From the dusts of time...

Posted by: Ryan

So I was recently looking into an old school game developer named Eric Chahi, who created the game Another World and worked on another amazing game called Heart of Darkness. I was researching his game technology for Another World, and I noticed he was working on a new game this year called From Dust. I checked it out and it's a god simulation game. I grew up playing Populous and Black and White so I was immediately drawn to this game. It looks like it will be coming out this year and everyone should check it out. These games are a lot of fun!

I also finished up my projects course with Lego robots. Our team got first place in the two challenges, and we completed five missions. So now we are done for this semester until September. I am going to try and get some photos and videos to post up of our challenges, but it might take a while.

In other news, I have been experimenting with making a game which uses a C++ based engine, and uses C# for the gameplay aspects. I am looking into this because of how easy it is to recompile and run C# byte code on the fly. Right now everything has been going great, and I even managed to overlay Windows Forms on top of the OpenGL context which might make creating tools for the game easier. I will post some information on that soon.

Last but not least, the site has been updated. I finally corrected the links in the navigation panel and made it so each blog post can have its own page. This will be handy once I implement comments. I am doing all this from scratch so I can get a good grasp on how to make a modern website.

Thanks for visiting the site and stay tuned for more updates.

Back from an alternate reality!

Posted by: Ryan

I am back! Well sort of. I have been putting a lot of effort into school lately and it has hindered my ability to post new blog updates. But I will try harder in the future to keep this site up to date. I still have a lot of work to do on the site in general, like archiving and perhaps comments.

So my first piece of news is just about what I am doing currently. We (me and my team) have been challenged by our instructors at BCIT to make some robots which can complete tasks on an obstacle course. The tasks vary from pushing a car up a ramp to picking up little white Lego blocks from the top of a tower without knocking over orange blocks which sit beside them. We have to use supplied sensors (Ultrasonic, Light, and Pressure) to complete the tasks. We are given a programmable brick which we can inject our little programs into. The programs send impulses via modular connectors to motors, and receive input from the sensors in the same way. We are using the LeJOS API which is a Java based API. The programmable bricks have had their firmware replaced with a lite version of the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). Here are some pictures of the obstacle course. I can't wait to get started on the project!

In other news, I started writing a text adventure game in Java I am calling JDungeon. I released the source code on source forge, and will be working on that from time to time. I added a new page with project details and download links.

And last but not least, I will be adding a new page where I post some interesting things I have coded. Mostly tools to do specific jobs, but they might be useful to some. Feel free to use the code in your projects.

Game Jam Photos

Posted by: Ryan

As promised, and with a late arrival, I present the Game Jam photos. The first shot is of the Game Jam area and about how many people participated, the next shot is of the entire group, and the last shot featuring me, Abdon, and alex (not shown) burning the midnight, or should I say 5 in the morning, oil. I am the guy with the beard and the grey hoodie if you didn't know. ;)

That's a wrap!

Posted by: Ryan

Greetings from beyond the grave! No seriously that was really intense, I think I got about 7 hours of sleep over the weekend. I and a bunch of guys made a game for the Global Game Jam 2011. The game is called "Super Hyper Mega Deluxe Earth Annihilation" and as you can guess, it is super and mega and deluxe and it is about annihilating the earth! I think it might be hyper as well, I’ll ask my team mates about that. ;) The Jam was quite the experience. There were industry developers working as volunteers and they sat down and spoke with us about our project and we got a lot of great tips. It is really cool to get input from people who make games for a living, really amazing. :) If you are interested in checking out the game we made, I added a new page for it under the "other" tab on the navigation bar. I am working on getting some photos of the game jam from Alex who was one of the developers working with us, I will post them ASAP! So now that the Game Jam is over it is back to the grind of school. I really enjoy my computer architecture class. The lectures are done by an amazing teacher that you cannot help but respect. Anyway, I will get back with some photos from the weekend and put some funky captions or something! Until next time!

Website Updates!

Posted by: Ryan

Howdy folks! I just cleaned up the sites unfinished pages to be slightly less unfinished. ;) It is hard to get any website work done while going to school and developing a game engine. But I will always try to get some work in every week and a blog entry. While updating the website I realized some things could be done better, especially with the navigation bar. I will clean that up this weekend if I can. lots to do! In other news, I have been messing around with shaders and finally managed to get them working with WorldScape! I have also been reading about bump mapping using normal maps and the technique sounds very cool. I will definitely be implementing that soon and when I do I will post a video of the results. :) Have a good weekend everybody!

Global Game Jam

Posted by: Ryan

I have registered for the Global Game Jam competition in my area, ( Vancouver, BC ). It is a competition where a group of people get together into teams and make a game within’ 48 hours. I am excited and a bit nervous at the same time. I have never participated in a competition like this, but I know it is going to be a lot of fun. The competition takes place at BCIT on the 29th and 30th of this month. I will post the results of the jam here on the blog, and some photos and game images.

In other news, I was recently asked to restore a bunch of emails that were permanently deleted from Microsoft Outlook. Outlook was unable to restore the emails from backup so I got my hands dirty and dug into the PST file format which holds message backups. I realized the file format was rather complicated so I went searching on the net for file specifics. I came across an open source library designed to access these files, and I was pleased to find that the library was very easy to use, and was able to restore the lost data. The library is called LIBPFF and it can be found here.

And now some news about the site. The site is coming along slowly by surely. A lot of links go nowhere at the moment, and I will fix that as soon as I can. I have been swamped with school work and working on the game engine. I hope to post some news about the engine soon by the way.

Welcome to the Stone Disc!

Posted by: Ryan

Welcome to the currently under construction Stone Disc! I created this site as a way to document my video game modding and programming projects. It is also designed to act as my personal portfolio. My hope is that this site will help visitors better understand me and my interests, and perhaps get involved. The site name comes from an old video game called Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. It is one of my favorite Lucas Arts adventure games, and I have fond memories of playing it as a child. So stay awhile and listen, and enjoy yourself while you venture into the deepest crevices of my mind!