In my career as a game programmer I’ve found too many of us simply can’t communicate with the outside world. Below is a list of 13 points that will help you communicate with others in the office and perhaps even talk to girls.
It’s done! After months of development and testing the first alpha of CIC is complete. Those who have signed up for the closed alpha should have received an email last night giving them instructions on how to download the latest build to try it out. If there are any major problems I plan to release a patch, and then decide how best to move on with the development. I’m really pleased that I met the first deadline I set 12 weeks ago of April 7th and it was suprisingly accurate as I fixed my last bug last night before uploading it to the server.
Due to the feedback I’ve already received I’ve decided to continue with the development of CIC, however I’m going to take a break for a while and plan out how I can best utilize the remaining year or so of development. It’s not too late to sign up for the closed alpha, just fill out the form below and I’ll send out the details on how to download CIC.
Everything is in and ready to go for the tech demo. I’ve been working on polish and bugs fixes for the last couple of weeks and I’ve cleaned up all my known bugs. I’ve just got a week of testing singleplayer and mainly multiplayer over a LAN and the internet. After a couple of weeks of looking on and off I finally found the cause of my graphical bug which made the missile trails to render incorrectly every 10-15 seconds for a frame or two.
After playing Oblivion I’ve been thinking about how decisions for adding features to games are made, and how it could be improved. I think the best way to judge a feature is on its benefit to cost ratio. That is, how much it adds to the game against how ‘expensive’ it is to put it in. I’ll begin by breaking down what I mean by ‘benefit to cost’… Read More
I’ve put up some video tutorials of CIC in preparation for the alpha test. I’ve got one more tutorial to make and that will be up by the end of the week. Please check out the tutorials and let me know if there’s anything you’d missing and I can make a few more tutorials. It’s also a chance to hear my nerd voice in action.
I love valve. Not just because they’ve made one of the greatest series of all times, but the way they generally run their game company strikes me as being the right way to do things. I also love counter-strike. Well, it’s more of a love-hate relationship, but over the past 7 years, it’s the game that I’ve poured the most hours into and always seem to go back to every 3-6 months. The main reasons for this are it’s addictive gameplay, the fact I usually score in the top few players on the server (you’d hope so after so many years) and that you can pick it up, play a couple of rounds and quit in anger before Battlefield 2 has even loaded up a level.
Cliff, at work, has signed up for the 14 days trial of Eve-Online. If my plans for removing sleep from my life had been fulfilled, it’s definitely a game I would sign up to. It’s the best MMO and one of the best space games I’ve played. If it weren’t for the hundreds of hours required to move up the ranks to be able to command a fleet I’d be playing it right now.
Microsoft’s Speech API allows me to add voice recognition to CIC so players can give different commands quickly and while using the mouse to do something completely different. I was interested in speech regonition a few years ago when I was making my RTS and so I reused some of my code to get it up and running in CIC. I’ve implemented a simple event system and decided it was time to see how easy it was to distribute SAPI 5.0 to other computers. Unfortunately, this is where SAPI has it’s failing. The redistributable (required for players to be able to use speech recognition on their computer) comes in at a massive 131 megabytes, approximately 10 times larger than CIC current size. With a little further reading I’ve found that I can leave out the text-to-speech part of the API, however that only brings it down to 40 megabytes, which is still ridiculously large. I’ve decided to put the speech recognition on hold for now until I get some feedback about whether people will be willing to download the extra amount simply for a single feature. It’s all very dissapointing.
So after doing some general testing of CIC I noticed that my environment mapping wasn’t actually working as it should be. I spent quite a bit of time looking through my code and the examples I had used when putting together my HLSL shader. The problem was the ray I was using to look into my environment map was wrong and so while it looked ok; it was just a coincidence that it looked similar to the expected result, when in fact it was completely wrong. I’ve since updated that and when I get some spare time I will email the author of the code snippet I was referencing who also had the same problem.
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