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Green Vibrations

This years’ edition of the Green Vibrations festival was fantastic as always ^_^

The first year I really didn’t do anything to actually build the festival, I had great fun as a visitor. Dancing like a retard with my breakdance crew was awesome 😉

Keep up the good work guys!

Windows Ceres Solver Guide

Hi all, I’ve just added a step-by-step guide on how to compile Google Ceres Solver for Windows using VC2012. You can find it here.

Ordered some new toys

These are exciting times! I’ve just spent $300 on an Oculus Rift, and am really looking forward to playing around with it. Lately I’ve bought several devices to just play around with and I’m thinking about mixing them all together.

The toys – an Oculus Rift, Razer Hydra and Raspberry Pi. I’m still thinking about a mobile power solution, but the Raspberry actually works on a couple of AA batteries. The Hydra actually generates a magnetic field around 2m in size, and I have no clue how much power the Rift requires, but I’m hoping to make a fully mobile immersive VR solution.

Of course this will require a bit of VR software to actually display stuff, and I will probably port my game engine to the Raspberry to do just this. This means making a linux or android version that uses the OpenGL ES bindings. Again, I have no idea how good the performance will be, but high performance is *the* thing that makes or breaks immersion in such a project. (update: I’ve ordered a similar, but higher powered dev board from china – hackerberry)

I’ll update the engine tutorials whenever I have time (which could take a while), but I’m actually pretty excited about this. Interfacing with a hydra, making use of headtracking sensors, correcting for optical distortions, cross-platform coding and engine tuning/optimizing for 60hz are all kind of unusual features that are essential for the project. Here’s to making the future 😉

Mini-reviews

Lately I’ve been playing lots of games again, and I thought I should provide people with some recommendations. I’ll try to keep it short and to the point.

First off, some Indie games. I’ve been purchasing indie bundles for a while now, and most of those were ‘okay’. Some of them were unexpectedly good though. First off is Braid, kind of famous now but I only recently got to play it. It’s really weird to see interesting gameplay emerge from a type of game that has been around for so long, but Braid manages to do so, surprisingly. Took me a good three days to finish.

Then there was Cogs. One of those okay-ish puzzle games. I can’t really explain what’s wrong with it – the polish was pretty good, the puzzles were clever and ever increasing in complexity, but somehow it just didn’t grab my attention. I quit playing it after 2 days, with a *lot* of puzzles to go.

Revenge of the Titans was pretty good, nice artwork and original gameplay. Good gameplay too, although the game seems to adapt its difficulty to the skill of the player. Needless to say, the game became almost impossible to play when you’ve performed perfectly for the first XX missions. My habit of re-doing levels when I feel when I could be doing better actually backfired with this game. Other than the rebalancing, most of the gameplay decisions felt kind of old-school, which I approve. After a week of playing, I left it unfinished at ~75% of the game.

Finally, I’ve been playing The Binding of Isaac. Now that was an unexpected gem. It’s really twisted and has a pretty sick sense of humour, but the gameplay is very smooth and rewarding. I’ve been playing it for a month and I’m just about done with it. I’d probably have to persist for another couple of weeks to get all of the achievements, but then it’d become a chore instead of fun. And we wouldn’t want that, now would we?

Game Engine Tutorial Part 6

After a long period of inactivity, I’m continuing work on the Game Engine series. I’ve also fixed numerous typos in the source, you should actually be able to compile and run this one 😉

Check it out [here]

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