It’s been a long time since I posted my last blog post and I can say now for sure that this website is truly dead! I thought it would be nice to keep it up here purely for prosperity. I did that thing one time and made some things some people liked and it was fun.
Anyone still interested in following me do so here: https://Alzon.co.uk/
I’m not sure what my future plans are but… they are something and it’ll happen sometime
Thanks, Its been something!
HELLOOOOO,
This is my blog, its a general blog and generally I like to occasional (practically never) do some very general generalized bloggy stuff… generally.
I also like to chat nonsense…
Not quite before the end of the year, but any who I’ll be posting up an alpha version of the update tomorrow evening, its not feature complete and this still a reasonable amount of things left to do…. but it’ll be available at some point tomorrow evening for thous wishing to try it out.
I’ll be explaining the details tomorrow along with whats included with the update, whats not made it into the update and final what to expect over the coming days, weeks in regards to the next update.
Hey Guys if you want to know when the updates released please:
LIKE the Unorthodox Game Studios facebook page below and I’ll be able to keep you posted on the progress without you having to check back to this blog every now and again.
Unorthodox Game Studios FACE BOOK Page
Hello, Sorry, it has been some time since the last update so erm… heres another. Going to keep it short today. Update 1: GOT MY RESULTS (First Class Honours)
Update 2: Yes after the requests for an update to PSV-Pad Eventually I did start working on it, keep in mind its not all set in stone yet, neither is it finished(But working). So here’s some screenshots, naturally the server will be getting a well needed update as-well. Ignore the reflection off the light… Configuration-> Well needed, think auto connect will make life slightly easier, If ticked then the vita will auto connect to the last network connected to, Unless naturally its been deleted from the connections list. In the bottom right is the status panel which can be brought up by clicking the wifi symbol.
The help is not complete yet naturally leaving this to last, It will literally explain the UI, and how to add new connections and other such things.
Additional buttons -> 2 larger buttons located at the top, which is what I think people where after plus an additional 12 buttons to use for whatever you desire.
Connection Settings screen for add and connected to your computer -> Yes they will be saved and reloaded when you next start up the app.
Anyway hopefully it’ll be finished soon, Have a nice day. Allan
Yesterday saw the hand in of my dissertation on “Developing a Lightweight Game Engine in C++”, I can honestly say there is so much more I could have included in the paper, but sadly between time constrictions and the somewhat limited length of the paper I could not. But there it is it’s done, complete with a prototype game engine built in c++.
Everything seemed to go wrong yesterday so it was somewhat hectic, The problems began from the moment I woke up, My computer (Where some of my work was temporarily being stored) had decided not to let me log in (The user account had become corrupt for some unknown reason) after an hour of technical malarkey I was able to obtain the work from my hard-drive.
In order to get into university I rely on public transport which is somewhat lacking, I first must get either a train or bus to oxford then from there get a coach to high wycombe, by public transport this usually takes about 3 hours to get from my house to university. Living in a village the public transport is somewhat lacking, after having missed the train (the only train of the day) that morning I had to seek alternative means of travel. A close friend, understanding the importance of me getting into university offered me a lift.
After having got to university one of the first things I did was to go pick up my final bound dissertation from staples, which went smoothly but set me back by around £100.
There were a few other things that needed to be done before I could submit the work, one of those was to copy a cut down version of the engine to a USB to be handed in along with the dissertation, this is were some of the problems began, during the transfer process the laptop decided to crash which very much slowed it down with the deadline creeping up this really slowed down the process, In the end due to my issues with my laptop I transferred to one of the university computers. The process should have took 5 mins but in the end took 45ish mins.
Now the final problem that occurred during this day, the whole final project had 4 expected deliverable s, 2 bound copys of the report, media containing the software that has been developed and an electronic online submission. The problem came with the electronic submission, I was submitting the electronic copy around about the same time that my laptop decided to crash, I had gone through the submission process uploaded the file, only to come back later that day and realize that it had been neglected slightly because of the problems that were occurring at the time, I opened my laptop only to find that the turnitin system that handles the online submission had timed out and as such the electronic copy had not been submitted, after the realization the document was submitted straight away, hopefully this issue will resolve itself but did somewhat a final blow for the day knowing not all the submission requirements had been met. This was the part of the submission that I though would be least problematic but in the end it ended up being the most.
Anyway that’s all for now, Once this course is over I’ll be able to get down to some programming, maybe update the website, upload some stuff it’ll be fun.
Good Day!.
Hello very soon I will be posting up the game I created during my first year at university, BIO-CRISIS although the name will possibly change in the future if I ever decide to rework the game. Its a pretty simple platformer really, but considering it was developed in around 4 days its really not that bad, there just a few changes I will be making to the game before I post it up here. One of the changes was to the menu screen just to.. well make it look a tiny bit more professional. It was developed as a 2 level demo and for now will remain that way.
So right what have I been doing, what have I been doing hmmm… well I did go on about uni work and not having enough time for anything it seems very much true, even lost a very beautiful young girl over the matter. But life shall go on.
Right Updates
Coming up to the end of uni, really need to work on dissertation, engines still absolutely terrible and I’m absolutely starting to freak out about the whole deal, but I’m pretty sure that’s the same for most students. As far as the actual engines concerned I’ve done “little” work little in the sense that there’s so much to do at the moment I’ve barely dented the surface. So many problems cropping up, bad code things I regret.
Engine Updates -> About 4 days ago I decided to start making a Minecraft Clone on my engine has been coming together very quickly. Screenshots below from the start to now. Texture Pack credit should be directed to BDCraft.net.
1) Modded/ Hacked the existing TileMap class to add an extra Dimension, For those/ everyone that doesn’t know the TileMap class in my engine used a chunk based system in conjunction with opengl’s diaplay lists (Don’t Judge) to render some pretty large maps.
2) My engine has little in the side of physics at the moment, box2d can technically be used but is not supported, So I added a few new colliders to the engines native physics system, this included an AABB(Axis Aligned Bounding Box) and a Ray. The systems very much brute force at the moment, but is currently not much of a concern as we will be working on a grid area with a limited number of collidable objects. Using these two new objects I went about creating another class to handle the collisions in the world itself a new type known as CubeMapCollider, it takes a reference to the CubeWorld and uses this to basically work out collisions that may be occurring. When checking for collisions in the world from a ray the CubeMapCollider will work out a set of tiles within the bounding volume of the ray before then checking each tile/ block to see if a collision has occurred, after computing the collisions and distance it will work out the collider object which is first struck. At the stage depicted below, the actual collision algorithm was slightly questionable, at this moment in time I had not worked out how to detect which specific face the ray had collided with on the AABB so for the time being I just added a new tile above which ever tile the ray collided with when the right mouse button was pressed.
3) At this point I was working primarily on optimizations(reducing memory usage, increasing FPS), I made sure only clockwise winding faces are drawn for a start, then I moved onto culling sides of the blocks that where not visible, and various other optimizations. in the end I managed to render a world consisting of over 2 million cubes-> to quote myself on facebook: “current rendering a cube world of 256X32X256 with chunks of 32X32X32 so around 64 chunks with a total of 2,097,152 blocks in the world and getting between 290 – 320 FPS on my computer. Not bad.”
4)The culling of hidden faces left it problematic when dealing with blocks with transparent textures, Its an easy fix but is not fixed yet.
5)By this point I had got the ray AABB intersect perfect next was to work out which face was hit first by the ray and to be able to place blocks attached to said face.
6) Just rendered out 4 chunks of 32X32, messed around a bit as I plan to start to think about chunk + world generation. 
6) Finally got collisions down flawlessly I might add.. 
7)Added functionality that makes it possible to destroy blocks.