Jacob Repp

Here is a good article outlining the Z-machine. This is the machine that runs all of the Infocom text adventures including Zork for which the virtual machine is named. This is some really interesting engineering and you can still see the modern fruits of this online in the Parchment project

I’ve spent some time looking at D again and really trying to evaluate it’s fitness for MMO game development. There’s a lot of holes left still in the whole development picture. The IRC channel has been a really great source of information, and is generally a fun place to hang out.

It might seem like a [...]

I was interviewed with 3 other programmers for an IGN Vault piece this week. They  asked us to describe some of the challenges we had to overcome to ship the game. It was nice to be able to talk about some of the technology behind the game publicly. After ship I’d like to go into more detail on what [...]

DSL-FSM.. that kinda sounds like some wierd internet sub-culture. It stands for domain specific language – finite state machine. I proposed both topics as presentation material for the austin-ruby group that I meet with once a month. Steven Harms the organizer recommended both/either so I combined it into one piece of code as it [...]

I recently received a comment asking for details on the terrain generation algorithm I used in my XNA shoot ‘em up proof of concept. Here’s my edited reply and sample code for anyone interested.

It’s not very complex and it doesn’t do any culling currently because I didn’t find that to be a problem given the [...]

http://kotaku.com/gaming/e307/best-of-e3-our-picks-279860.php

Now granted this isn’t Gamespy, IGN or 1up but that’s a good thing. I have been reading kotaku for a few years now and I respect their opinion on games. They haven’t had back stage access or been flown out to Austin to check out the game so this is based solely on their E3 [...]

A new windows binary and source distribution is ready on ruby forge with inital support for sprites.  I also took this opportunity to fix a few small bugs and update the documentation. This also marks the first public upload of the master sources to ruby forge trunk. Although the sources are included in every release [...]

I just released the initial distribution of RubyCube locally.

RubyCube 0.1.1

I’m in the process of getting a new ruby forge project setup to host the project files, mirror the source depot and manage bugs.

I’m very happy with the overall quality of this initial release.

Incidentally, I also uploaded a copy of my async IO extension to [...]

Modern video games can be about as hard to tame as a large fire breathing dragon. It’s usually not until around when the marketing budget is finalized, traditionally around 6 months before release that people start talking about bringing the dragon out of the cave to meet the general public. It’s not wise to allow [...]

XNA doesn’t yet have good support for text render (still?) so since I just got a request for my font rendering code I put some short comments in the header. I think there are other examples of this but this one is completely free and small. Let me know if you have any issues.

XNA BM [...]