Life Reboot

CRYENGINE

Joining StoneRage

A few weeks ago I decided to place my own projects on hold and join a team working on a game - specifically the StoneRage game. The developers seemed organised and were well advanced in terms of graphic and environmental production.

CRYENGINE

How to Make .PAK Files With Your Assets

Something that doesn’t seem to receive much coverage is what to do with all your awesome assets once you’ve made your game. You’re going to need to ship them to end users, and the best way is within a .PAK file.

general

Building A Cheap Motion Capture Studio

A while back I became interested in motion capture as a means to easily get basic animations into the game I am working on. Using reasonably priced software from Brekel and a cheap Microsoft Xbox Kinect camera you have the beginnings of a motion capture setup.

Programming

Dealing With The Difficulty

I’ve been working on my pet project for almost five months now and I must admit that some parts of the project are easier than others. I don’t actually get a choice about which parts I will try and deal with, but I do get a choice about the order in which it happens.

World Design

On Building a World

To date I’ve been focusing on making my little zone with little regard for the world around it. Till now it’s been acceptable to know just the prime locale of the zone, but it’s been niggling at me that I don’t know it’s location on a world map, it’s climate, or even the location of the sun.

World Design

Creating Interesting Terrain

At first blush terrain might seem like a fairly easy thing to be able to create, and at it’s simplest it might well be. Toss a few mountains about, some rolling hills, a valley or two, a little water, and you’re done - or are you?

CRYENGINE

Sunset Oasis

My first effort towards building a CTF style game went a little awry. I tried tinkering with the gameplay parameters and added in extra elements and came up with a hybrid that might be interesting when I get back to it. My big mistake though was to create a landmass about 8 times bigger than was really needed. Even using much of it for ocean, I was still left with these way too large spaces for the tight gameplay I wanted.

CRYENGINE

CryEngine3 and UDK3

I’ve been playing games for over 30 years now and I’ve seen them progress from simple text based games through all the iterations to give us the amazing looking games we have today. I have at times written my own games; most were very simple - due to the nature of the machines at the time.