I've never worked on a project that had any sort of physics simulation occurring within it before; when I found out that Havok released their SDK that could be used by hobbyists and by any commercial product that retailed for less than $10, though, I retreated from my previous stay at Hotel XNA and back into C/C++ Direct3D9 Land. I didn't want to spend months writing a framework and a rendering engine, though, since I'm currently in the kind of mood where I want to put out a game every two-three months -- a timespan which is variable based on game release dates, occasional social interests and obligations, and work schedules. It is a direct result of this mindset which led me to using OGRE. I spent a few days configuring my project, the engine (and all of the modules for it which I planned on using), and Havok in Visual Studio and then got about implementing a basic Havok simulation and rendering aesthetic worked out.

In the wake of Tomonobu Itagaki's resignation from his directorial position at Team Ninja it has now been revealed that every Tecmo employee is suing Tecmo. Tecmo instituted an illegal "flexible hours" scheme that allowed the company to avoid paying their employees overtime; the company was ignoring over one hundred overtime hours worked by its employees every month and falsified documented to cover the whole thing up. The filing was handled by two Tecmo employees (one of which was the head of Tecmo's Labor Division, Hiroaki Ozawa) and asks for 8.3 million yen ($77,000 USD) per employee as compensation. Basically, Tecmo has been a bad, bad company.

 ]]>http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/315709http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/315709Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14mittenshttp://mittens.joeuser.com/article/315671Over the course of the last week I was able to play the final chapter in a franchise which I first played as a rental on my NES way back when I was a munchkin; Metal Gear was a thoroughly confusing game for the four-year-old me. I very much doubt that I made it much past the first few areas as I was not a patient child. I may or may not have played Metal Gear 2. I did, however, play the hell out of Metal Gear Solid for myPlaystation back in 1998. I played it through about four or five times, got Snake's tuxedo on New Year's Eve 1998, and have very fond memories of Psycho Mantis and Meryl and the boss fight with Revolver Ocelot. I would be hard-pressed to think of a franchise which, to this day, I remain so positively nostalgic about aside from Metal Gear Solid (and Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil). So, now that I've completed my first play-through of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, I want to write about the two halves of this game: the gameplay and the story.

]]>http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/315671http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/315671Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14mittenshttp://mittens.joeuser.com/article/315619
Among gamers, though, the most...]]>http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/315619http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/315619Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14mittenshttp://mittens.joeuser.com/article/312443http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/312443http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/312443Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14mittenshttp://mittens.joeuser.com/article/309930http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/309930http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/309930Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14mittenshttp://mittens.joeuser.com/article/309090
I originally wasn't planning on releasing the source but as development winded down and I started to play the game for longer sessions I soon realized that the game became virtually unplayable on my machine after about seven-eight minutes. I thought this may have been a result of poorly-managed graphical assets so I took a couple days to optimize them (and, as a result, the VectorMod...]]>http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/309090http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/309090Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14mittenshttp://mittens.joeuser.com/article/308576I've been playing a very time-intensive game of musical chairs with various three-dee engines over the course of the last two-and-a-half weeks in an attempt to find the one that would be best suited to my particular development style and the kind of game I want to create. And I can safely say that, tonight, I have reached the ultimate solution. That's right, after toying around with things like TorqueX, Torque Game Engine Advanced, OGRE, Irrlicht, Nebula3, and, finally, PowerRender. The latter two of the list appeared to have the most potential, with PowerRender being the closest thing to what I was looking for, but the most recent iteration of the engine is still under heavy development and, what was the most troublesome, seems to be getting very infrequent updates. So, after all of the wasted time, I decided that I was going to dig out my old C++/D3D9/D3D10 framework and just rip out the D3D9 parts for use in a new framework which I could use in the future.

I got exactly an hour-and-a-half of work done on that last night before I realized that it felt way too much like the kind of engine work I do at my job every weekday. So now, and for realsies, I'm back with XNA. I'll be releasing Asplode! this weekend in its terribly-performing state (and open source) and, hopefully, everything I learned in the development of that will help me create a far more useful toolset this time around as far as memory management is concerned. The most important lesson I have with me that I learned from Asplode! is that the most important thing about memory within a managed environment isn't necessarily the allocation of memory so much as it is the deleting of it. Apparently the garbage collector is a wicked beast that must be appeased in order to maintain stable gameplay performance. I don't know. I'm still getting the hang of the intricacies of C#. When I was working on Asplode! -- and this will be readily apparent in the source if people peruse it -- I didn't know anything about C#. I simply coded as if I would code a game using C++ and, when code didn't compile, I read up on why the error occurred and what I needed to do/learn in order to fix it. Hopefully, this time around, I'm a bit more well-prepared. It also helps that Drilian and I are teaming up for some of the more game-independent stuff.]]>http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/308576http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/308576Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14mittenshttp://mittens.joeuser.com/article/307016http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/307016http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/307016Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14mittenshttp://mittens.joeuser.com/article/306283http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/306283http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/306283Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14mittenshttp://mittens.joeuser.com/article/306254http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/306254http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/306254Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14mittenshttp://mittens.joeuser.com/article/305754http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/305754http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/305754Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14mittenshttp://mittens.joeuser.com/article/305528http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/305528http://mittens.joeuser.com/article/305528Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:52:14 -04002008-09-05T23:52:14