Gaming

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How to Use Math to Create Fire

By Tanner ⋅ February 4, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Whether working on an old-school RPG or a state-of-the-art FPS, every game programmer needs a fast, cool fire effect at some point in his/her career. In this example, I’ve opted for a straightforward and easy-to-understand method for generating real-time flames. No pre-built images or palettes are used, making the code quite small (only 11kb, including a demo exe) and very easy to reuse. Coloring and flame generation is done using only math and a little cleverness…

Basic Game Physics (Velocity and Acceleration)

By Tanner ⋅ January 29, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

This site spends a lot of time focusing on the graphical side of game programming, but what about the underlying math that drives game engines? After an evening of being inspired by the marvelous Havok physics engine, I decided to bust out some old arcade game code and use it to demo classical mechanical physics. The demo has a pretty simple premise – use the arrow keys to fly a spaceship (taken from the classic game Raptor) in all 4 directions and use spacebar to fire two “lasers.” Also, for any VB-haters out there, it’s worth noting that if the demo’s frame rate limitation box is unchecked, the code will easily run 500+ FPS on any modern machine. Still think VB6 isn’t a viable choice for game programming?

Think video games make kids antisocial? Think again.

By Tanner ⋅ September 16, 2008 ⋅ 3 comments

As an adult male who enjoys the occasional video game, I find myself constantly having to justify this choice of entertainment to other adults – you know, the ones that claim video games are “evil,” “a waste of time,” “anti-social,” “satanic,” etc.  These arguments usually consist of the other adults name-calling gamers while I explain [...]

10 reasons to expect a Final Fantasy VII remake

By Tanner ⋅ July 25, 2008 ⋅ One comment

10. 1up.com interview and Shinji Hashimoto’s “shocking” comment
From http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3168827:
1UP: Last week, Final Fantasy Versus XIII director Tetsuya Nomura said that he’s hard at work adding new scenes to the FFVII: Advent Children Complete Blu-ray release. Can you give us any update on that project?
SH: You can look forward to the upcoming invite-only fan event DKS3713 [...]