Why I Chose Not To Use Unity3D

I evaluated Unity3D for a few months before deciding NOT to use it. It’s a really, really great tool and it was a tough decision. Ultimately I felt like there was more resitance to steady progress using Unity3D over extending/upgrading my own code. Here is a rough guide …

Integrating Lua and my C++ Game Engine

If you want to cut to the chase you can download the code here.

This isn’t a very well written blog post, it’s more of a dump of my thoughts as I tested out LuaBridge and didn’t get to trying out OOLua.

Once again I am starting …

Moving from qmake to CMake

After working with Qt5.x for a few months and really starting to enjoy the flexibility of qmake and QtCreator I decided to try using CMake to build XCode and MSVC proejcts.

After turning on C++11 a few weeks ago I found that QtCreator debugging became more difficult as …

GLSL: Getting active uniforms

When you load a vertex and fragment shader in OpenGL you need to pass in data such as the current viewport transform, camera transform and lighting data. You do this via Uniform variables.

Each of these Uniforms is addressed via a location which in true OpenGL style is a GLuint …

Python Script to build a Texture Page or Sprite Sheet

Why pack textures/images?

If you’re making a game then it’s more efficient to tell the hardware:

1
2
3
4

use packed texture 1
draw primitive 1,2,3,4,5,6
use packed texture 2
draw primitive 7,8,9,10

than to

1
2
3 …

Using Python and Tkinter to capture script output

In order to build the assets for my games I have a series of python scripts that know how to take files TexturePacker, Tiled, and Blender and build them for use within the engine. My main platform is OS X and it has good terminal support and more importantly I …

Starter Blender Exporter

I’ve settled on using Blender 2.6 both as a level editor and modeller for my next game (code name BBM). BBM is a 2D game but modelling the characters and rendering the sprites will save a lot of time. Blender isn’t the best level editor but it …

Apple TnC Changes and Lua

With the beta release of iPhone OS 4.0 Apple has changed the terms and conditions for developers who want to target the iPhone platform (note that includes the iPod Touch and iPad).

There has been a of discussion about changes to clause 3.3.1 most notably by Gruber …

NvStrip and Blender – Stripifying Models for the iPhone/iPad.

What Is Stripification?

Stripification is the process of turning lists of triangles in an arbitrary order into as many lists of triangles that contain adjacent edges. There is a great explanation of a triangle strip of wikipedia.

Why would you stripify?

On most platforms Triangle Strips render more quickly. The …

A Pythonic “Center New” in Blender

Part of my Art pipeline for Tentacles is to import a directory of 3DS files. Each of these files is a map piece and the map pieces are instanced to create a map. That way I can store the geometry for a shack once but instance it across the level …