ChatGPT Killed Fancy Game Namer
I’ve been playing with ChatGPT and it’s kind of incredible. After toying with it for awhile a thought hit me, that this could replace something like Fancy G...
I’ve been playing with ChatGPT and it’s kind of incredible. After toying with it for awhile a thought hit me, that this could replace something like Fancy G...
A few weeks ago Nick Penwarden highlighted several improvements that we made to Unreal Engine 4 while working on Fortnite Battle Royale.
For the past several months I’ve been refactoring the automation framework off and on for Unreal Engine 4. One of the things that we wanted to bring to the f...
Maybe you’ve been looking at some C++ in the debugger not too long ago and happened across some enum flags on an object in your codebase. However, rather tha...
So for the 2015 Global Game Jam we worked on a multiplayer game called Cowtastrophe. It’s a very silly game, you collect cows, some cows are worth more than ...
So back in 2012 for the Triangle Game Jam, I threw together a simple PHP script to generate a set of game names based on the pattern Adjective Noun Verb(er) ...
I’ve been experimenting with a little project called JSIL off and on, it can take compiled IL code and convert it to Javascript. Which seemed like an intere...
I should have wrote a post about this months back, but better late than never. At the Global Game Jam this year my buddy Mike and I teamed up, with some ass...
A few days ago Morgan McGuire added a post on his blog about the absence of a good cross platform tool for depixelizing pixel art for higher resolutions purp...
A couple of weekends ago was the 2012 Triangle Game Jam. Our theme of the jam was to generate game titles by madlibs: everyone contributed a list of 5 adject...
So I’ve posted a new version of Oxel, grab it here. The new version has several improvements in UI, performance, stability, as well as a brand new re-triang...
So I have a new page dedicated to the Oxel project located here: http://nickdarnell.com/Oxel. I’ve also started a new project on BitBucket where you’ll be ab...
Oxel is a tool for generating conservative low polygon occluder proxies for 3D geometry that are cheap to render and can be used for occlusion culling in gam...
Its been awhile since I’ve done an update to my research into occluder generation. If you need a refresher, take a look at:
The 2012 Global Game Jam is over and it was another year of awesome games in the Raleigh-Durham – North Carolina area. This week I wanted to put the spotlig...
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately rebuilding the old Triangle Game Jam website. Now that it’s done I can get back to new articles. The new site is up a...
Before I begin let me give you a little background. About a month ago we decided to try and create NUI (Natural User Interface) or Kinect controls for Angry...
Anthropometry (Greek anthropos (άνθρωπος – “man”) and metron (μέτρον – “measure”) therefore “measurement of man”) refers to the measurement of the human i...
Merging is a fact of life for most of us. Eventually two users touch the same files and a conflict must be resolved. For programmers merging is a daily act...
While wrapping up my post for generating simplified occluders for Hierarchical Z-Buffer Occlusion Culling, I was pointed to a paper called Complete Polygonal...
I managed make it out to Seattle this year for Gamefest and figured I’d share my thoughts on some of the different presentations I saw. They are not availabl...
A while back I wrote SWIG and a Miss, which is a post about several of the problems I’ve encountered with SWIG. At that time I didn’t have a solution for dea...
Last week we were sitting around the office wondering if it would be possible to place ourselves in a game world with Autodesk’s Project Photofly. How cool ...
About a year ago I got tired of trying to keep the mounting supply of PDFs and PowerPoint slides I’ve collected over the years organized. They weren’t searc...
Back in April I wrote a short post about Activate3D releasing 1.0 of ICM, but unlike the 0.8 alpha version the 1.0 did not ship with a community version.
After beating Minecraft (not really) I thought my addition to these blasted sandbox mining games was satisfied. Sadly, I was wrong. I started playing Terra...
Almost a year ago I wrote a couple of posts on Hierarchical Z-Buffer Occlusion Culling (HZB-OC).
The Pitch
There are so many pitfalls you’ll encounter after using SWIG for any extended period of time or with a large enough codebase. I thought I would go over some...
Preface
My new side-side project with DirectX 11 is something that has been bothering me for awhile. Chaining compute shaders with variable length output. Chaining...
Who would of guessed back in 2009 when I wrote this post. That I would actually end up working on solving those exact problems?
I didn’t get to see many sessions at GDC this year. One I really wanted to see but didn’t make it to was the talk on “Approximating Translucency for a Fast,...
It took several versions before enough kinks got worked out in Nvidia’s Parallel Nsight Graphics/CUDA debugging application before I could successfully profi...
Every now and then I wonder what decisions might be different if I had access to a cloud of machines dedicated to baking game assets or solving other highly ...
I’ve talked about AtomineerUtils before on my blog very briefly several months back when I first discovered it. I’ve now been using it pretty much straight ...
1/28/2011 6:00 PM
The Global Game Jam 2011 has ended. I present to you the labors of me and my team. The theme this year was “Extinction”, which I’m happy to say I loved. I...
The idea isn’t new, a few people get together one weekend with a common goal; make a game in 48 hours. I have game jams on the mind because the Global Game J...
The Global Game Jam 2011 happens later this month and I’m really excited. A few months ago we had our local Triangle Game Jam for the 4th year in a row. It...
One of my hobby projects has been to try and implement Morgan McGuire’s Ambient Occlusion Volume (AOV) approach to ambient occlusion on DirectX 11. It’s loo...
This is a pretty awesome memory tool hobby project Jvander Beek of Vanguard Games is working on. I’m a big fan of the physical memory layout / fragmentation...
Awhile ago when I was working on the ShaderEffect Generator I had an idea for another Visual Studio plug-in and quickly got it working. I finally got around...
Anyone that has had extensive experience with WPF and has attempted MVVM knows it’s not perfect. Over the years I’ve attempted many things in an attempt to ...
Our PMD CamCube 3.0 arrived over at Activate3D a few days ago, figured I would snap a picture of this bad boy. This thing is one seriously beefy time of fli...
I finally got the green light to make a blog post about what I’ve been working on for the past 3.5 months :D Today is a pretty auspicious day for Activate3D,...
Background
There’s a pretty cool paper on Ambient Occlusion Volumes I was reading awhile back by Morgan McGuire, the technique actually uses volumes to calculate what p...
I’ve released an updated version of my WPF ShaderEffect Generator tool on Codeplex. The release is fairly minor but I figured I’d update my blog anyway.
Last week was the start of new things for me. I’ve moved on from Emergent and joined my good friends and fellow bloggers Dan and Shaun over at Activate3D. ...
After exchanging a few emails with Stephen Hill, he clarified how they were able to cull shadows from the scene using the Hierarchical Z-Buffer (HZB). The p...
While I was at GDC I had the pleasure of attending the Rendering with Conviction talk by Stephen Hill, one of the topics was so cool that I thought it would ...
We play a lot of Super Smash Brothers Brawl during lunch around here, and occasionally after work there’s additional smashing. I walked in today to find this...
One of the biggest pain points of MVVM is the boilerplate code that is necessary for it to function. The code I’m referring to is the code needed to Hook an...
One of the good talks I saw at GDC was this one, Rendering With Conviction. Stephen Hill posted his slides for his presentation and you should check them out...
So I was thinking about what [Jesse Schell was saying in his DICE presentation] while brushing my teeth this morning. About 90% of the way through the prese...
So [over at the CLR Team Blog] they’re asking users to send them feedback on what kinds of things they should be focusing on for the next version. Even thoug...
This presentation from DICE by Jesse Schell is pretty insightful. The talk is about how humanity has become dissociated with reality over the years but becau...
So awhile ago I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to do heat maps in WPF?”. Well I started playing around with the idea and immediately was side tracked with ho...
After learning a lot about integrating tools into Visual Studio (2008/2010), I’m happy to announce a new version of my WPF ShaderEffect Generator tool. (ugh...
I’m currently working on a project over at CodePlex that I haven’t published yet because I want to make it a little more awesome before I draw back the curta...
Here is a video of a bunch of us playing our game.
[Possessed: The Turing Deception]
No WPF article this Thursday, I’m working on a big one and I keep coming up with sub topics to cover :). So i figured, why not just throw together a list of ...
Early on Data-Binding in WPF can be kind of annoying, things aren’t binding correctly, UI isn’t being realized because of it. Searching Google for tips on ho...
The 2010 Global Game Jam starts in just 12 days. I love doing game jams and can’t wait for this one to start. If you’ve ever wanted to break into the game in...
I was thinking about the [WPF Theme Replacer] some more and there are a few things you should be aware of when designing your theme to work just like a Micro...
So in [Part 1] I explained the basics of theming your WPF application and in [Part 2] I provided a more in-depth discussion of how the styles are applied to ...
One thing I really enjoy doing is duplicating effects in WPF that I’ve seen in other applications. One I like a lot for directory browsers and content browse...
For this part I wanted to talk about the style lookup system, things to be aware of and some problems with WPF’s “theming” capability in general. Here are th...
I just finished doing a ton of styling/theming work in WPF, after doing so I had many thoughts and experiences on the subject that I thought I would share. S...
World Builder has this great little feature (with a good back story) in it that I added in the early days of its development. The idea started with a challen...
If you haven’t had a chance to mess around with an AdornerDecorator, I highly recommend that you do. They’re extremely useful because they allow you to over...
I have been using XamlPadX to test out XAML ideas. But lack of updates had me looking around for a new tool, turns out there is one. [Kaxaml] has some nice...
So if you’ve ever tried to change the selection color of the TextBox in WPF, you’ve probably found out really quickly that it’s not really doable in .Net 3.5...
One of the best things about my job is getting to see the games users of our tech are creating. Check out this really cool tech demo from Artifex Mundi.
So I wanted to make a really nice looking WPF TabItems and went looking for some examples of how other people have done it. I really only found one quality ...
I think the most annoying thing about WPF is that for any given task everything goes fine, for a few hours, then you do something and you’re stumped why it’s...
When generating MSIL it’s often very useful to be able to see what you’re doing. One very handy debugging visualizer I’ve used is Haibo Luo’s DynamicMethod ...
The two most common filters used in any UI are “Begins With” and “Contains” substring. However, both of these filters are non optimal because they tend to fa...
I haven’t actually tried using this in the field, but this little tool comes with Windows 7 and after playing around with it a little it seems really handy. ...
Who watches the threads? Apparently the Visual Studio 2008 debugger. Though, this should come as no surprise to anyone… except for the fact that they watch t...
Does anyone remember Nick(elodeon) Arcade? I think they must have used a a physical area for the users to move in, but I wonder if an intrepid game programme...
Collaborative Game Editing
If you haven’t gotten a chance yet to check out what Microsoft has planned for the 360 in the coming year, you should check out this video about Project Natal.
The Wii Vitality Sensor was just announced at E3 and I’m thrilled. I’ve wanted this type of peripheral for a long time. Think of what knowing the heart rate ...
We (Emergent) posted a series of demo videos over at our YouTube channel. They are videos we created prior to GDC’09 for customers and such. These videos dem...
This video was getting passed around the office a little while back. Figured I would link it here for posterity. It’s Bruce Branit imagination of what a worl...
Was reading one of the feature articles over at Gamasutra Custom Tools: Environment Artists and Game Editors. Was a good read; from my experience I would hav...
GDC is nearly upon us and we’re wrapping up the latest release of the product, Gamebryo Lightspeed. Keep an eye out for updates on the website, or if you pl...
There are few things more painful than trying to debug an application in production. So I was very pleased to run across a little tool today that can be use...
This weekend was great fun, I participated in the first annual 48 hour Global Game Jam. Working on the smash hit, Space Fish.
MSIL is a fantastic language, but then again I loved programming in x86 assembly back in school . The problem with programming in MSIL is the same problem y...
One of the really nice features of WPF is that it comes with a Dispatcher for executing code coming off a thread different from your UI thread. It’s not sub...