Gamers Could Care Less
Feb/080
Gamers today … could care less whether or not you used quaternion-based interpolation between keyframes coupled with skeletal-hierarchy animation for your two-hundred polygon optimized character with hardware bilinear-filtered perspective-correct texture mapping applied and high-end LOD processing. Rather, they want to take interaction to a higher level…
-The Essentials of Multiplayer Games
I love that.
Lean Code == Money
Jan/080
Reading Free to Play means Cheap to Run earlier today gave me one of those “of course!” moments. One of those things that seem so obvious… after you read it.
With more and more developers jumping into the MMO fray, I wonder how many of them feel like I do right now. Like every… single… byte… that gets sent down the wire is money, money and more money. Has anyone ever calculated what each byte is worth or what the cost is for certain network activities? I’m sure someone has to:
- User Login : $0.01
- Single Hour of Play (average) : $3.21
- DoS Attack : $17.83
By creating thinner and thinner game clients to help resolve certain security issues, are we really just creating a bigger problem in costly bandwidth overhead? What does this mean for the future of free-to-play MMOs? What about smaller market games? Is there room for indie free-to-play titles?
Great. I’ve just ended the post with more questions than I had when I started. 
Bitmap Collison Detection with ActionScript 3
Sep/071
I finally got around to converting Grant Skinner’s collision detection algorithm to ActionScript 3. This version primarily takes advantage of the latest library class/method additions.
For anyone familiar with Grant’s implementation, you’ll notice the method signature is similar.
To determine whether or not the bitmap data values of two display objects are “colliding”, you simply call:
var x:Rectangle = Collision.collisionTest(myObj, yourObj);
Alternatively, you may also pass a third argument representing the alpha tolerance which in turn gets passed to the alphaTolerance argument of the ColorTransform constructor.
var x:Rectangle = Collision.collisionTest(myObj, yourObj, alphaTol);
You can see an example, here or download the Class definition, here.
CGA Conference Podcasts and Slides
Aug/070
The Casual Games Association recently hosted a conference in Seattle and have graciously released podcasts and slides of the presentations.
Looks like the next best thing to being there!
CARRDS for Game Protection
Jul/070
The latest IDGA quarterly features an article authored by Steven B. Davis, CEO of SecurePlay and provides an overview of the CARRDS framework. This framework is meant to alleviate much of the problems inherent in any multi-user system but specifically, multi-player games.
This is particularly interesting to me as I’ve started development of my own framework for multi-player games.
More Random Opportunities for Game Developers
Jul/070
I’ve just caught wind of another “true” random number generation service known as the, Quantum Random Bit Generator Service.
QRBG “relies on the unpredictable quantum process of photon emission(s)” and is now online and available for public consumption (registration required).
Given that random.org charges it’s users, the arrival of a free service is a breath of fresh air. Especially for budding, indie game developers looking to save a few bucks.
For those of you not developing in C++, a command-line tool is available for a server-side tie-in to your current game development framework.
