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.

Posted by Rama, Category: Game Development, Mathematics, XNA
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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!

Posted by Rama, Category: Back to the Basics, Uncategorized, XNA
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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.

Posted by Rama, Category: Back to the Basics, Game Development, XNA
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