M2 planning complete, coding begins

Since my last update on the progress of developing my game, I flushed out the game mechanics details I needed to get further coding unblocked and took care of the remaining low hanging fruit in regards to refactoring the code implementing M1 hacked up game mechanics into code implementing the newly revamped game mechanics for [...]

PhysX coming for GeForce 8000 series cards

From Nvidia PhysX features page “Available soom for PhysX-Ready GeForce Processors*” (yes their site had ’soon’ spelled incorrectly). On that same page that star at the end is specified as “* Note: NVIDIA will deploy PhysX on CUDA-enabled GPUs” and a google on “CUDA-enabled GPUs” reveals that these are the GeForce 8000 series cards [...]

Back to game mechanics, coding blocked

As stated here I’ve been working on refactoring my game code to bring it line with my newly revamped game mechanics.  The interface between the simulation and the results viewer has been refactored and a decent chunk of simulator code has also been refactored, but further progress there is dependent one aspect of the game [...]

Game mechanics revamped; time to start coding again

At this point I’ve flushed out most of the core details of my idea for deepening the game mechanics and its looking good.  On Monday it seemed like I had solved the last tough problem without creating any new problems, but it took a couple more days to detail out that solution sufficiently for confirmation.
The [...]

Next competitive evaluation

Yesterday I had some unplanned time to kill Best Buy, so I had a look at their current stock of PC games and walked out with a list of 6 strategy titles that looked interesting but which I knew nothing about. The games were Seven Kingdoms: Conquest, The Settlers: Rise of an [...]

64 cores on a PCIe card

Just ran across Tilera Corp’s PCIe cards ( TILExpress-64 and TILExpress-20G ) sporting a 64 core processor. Assuming my back-end game simulator can be sliced enough that the processing of one instance can be scaled to hundreds of separate processes, this could be a pretty cost effective way to get that many cores to [...]

Game Mechanics Revamp

In this post I mentioned that I had “forgot[ten] about one aspect of the implementation, which was how much the options will actually cost to build into a unit.” I had the seed of an idea for how I might be able to do this without needing to do it arbitrarily for each and [...]

M1 Game Mechanics Progress II

I finished coding up the game mechanics I had planned for M1 (i.e. the first milestone/iteration), but I found that a few more will be necessary to get to something playable. I also completely forgot about one aspect of the implementation, which was how much the options will actually cost to build into a [...]

Game Mechanics Design Progress

In between family visits, tax time, and commodities volatility I did manage to get a good amount of design work completed on core game mechanics. When I implemented my minimalist simulator last month I ran into some areas of game mechanics that I had clearly not detailed out sufficiently, but in the interest of [...]

A look back and a look forward

Yesterday marked the end of my first month of code crafting after leaving Microsoft at the end of last September. Come to think of it, its really my first full month of code crafting since I switched from the VS SDK team at then of July 2006. The last leg of my tenure [...]