Category: howto
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Aniziz: Keeping it local and independent
A large part of the Aniziz project involves porting the Germination X isometric engine from Haxe to Javascript, and trying to make things a bit more consistent and nicer to use as I go. One of the things I’ve tried to learn from experiments with functional reactive programming is using a more declarative style, and…
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Websockets vs HTTP
A bit of R&D this morning into websockets. Previous games like Naked on Pluto and Germination X have made use of standard HTTP protocol for their client server communication. This is easy to set up (as a newbie web programmer) and fine for prototyping and proof of concept – but has some serious problems with…
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The Swamp that was, a bicycle opera
Day one on a new project – with Kaffe Matthews, and a collaboration between FoAM & Timelab, “The Swamp that was” is an opera where bicycles become a way to hear stories of the past in the city of Ghent. I’m picking up the software side of things from Wolfgang Hauptfleisch, which involves using BeagleBoards…
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Fast HTML5 sprite rendering
After quite a lot of experimentation with HTML5 canvas, I’ve figured out a way to use it with the kind of big isometric game worlds used for Germination X which are built from hundreds of overlapping sprites. There are lots of good resources out there on low level optimisations, but I needed to rethink my…
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Betablocker DS code patterns (part 2)
Following on from the last installment of Betablocker DS coding patterns, this time looking at some very short programs that are nicely controllable by the livecoder – including some actual audio examples here (embedding seems broken on archive.org). Both these example programs are 16 bytes long, and require 3 concurrent threads to be running over…
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Betablocker DS code patterns (part 1)
Some useful Betablocker DS code patterns as used in common live coding situations. Firstly, when carrying out a sound check before a live performance it’s important to keep some kinds of sound engineers happy generating as many different sounds as you can so they can fiddle around with stuff – of course remember to turn…
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Run your own Germination X server
We are in the process of moving the Germination X game to a new server, which gives me the chance to properly document the steps required to set it up – this is based on a clean Debian Squeeze 6.0.1 box on Linode. Step 1: Get the source and Clojure installed sudo apt-get install subversion…
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Isometric engineering
The first report from south western Sweden where I am on unofficial residency/hacking retreat in the environs of the Tjärnö Marine Research Laboratory. This is a great place for my main task, to focus on Germination X, and I’m starting with new isometric ground tiles. I’m aiming for the feeling of roots and interconnectedness with…
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PS2 homebrew #5
Getting stuff to work on PS2 wasn’t quite as easy as I probably made it sound in the last homebrew post. The problem with loading code from usb stick is that there is no way to debug anything, no remote debugging, no stdout – not even any way to render text unless you write your…
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PS2 homebrew #4
Getting things to render on the PS2 is a little more complicated than using OpenGL and it’s also a very different system to a PC. On the right you can see a block diagram of the Emotion Engine – it consists of the EE core, the CPU on the left and the GS – Graphics…