Development Blog

I think I decided finally what I want to work on for now. Along side this AI project I am involved with at the University, I am going to make significant changes to the terrain engine that can be found in the projects section.

Firstly, I am going to improve upon the generation algorithm to create a much smoother more realistic world. The method I was using before relied almost entirely on random noise and moving verticies to make sure seems lined up. I feel like this was a pretty unrealistic and poor approach when considering the performance of it. The other thing I am going to change is as in the project description make the engine completely infinite(well near infinite because of overflow) so that you can continue to wander around in the world with no errors and new chunks are generated on the fly much like Minecraft. The third thing I want to add in would be water, and possibly a river particle engine, however this will mostly depend on if I can get improve much on the performance of the previous project, however I believe that won’t be too hard to do now that I will have more time to experiment.

After the engine is running and looking cool, if I can get my hands on a DirectX11 GPU, I want to experiment with DirectCompute and populate the world with many agents to experiment with different AI algorithms on the GPU, as it is a topic I am pretty interested in. Also the engine will allow me to mess around with not only AI but possibly physics and graphical experiments as I will always have access to a different world with differing possibilities.

Anyway should be fun experimenting with all this stuff while I look for a job, and then afterwards in my free time. Excited!

Schools over or at least practically, just one algorithms exam, and a geography course in the Spring. Still gotta rewrite the about me section, maybe tomorrow sometime. Hoping to start doing some programming in my off time while I look for jobs. Although its hard because there are so many projects I want to explore such as AI on the GPU, rewriting and improving the code in my terrain project as well on improving on the algorithm, and possibly more OpenGL and XNA stuff.

Completed Portal 2 yesterday and all I am going to say is wow. Haven’t played the co-op campaign yet but VALVE did some amazing game design. The story, the characters, the written dialogue, and the game play variety was completely awesome. And the ending .. brilliant. The amount of creativity in this game is absolutely stunning, and there isn’t much more to say but wow. I hope we get more info HL2:EP3 this year because after Portal 2 I am just so stoked for what VALVE does next.

Hello, still in the process of updating the site content etc. Had to remove the content from the about me section temporarily as I have to rewrite it(original probably a bit too long and not as concise). Also soon I will have my resume available on the website, as well as adding information about the iOS title that we are currently finishing up!

-Nick

After not being updated for several months due to being extremely busy I have decided to re-do the entire design of the website as the previous design I thought was rather tedious to update, hard on the eyes, and overall not that great. Hopefully the new design will be a lot easier to read information and navigate.

This re-design will enable me to add content to my portfolio much easier then before, and will enable to me to possibly begin a tutorial series when I get the time to start one. It may also enable me to add other types of new content maybe eSports related but for now it’s just going to contain just my projects, biblography, and contact info.

-Nick

Hello,

School’s finally over for me although I still might take a summer course, and possibly get a job helping a prof with some Game dev research! Now that I have some more freetime I will be making updates to the site, including a prototype game we finished for our Game Design class “DreamWorld”, which actually you can download here Dream World.exe.

Along with posting up the page about the Dream World prototype, and about our project of possibly porting it to XBOX while making it a million times better and less buggy I may be doing an eSports blog and making aestetic changes to the site.

Esports has been a huge part of my life growing up and although I have made attempts at contributing content up there, I wasn’t too sure of a direction to go in. So I might be making an eSports blog, and using it as a subdomain from this site so in the future check that out. If you havn’t followed eSports, I highly recommend it, just contact me if you want to know a lot of information. I will probably write about this in my future eSports blog as well. I’m hoping to update that blog a lot more often as I continue to follow eSports right now mostly the Starcraft 2 scene but now and then I start paying more attension to things like Quake and Counterstrike. It may turn into a daily thing, and I will have it open for discussion!

Anyway, back to watching USA vs CHINA in SC2, GO USA!