. Perhaps it is the paradoxical climate of verbal permissiveness where almost any profane utterance makes frequent appearances in popular media that has desensitized us, and thereby rendered our expletives impotent. When an american wants to use an expletive powerful enough to startle old ladies and make mothers hide their babies, there is really only one option these days. It is unfortunate that when american culture diverged from british culture, certain expletives were left behind. Words like bloody became mundane rather than profane. When we hear them used as utterances of frustration or anger, they sound more quaint than shocking. If it were not for religion, the only expletives we would have would be base remarks about excrement or improper sex.

People of the United States, use your expletives sparingly! Save them for when you truly need them or before long they may be about as shocking as exclamations from a 50′s sit com. Or better yet, invent your own horrifying epithets.

There are two basic shadowing techniques that are commonly used in real time rendering: stencil shadows and texture shadows. The stencil shadow technique (also called shadow volumes) works directly on the geometry to project shadow volumes through the scene. The texture shadow technique works by rendering the scene to a texture (jargon that simply means image) from the light’s point of view and using that texture to determine where shadows fall during the rendering process of the output image (what you see on the screen). Both methods have distinct advantages and disadvantages and the myriad array of sub-techniques and specialisations of these two umbrella techniques makes choosing a shadowing technique suited to ones own uses a bit of a task. Describing, or even enumerating all of the sub-techniques that have been used or proposed is outside the scope of this article (read: outside the scope of my evening). I may write some articles in the future about the sub-techniques that I think are wonderfully clever (and some of them are deliciously clever) but for now, the basics. How does anyone get any shadows on the screen in the first place?

Read the rest of this entry »

I remember the first time I started looking into shadows. It was back when I first started working with 3D graphics and I had this naive idea that 3D graphics were so awesome because they were simulating nature. Learning about real time shadow rendering techniques quickly killed that idea. Learning about other aspects of real time 3D rendering like geometry and lighting I suspended the realization that it is all just smoke and mirrors, by imagining that if my computer were just faster, I might be able to take into account enough detail to actually be simulating how light works, rather than just making a nice picture with a pseudo-approximation of how light works. But when it comes to shadows, that rationalisation rolls over and dies. The methods used to create the appearance of shadows in real time rendering (and as far as I’ve researched, in offline rendering as well) are far removed from the real world physics that create shadows.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to open applications for the Cutthroat Studios Art Team once again. I am looking for individuals with talent in: 3D modelling, texture art and world design/art direction. Interested parties with talent in one or more of these areas please contact me via my email address on the contact page.

The Application

In your application please provide the following information:

1. Your name
2. Which aspect(s) of the Cutthroat Studios Art Team you would like to be involved with
3. A summary of your relevant experience (does not need to be work experience)
4. An estimate of how much time you have available to work on Art Team projects per week
5. Examples of your work (attach to the email or include links)
6. Anything else that you think demonstrates your qualifications or talent

Applications will be open through August 8th, 2008

Good luck!

Numerical Apocalypse

A verdant world

dappled with light meets its end -

divide by zero.

The Blue Screen

Microsoft tells me,

General Protection Fault

cry out with despair.