Monthly Archives: March 2009

New Project.

by

0

I was a bit hush hush about my current activities, but I guess it’s OK to talk about it now that the project has been put on track. I am not revealing too many details as yet, but I can tell you what it is going to be. Well it’s actually a smaller project considering the my previous one (Doofus Longears – The game), lot easier in complexity and pretty small in size. Yes, it is related to games and gaming and involves a game, but it’s not a 3D project — it is 2D. Well it is 3D under the hood since it is based on Direct3D but it rarely uses the third dimension so it’s not 3D per say. The entire project involves creation of a game, which I must say is pretty trivial, but more than that it involves the creation of a generic game builder software, the work for which is already under way. The name of the entire thing is still under wraps, but you should see it come out in later entries.

The engine is an already written, accomplished 2D engine — no I am not writing the engine this time. The major job is to create an elaborate game builder (GUI), a designer, a scripting engine (Lua in this case) on top of the engine and integration of the engine and the scripting system into the game builder and designer. The game will be built on top of the scripting engine and should be pretty simple to make once the game builder and the scripting systems are in place and properly integrated. The game builder is designed to be generic enough to make any kind of 2D game (arcade, adventure, platformer, puzzle,…)

So — Yes, I am taking a holiday from our engine for a while, I hope only for a little while. I have been up to some interesting R&D which I hope I can integrated into the O2 Engine soon. It’s been a long time since I worked on a 2D game, almost 7 years now since I wrote a 2D pacman clone. The game had 3 levels and crappy graphics, makes me laugh looking at it now. But hey — that’s how you learn.

As it stands today, a fair amount of  progress has been made on the GUI side of things. A lot still remains to be done with integration, but 2D games are lot simpler than 3D ones so I hope and can tide over this project pretty soon. More details about the project and the game builder will be out in due course. I will post some screens of game builder when the game engine is integrated and there is at least a semblance of a game running inside it.

Credit Crisis.

by

0

My initial years in software development were spent writing software for trading, stock markets, cash markets, futures, derivatives trading — mostly for trading houses, brokers and in general for the finance industry. You could say that I have at least some knowledge of how financial markets work. In the same breath I can assure you I am no expert in the workings of the finance industry, but I am not totally clueless as to what’s going on either. However, many of my colleagues and friends from software development backgrounds are clueless of the exact nature of the current credit crisis that has, what some have equated to being a “financial tsunami” to have hit the world.

If you are one of those who doesn’t have a clue of what’s going on and why people are hysterical, or wonder why a housing crisis in the US is going to make you living 10,000 miles away homeless, this is probably the best explanation I have yet to come across.

http://crisisofcredit.com/

I would sincerely suggest you take a look at it.

Time away

by

0

I have been away from blogging for a while now (I know, I’m sorry) and I really feel that I have neglected the blog for the past couple of months, but on the whole it’s been a slow January and a rather boring February. I have also been taking breaks from my daily routine, not too many, but on the whole I have been rather sluggish  for the pas t 2 months. I guess it’s an unfortunate consequence of being stuck to a chair for 6 odd months and being generally devoid of and other life 😀 ! I had decided to go somewhere and relax for sometime, but I haven’t yet found any time to do that. Thus far it’s been only small weekends of relaxation. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to take the “big vacation” I had been planning for (yet), but I guess I will get around to it one of these days.

Besides all that there have been some projects I had been holding out till I had released the game and I finally got around to having a go at them. However the major chunk of my time is currently being spent on R&D, and that’s probably something I love doing. Trying out crazy stuff, hacking around code in the most insane ways possible, trying out crazy stuff with shaders, pulling and pushing DirectX, NVIDIA, ATI samples. Yeah! All that kind of stuff one likes to do 😀 . It’s really fun to see how far your card will go (in my case the HD 4850) and I can tell you the 4850 has a lot of punch if you know how to tweak it.

Well, this entry is a no brainier, but then again I haven’t been doing a lot of brain activity recently 😀 , so this entry probably reflects that 😉 . Don’t worry I will be back to myself in no time…