Category Archives: game programming

Overview of the Z-machine

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 … Continue reading

Posted in game programming, games, history | 1 Comment

Some D on Linux Progress

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 … Continue reading

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IGN RPG Vault Interview

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 … Continue reading

Posted in game programming, software development, tabula rasa | 1 Comment

Implementing a Finite State Machine with a Ruby Domain Specific Language

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 … Continue reading

Posted in austin, game programming, meetup, programming, ruby | 8 Comments

XNA Random Terrain Generation Sample Code

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 … Continue reading

Posted in csharp, game programming, sample code, shmup, xna | Leave a comment

Tabula Rasa Chosen in Top 5 RPG E3 Category by Kotaku

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 … Continue reading

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RubyCube 0.2.1 released to RubyForge

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 … Continue reading

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RubyCube 0.1.1 Released

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 … Continue reading

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Profile Based Optimization and Test Driven Development

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 … Continue reading

Posted in coding, game programming, ruby, rubycube | Leave a comment

Simple XNA BMFont loading/render code

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 … Continue reading

Posted in game programming, indie dev, xna | Leave a comment