Game Programming with Steve Healy

As HopeDagger has pointed out in my last post, it’s been a painfully long time since I’ve updated. I let real work and game development take over my blogging life and I’ve left you all in the dark and for that I am sorry.

So in an effort to prove my rekindled love for blogging, I’m going to go ahead and give you all an update on what’s been going on.

In game development news, I’ve been furiously working on an outdoors engine. I learned quadtrees for the first time (which took a lot longer than I thought it would) and am now working hard on a generation method that I’m comfortable with. LOD algorithms have me ready to gouge out my eyes and I have since taken a break from LOD programming and focused more on the terrain optimizations I can handle like tweaking generation methods, adding better smoothing filters, and trying to combine various other algorithms to make the generator more robust.

The idea is a Tribes-like game with very little (if any) indoor scenes to make things easier on my engine and allow more time on actual development. I’d like to make the focus on team-based deathmatch because I love team deathmath and haven’t seen too many great free online team deathmatch games.

I’m going to try and keep blogging at least once per morning with an update on the game’s progress, but if it comes down to working on the game or posting, I’ll definitely be choosing game development.

As far as this page, I think my domain name is about to expire, but I’ll probably just get a new one with a little more possibility than simply one named after myself. First things first however, this bad boy needs a redesign. I was looking my available templates and I’m not really pleased with any of them. So I should have something a little prettier up here in about a week.

By the way, something I found mildly entertaining that my WordPress using friends should get a laugh out of: I love it when a spammer posts a comment starting with “Sorry :-(” then proceeds to toss in about 100 links to viagra and porn. It’s like the spammer has a conscious :-P.