I did a fair amount of programming last year and among other things I wrote a Python program that takes Word documents and transforms them to game data. One of the things it had to do is take a text that uses characters we didn’t support in the engine (on Nintendo DS) and replace them [...]
Intelligent Artifice
Programming —
Programming computer and video games
Category Archives: Programming
Joerg Plewe and Flying Guns
Joerg Plewe currently is a senior Java and GUI developer and has been in many areas of IT ranging from embedded programming to bioinformatics and games. Joerg has studied physics and used to work with languages like C/C++, Forth, Lisp, Assembly and others in all kinds of environments. That may be so, but I know [...]
Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing
Here is a SIGGRAPH 2007 presentation by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir on a novel way of resizing images. Arbitrarily resize an image while keeping important parts whole. It’s quite impressive, until the baby is squished. Can also be used to eliminate people from your pictures, Stalin-style. Coming soon to your Photoshop.
Checkers has been ‘solved’
New Scientist reports that Checkers has been solved and joins the ranks of Tic Tac Toe and, apparently, Connect 4. Computer games expert (in a different sense than usual within the context of this blog) and spoilsport Jonathan Schaeffer worked on the problem for 18 years! (Via BoingBoing.)
Electronic Arts’ STL Implementation
If you’re into hard-core C++ programming for games, you might be interested in reading about Electronic Arts’ STL Implementation. They wrote their own implementation of one of the most intricate C++ libaries known to man. Back when I was into hard-core C++, STL was not well supported by Microsoft’s C++ compiler (Visual C++ 4.2, at [...]
AIIDE 2007 proceedings
As someone with a background in technology and game design, AI programming excites me like few other subjects, and it is a continuous source of surprise and frustration to me that I have done so little of it. Somehow, by the time gaming hardware was capable of serious AI I was already on my way [...]
LOLCODE
LOLCODE. Yes. Programming in kitten pidgin, like so: HAI CAN HAS STDIO? I HAS A VAR IM IN YR LOOP UP VAR!!1 VISIBLE VAR IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE IM OUTTA YR LOOP KTHXBYE Call me easily amused, but I love it. I HAS A VAR, lol. A compiler can’t be far behind. Bonus [...]
Making sense
Gamasutra has an article up written by Tom Leonard, accompanying his talk at this year’s GDC. It’s called “Building an AI Sensory System: Examining The Design of Thief: The Dark Project”. I recommend it, it’s good. It goes into some of the software / game design aspects of AI sensory systems.
Article on independent game development
O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com has an article on independent game development. It discusses Garage Games, the Torque engine, the Independent Game Developers Conference, open source middleware, the independent game business strategy, and scripting languages.
Battle of Helm’s Deep: game technology
I have recently been reading about Massive, the technology used to create the climactic Battle of Helm’s Deep segment in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and I was struck by the similarity with game technology. Massive, which stands for Multiple Agent Simulation System In Virtual Environment, was developed by Stephen Regelous for the [...]
