Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
In the advent of Metal Gear Solid 4 I decided to do something that I’ve never done before. As I understood it at the time, MGS4 is awesome but if you know the story it will be even awesomer. I had MGS2 already, but I never got into it because I couldn’t really grasp the story so I ordered the MGS Essential collection and I played all three games back to back. I finished the third game the day before four dropped in my mailbox. From playing the first couple of hours I can already sense that it was a good idea.
From the top left:
I got the fighting stick mostly because of Virtua Fighter 5 and Arcana Heart, because both those games are great fighters but play best with an arcade stick. The Mayflash stick was resonably priced and the reviews said it had a good quality per cost ratio. I agree. It was much bigger than I expected. Your wrists rests comfortably on the controller itself when you play.
I bought Warhawk mostly because of the Blutooth headset. I wanted to use it in Metal Gear Online, but the beta ended already. D:
Update
I had two expectations from the arcade stick I bought. First, I wanted a control that didn’t give my thumbs sores from doing quarter-circle attacks (aka. hadokens) and second; I wanted it to improve my game in Arcana Heart, for starters.
So did it meet my expectations? Yes and yes. Mildred is still stupid hard, though.
I rarely do experimental programming, but I had an idea today that I wanted to try. Maybe it’s not a new idea but at least I thought of it on my own.
Stereoscopic images are usually photos taken by two seperate cameras aimed at the same object but a small distance apart from eachother. The difference in position will let one camera see the object at a slightly different angle than the other. By looking at the two images side by side and crossing your eyes you will experience a 3D effect. Other than the eye-strain it’s a neat effect.
I liked the idea and thought about ways to generate a steroscopic image from a single flat image. The idea I came up with was to fake depth in the original image and then render two snapshots of it from slightly different angles. There’s a popular method employed by game developers for faking depth in otherwise flat textures called Parallax Occlusion Mapping. The idea is to use a heightmap and some clever math to make parts of the image “pop out”.
The implementation was really straight forward. I just found a parallax mapping shader online, converted the code to C++ and threw some sample images at it.
See my results after the break.
Continue reading ‘Generating stereoscopic images with parallax occlusion mapping’
I got this in my mail today. Am I excited about it? Yes.
I’m a huge Phoenix Wright nerd and I had this urge to do some fanart. I haven’t drawn much lately and I thought it could be a fun way to get back into it. Here’s the first in what I hope to become a series of Phoenix Wright characters:
Continue reading ‘Franziska von Karma’
I was looking for videos with Etna from Disgaea for a forum post and I stumbled across this. I thought it looked familiar.
I’ve finished Heavenly sword and Uncharted so I wanted to get some more PS3 games. I got these in the mail today.
I also got a new monitor for my computer this week. It’s all wide and shit.
Europe! They’re out. Go buy them!
This one comes out next week:
Buy it. Play it. Finish it before May 9th because then you’re buying this:
I’ve mentioned before that I’m working on a visual novel maker in my spare time. At first the purpose was only to practice my programming skills and try to implement what I’ve learned while working at Ksatria. Lately I’ve been wondering what my competition really looks like. I know there are other engines out there and I became curious of how they work compared to my Novelty and other engines.
From what I can tell there are no other visual editors for making visual novels. Granted, VNs are extremely simplistic in terms of programming. All you need is a simple 2D graphics engine and some sort of scripting language to set it all in motion. Had I taken the same route with Novelty I would’ve been done by now. In fact all VN engines are essentially script language runtimes.
My main issue with this approach is that it doesn’t take non-programmers into account. Visual novels are really popular in the japanese sub culture. It’s a genre as big as any other video game genre. In the west there isn’t really a big market for them so most authors are most likely hobbyists. For something as simple as a VN a lot of these engines sure make it hard for beginners to get something up and running.
It’s really hard to get any hard facts on any of these engines because most of them are japanese developed. Here’s what I found.
Continue reading ‘A study in visual novel engines’
