Fun with Fractals


This week I decided to go over a short research essay I did for ‘Numerical Methods & Advanced Mathematical Modeling’ at Trinity College.
In it I go over fractals, their origin, use and so on, but I’ll spare you the boring details and go directly to the fun part, sticking it on the GPU (and on the 360), namely the Mandelbrot set.

The Indie Bay Competition Winner

The competition is over and the winner is Midnight Ritual. Congrats to Tahir and anyone who participated on the competition. Despite the critics I can’t wait for the next one. Lots of fun!

The Indie Bay Competition

Duct tape, gum, and a pair of tweezers
If, like me, you love making games and have 48 hours to spare, check out the 48hour Indie Bay Competition over at theindiebay.com/competition kicking off later this month on the 19th.
Kudos to David from TheIndieBay.com and good luck to all the competitors!

Day 3 - GDC Europe, Köln 2009

R2D2 at Gamescom 2009The final day of GDC Europe finally came, and with it all the crazy chaos of the first day of Gamescom, just next door. I arrived and reported to my post to find out that the Gamescom organization had taken over one of the balconies and the entrance, sending all the staff to a single side. This caused us to have too many people for the posts available, so they ended up releasing us volunteers except for an occasional need to move something around or pack some printers.

Day 2 - GDC Europe, Köln 2009

Elevator entrance - GDC Europe, Köln 2009Like the day before, only a few hours after the party (even fewer that day 1), I was getting up for my first day of work. The streets were still empty and hardly anyone was on the trains. Reaching the conference only a few staff members were walking around in a hurry. I walked around the Expo Floor, looking at the still empty booths, took a few pictures and just wandered around biding my time. Soon I’d walk over to the show room where I’d change to my staff t-shirt and follow one of the staff down to the registration area to know what kind of work I was doing.

Day 1 - GDC Europe, Köln 2009

Intel Booth - GDC Europe, Köln 2009Just a few hours after the reception, I was waking up and heading to the Koelnmesse again. I didn’t work today so I wanted to make the most of my free day. Got to the conference through the elevator and wandered around the Exposition Floor, where many spent most of their time away from the sessions. To my left I could see the CCP booth, hiring some talent; to my right a few booths, mostly indie I think, the only name I recognized was ‘Tale of Tales’, though the guys from ‘Sakari Games’ had a really nice lego-like shooter in showcase. Moving on to the over side of the room I passed through the Autodesk booth, and at the end of the hall leading to a open-air social area I could see the Intel booth on my left, and the Crytek booth on my right.

GDC Europe, Köln 2009

Game Developers Conference Europe 2009A few months back I decided to try GDC again and got myself a place as a volunteer over at the European conference in Köln. So there I went, bags packed and leaving to Deutschland, hoping to have a good time, meet interesting people and drink great beer (which is pretty much what happened).

GDC, London 2006

I’m currently writing an article about my experience as a volunteer at the Game Developers Conference in Köln a few days ago. I’ll be posting it throughout the following days, each post describing one day at the conference. So just for the sake of completion I decided to translate my old article for GDIsep about a similar experience back in 2006. So, without further ado, here we go…

Game Developer’s Conference London 2006

One day (not sure which one) I decided to volunteer for the GDC London (unsure of what kind of answer I’d get). To my surprise, the answer was extremely positive, so there I went to London, bags packed and expectant of what would come. Throughout the following pages I’ll share my experiences at the Conference. What I heard in the sessions, highlights, points of interest, etc.
I apologize if I’m not completely clear, or for any reason wasn’t able to discuss something with further detail, but I wrote this article so people could have an idea of what went on, what was discussed. A peek at the conference through my eyes.

Back to the Basics: Scene Management

Hello and welcome to the first actual post on the ‘No More Coins‘ blog.

I’m using this post to document a new venture into XNA. I’m coding a new layer into XNA adding extra functionality to support my game programming needs. That and a set of tools I’ll hopefully get the chance to make sometime in the future are lovingly called the XNAlchemist Engine. This is based on another older project still WIP called The Alchemist, a basic multiplatform game engine in C++.
Ok, so besides the fundamental classes and wrappers the first hot topic to touch in development is, of course, Scene Management.
Not very exciting, I know! But even though its not all bells and whistles it’ll definitely pay off in the future. Good foundations and all that jazz…

From the many techniques for scene management, I decided two were crucial enough to implement at this stage: Octrees and Portals.