Let's break it down mathematically for just a second here, ok?

For our purposes, a Discrete Point Set is a collection of objects which can be differentiated from each other somehow. We call each element in the set a Point.

Points themselves are unordered; the set may be infinite or it may be finite. An infinite DPS would be for instance the set of all 2-dimensional (x, y) coordinates within the unit circle on the real plane. A finite DPS could be the list of letters { A, B, C, D, E, F }.

DPS's in Your Game World

La Tour Part I: World Elements

I recently got a question from a friend about the basics of how I do game development (how am I doing 3D, how does my engine work, tc.), so that seemed as good a reason as any to get back on it with my blog (this blog has been inactive for I think a month or more!)

So it begins! A four part tour of how I do game development...

World vs. Play

I'm just about ready to launch another Alpha (read: at least a couple weeks solid of fixing, tidying up, etc.) I'm in the state of development where I'm just kind of walking around making notes about what's broken and what seems to be missing.

Problem: Trekking to the Cave is Boring

Early on you have to trek along a river bank to a cave; this is a nice enough trek but a bit empty-feeling. I really wanted to solve this, but somehow felt I should avoid the obvious thing of having enemies along the path.

I do all my game dev (almost) on Linux, using only free tools. Sometimes it's hard to get things working; as a Linux game dev you are in the minority so prepare to feel marginalized!

The result is well worth it though, since Linux is invincible and incredibly responsive compared to Windows. Windows feels so clunky after using Linux!

Today I installed Adobe FlexBuilder for Linux, so I could do Flash development with Flixel without resorting to my Windows Box. I'ts not fully tested yet but it does seem I managed to get it installed.

Here is how I did it:

Flow is fixed

I've fixed most of the flow issues-- or so I think! Having written some short stories was very helpful. I boiled down the dialogue to it's bare essentials, and removed about half of the NPCs (a bold move, don't you think?) A side effect of not using some of the NPCs is that I get to fill the wardrobes of the castle with their now-unused clothing, which is a nice bonus!)

Music is magic!

In game development you slog and slog and slog away. You try to stay on-track yourself, and above all things keep the game focused.

First off, I've got a pre-release of VtV 1.1.5 ready, and if some of you lucky readers could just give it a test run and let me know if it works, that would be luscious! Forum post is here:

http://www.venturethevoid.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=218

Tanku!

Texas Playtester no. 1

My friend Kevin came to stay for awhile and while he was here I held his bicycle hostage and made him play Texas. Here's what happened:

- There were some simple bugs that I fixed; I hadn't played the very first part of the game through for awhile.

When I finished Venture the Void, I was thoroughly DONE with it. There was a bit of bug fixing to do but overall, I wanted nothing more to do with the project because I had spent such a large amount of time on it.

Since then, Microsoft has released Vista and introduced a few simple incompatibilities. There also seems to have developed a few issues for linux, and so I wanted to address these.

For your reference, here is how I do random number generation. If you use a lot of random numbers in your game logic (and of course, you do!) then maybe you can get some useful ideas here and add yours to the end of this post.

Mersenne Twister

Ah yes, this algorithm is the one that everyone uses nowadays. It's fast, and produces excellent very long-period sequences of random numbers.

The Bugaboo of Multipass Rendering

Multipass rendering might scare off indie game devs; it seems to tell us tales of bump mapping, realtime shadows, or other incredible, complex, tweaky effects that strain our minds and put the fear of math into us.