So you know a little bit about programming (perhaps you've read the free book, "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" , a free programming book for beginners whose author shamelessly plugs at every chance) but you want to get better at coding. You can't seem to find any open source projects that are at your…
Cartoon Law I Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.
This is a document I wrote in 1995, while working on Neversoft’s first game: Skeleton Warriors. It was the first game I’d worked on where I did not use 68K Assembly.
graph theory, music theory
If you are looking to synthesize the sound of a plucked string, there is an amazingly simple algorithm for doing so called the Karplus-Strong Algorithm. Give it a listen: KarplusStrong.wav Here it …
Today I will present how to implement in Python a simple yet effective algorithm for proceduraly generating 2D landscapes. It is called Midpoint Displacement (or Diamond-square algorithm,…
Last time we looked at generating random dungeons for video games using the Drunkard’s Walk algorithm. The Drunkard’s Walk is fun to play with, and often generates cool levels, but it’s also pretty unreliable. That’s not good enough for my purposes: I want to reliably generate big, open, cave-like maps, with lots of…
There’s been a secret feature on the DOS-related emulated programs on the Internet Archive. It’s been there for over a half a year now. I’ll explain what it is and why I didn̵…
Rule #1 is “The Player Must have Fun.” It’s trivially easy for a game designer to “defeat” players. We have all the tools and all the power. The trick is to play on the same side as the players, to tell the story together, and to make them the stars.
It’s not easy having a software superstar for a little brother. That’s something that Robert Garriott, president of Origin Systems , had more and more cause to realize as the 1980s wore on. Whilst Richard Garriott quite literally lived out his fantasies, it was Robert who was left to deal with all the mundanities of…
My blog about making and modding, 3D printing, electronics and other experiments.
Coming out of Sierra On-Line’s 1984 near-death experience , Ken Williams made a prognostication from which he would never waver: that the real future of home as well as business computing lay with the open, widely cloned hardware architecture of IBM’s computers, running Microsoft’s operating systems. He therefore…
If you’re familiar with my blog, you know I’ve lately taken a fancy to doing abominable things to my Intel GPU’s OpenGL driver.
Ever since I learned about neural networks playing Atari games I wanted to reimplemnted it and learn how it works. Below you can see an AI playing Space Invaders. I trained it during my batch at Recurse Center on little over 50M frames.
The Goal – Explain What is Magic Leap Doing Magic Leap has a way of talking about what they hope to do someday and not necessarily what they can do anytime soon. Their patent applications ar…
ffmpeg is a wonderful library for creating video applications or even general purpose utilities. ffmpeg takes care of all the hard work of video processing by doing all the decoding, encoding, muxing and demuxing for you. This can make media applications much simpler to write. It's simple, written in C, fast, and can…
A while back I decided to try to write a Game Boy emulator in Common Lisp based on this series of articles . I made some good progress but eventually got bogged down because I was trying to learn a bunch of complex new things at once:
When you play Chess, there are on average something like 30 different moves you can make each turn. In other words, the branching factor is ...
Reconstructing films with artificial neural networks
One of the very early committed arcade collectors here in the UK was a guy called Pete Davies. Known on the arcade forums as Invadar, he was by all accounts, very well liked. I can’t say that…
