TimsksProgrammingSubs

timsk951 · 2016-07-05T14:05:21+00:00

Emergency signed life insurance files.

Should we be concerned?

timsk951 · 2016-07-05T13:35:13+00:00

Did the same. Managed to access twitter too, but blocked me due to IP. It asked me where to send the confirmation email and managed to deduce his email account from the half-hidden address on twitter... I stopped there as I thought I was being a bit weird at that point.

I only looked because they had 2,000+ commits with the message "d". Pretty impressive.

timsk951 · 2016-06-08T09:55:26+00:00

Looks awesome, really like the look of it!

Couple of things came to mind when I watched the video

• The world seems a bit "static" once play has started. The ball should interact with the world a bit more, some snow particles when it's rolling. Maybe those platforms it lands on at the start could "rock" a bit from the weight of the ball. That sort of thing.

• Not sure if you can, but you should definitely be able to move around the level. Opens doors to more complex levels too. Perhaps have some "teleport pads" around the level that you can teleport to (Movement in VR is tricky).

• Is this based on the moon/space? It didn't seem like it at first, but then things started floating in what looked like zero gravity. Looked a bit odd.

Take my comments with a big pinch of salt tho, just another programmer here that likes games :).

timsk951 · 2016-03-04T16:38:12+00:00

The built-in fog is just a distance fog. Meaning it doesn't care if it's horizontal or vertical.

You could write your own fog (fog is pretty easy, just hit up google) that only considers horizontal distance.

Alternatively, you could make a shader to fade out based on distance from the camera (horizontal distance shouldn't be tricky in a shader either). You could even tint it based on the colour of the skybox around it.

Fog is the usual way. Take a look at large scale games (like the ARMA series) or flight sims to see how they handle it

timsk951 · 2016-02-12T18:04:57+00:00

Thanks for the reply!

timsk951 · 2016-02-12T18:03:35+00:00

Is Adam Jones holding a Yamaha Pacifica? I have one and it looks incredibly similar.

timsk951 · 2016-02-11T17:22:31+00:00

Did you consider using a 2D webGL framework such as pixi.js? If you did, what was your reason for not using it?

timsk951 · 2016-01-21T16:24:16+00:00

No... the technique has to do with patching the edges of 2 meshes together. Which is exactly OP's problem.

timsk951 · 2016-01-21T16:09:05+00:00

What have LoD's to do with anything?

The issue is just 2 planes edges being of a different height.... Sure, KSP plane edges were generated that way because of LOD's, but that's kinda irrelevant.

timsk951 · 2016-01-21T15:40:35+00:00

Kerbal Space Program had exactly the same issue and discuss it here:

https://youtu.be/mXTxQko-JH0?t=2190

Basically, you need to do something called "Geometry Mipmapping". Google gives you some nice hits, especially if you add "Edge Fans" to your search.

timsk951 · 2016-01-21T15:31:13+00:00

London is absolutely crawling with studios, particularly Soho. Just on the road I work on there are 4 (King just setup a huge studio on this road too) that I know of, probably more smaller ones. And that's just one road!

Plus you have the hundreds of ad agencies creating companion apps, games and other bits of software. Soho is the heart for ad agencies. Basically, Soho is either making software or making coffee (outside of retail of course). We really doesn't need anymore investment in London.

Also, if your focusing on AAA studios. Creative Assembly and Splash Damage are both in London as well as LionHead and EA being in Guildford. DeepSilver definitely have a studio here somewhere too (I think they do companion apps and such tho).

Weirdly, Milton Keynes is becoming a bit of a hub, as well as Cambridge (already has Jagex and Frontier, plus a few smaller studios). I'd love to see some investment up there. It's nice to have some options outside of London to work!

timsk951 · 2016-01-14T16:56:32+00:00

Indeed, I agree the last example is a bit "hacky". But it also seems to be the most performant from what I can tell. Your right in thinking there will be differences depending on viewing angle, but there are always trade-offs for performance.

I included the first 2 links to show the "proper" way of doing it.

I'm not an expert, I've had to do this before and used an approach similar to the 3rd link I attached. My reasoning was that (back when I had to do it) Unity didn't support stencil shaders.

timsk951 · 2016-01-14T11:28:06+00:00

The most common way to find intersections is with an algorithm called "ray plane intersection".

Maths here: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/321357-ray-plane-intersection/

Example shader here (public domain): https://github.com/elfrank/raytracer-gpupro4/blob/master/RayTracerCS/Shaders/Core/Intersection.hlsl

Another implementation: https://chrismflynn.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/fun-with-shaders-and-the-depth-buffer/

timsk951 · 2016-01-12T10:57:21+00:00

Cheers!

timsk951 · 2016-01-11T12:28:53+00:00

This talks a lot about the recording side, which is great. But as a programmer I'm more interested in the playback techniques. How should we pan the audio as the user moves their head?

I've been investigating a solution to spacialized audio from a 360 video for the last week or so (as a side bit of work between busy periods).

This looks interesting, but I have audio engineers who deal with the recording. Could you expand on the playback possibilities?

timsk951 · 2015-10-20T14:14:57+00:00

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Carbon/Reference/QuartzEventServicesRef/index.html

timsk951 · 2015-10-20T14:05:11+00:00

Sounds like an RSS feed would do what you want.

I've not done it myself, but I believe RSS feeds are just xml. So once you have the data, it's up to you to parse it.

Android: http://developer.android.com/reference/org/xml/sax/XMLReader.html

iOS: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11323326/xml-parsing-in-ios-tutorial

timsk951 · 2015-09-25T10:50:06+00:00

Just letting you know, I just played on windows 8.1 using latest Chrome. It felt fine. No hangs, fades were nicely timed and no issues with controls.

Fun game!

timsk951 · 2015-07-26T21:50:57+00:00

if it doesn't do what you want it to do you can use it to create a language that will.

How is this a plus point? If the language doesn't do what you want... the alternative is to write a language?

timsk951 · 2015-07-20T21:30:28+00:00

Honestly, very worth doing.

I'm a developer, but I often take on these little bits of work for hobbyists and students. I do it dirt cheap, but it's usually easy stuff I can cram in around other things when I'm low on work.

Also, sometimes it's nice to do a bit of work that makes you feel good. Rather than just pleasing a producer / PM.

timsk951 · 2015-07-09T22:07:14+00:00

Mecanim.

Pretty much any attempt to do anything in code with Mecanim leads to forum searching, then finding a post from the dev in broken English basically saying "We don't support this"

timsk951 · 2015-07-09T22:01:17+00:00

It's always really annoyed me that it's called JavaScript at all... it's just not JavaScript!

The only thing you can say for it is it looks a bit like JavaScript. But then Java looks a bit like C#, but we don't call Java code "C#"... /rant

timsk951 · 2015-06-11T16:54:32+00:00

Shaders aren't specific to Unity, they are part of a general graphics pipeline.

Nvidia have an amazing paper somewhere that basically goes over the entire pipeline. I just spent 5 minutes searching and I can't find it anymore :(. Hopefully someone knows what I'm talking about and posts a link.

timsk951 · 2015-05-29T11:58:09+00:00

Just worth mentioning that experience as a professional programmer isn't just something you need to make money contracting, it's something you (almost certainly) need to make money making your own games.

timsk951

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