community

Shader Based 2D Shadowing

Those who know me know I used to do quite abit of development in c# using Microsoft’s XNA platform.

Well I like to check back in every now and then with some of the big players in the community to see what’s going on.

One of those players is Catalin Zima, who is famous for producing many great shader and effect samples.

One of Catalin’s reccent project particularly caught my eye however as I had tried to tackle the same problem several years ago when I was in my final year of university. That is, Dynamic 2D Shadows Calculated on the GPU (http://mikecann.co.uk/university-projects/shadowshader-in-rendermonkey/)

Catalin’s approach to the problem is far more elegant that my brute force iterative approach. He uses a clever technique of distorting the desired casting image about the light in such a way as not to require iterative pixel lookups.

If you are interested in the more details in the technique I encourage you to check it out over on Catalin’s blog: http://www.catalinzima.com/2010/07/my-technique-for-the-shader-based-dynamic-2d-shadows/

Starcraft II & TDs

I, like many others have been eagerly anticipating the latest Blizzard release Starcraft 2. I have been looking forward to the game but more importantly I have been eagerly anticipating the custom maps from the community.

I used to spend hours and hours playing the custom maps released with Warcraft III, I still log in every now and then to check out how its going and am suprised every time to see people still making new maps. Some of the most popular game genres in existence today wouldn’t be around if it wasnt thanks to be map making community in WC3. Genres such as Tower Defence (TD) and Defence of The Ancients (DOTA) were born there.

So it made me extremely happy to see this video on YouTube showing that yes custom maps are possible in SC2 and yes you can make TDs with them, horaay!

SWFt – Dependency Injection Component Based Game Framework

This is my first post of what I suspect will be many on the subject of SWFt.

What is SWFt I hear you cry? Well in a nut shell SWFt is an Entity-Component based game framework powered by Dependency Injection. Still confused? Well basically its a really nice neat method for making flash games. Still interested? Read on!

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