Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Monthly Archives: October 2015

Caves

Today I squashed an old bug… I had a cave planet whose generation ended up being this: So the player couldn’t get out of the initial drop zone! I have a lot of code to try to prevent this sort of thing, but sometimes some stuff falls through the cracks… That’s actually one of the […]

Documents

As most (all?) coders in the world, I hate writing documentation… That’s what I did today, to finish off my work for OldJob™… So, I’m theoretically done with it (although I probably have some bugs to fix still, but let’s see)! Next couple of days I’m going to finish getting ready for my NewJob™, go […]

Finishing the old work…

Today I finished getting my lab ready (well, it’s never really ready, but close enough): I’ve installed Linux Mint, but it has some issues with my friend Synergy… Hopefully I’ll be able to fix them and still use it, since it’s quite nice (at least until now)… Anyway, I’m finishing my work for my old […]

Doing some multitasking…

So working on two things at the same time: getting a Linux Mint install to work properly, and finding a good way to debug/profile compute shaders… Decided to try Linux Mint because I ran into a problem with some updates on Ubuntu 14.04… It’s not the first time this happens. I install something on Ubuntu […]

More Compute Shaders

After getting compute shaders working properly yesterday, decided to check some profiling… After some moving code around, got some rudimentary profiling working. In terms of CPU flow, running the compute shader to sum 33 million elements took about 0.2 ms (against 37ms of CPU time)… This looks great, in theory… But the reality is way […]

Compute Shaders

Started today with compute shaders… The concepts behind them are a bit weird at first, especially the relation between threads and groups, read/write orders, barriers, etc… Anyway, I made some headway and I have a naïve compute shader that sums all elements of an array… Impressive, I know, but it’s a start… Now I can […]

DirectX 11

Continuing to learn stuff I’ll need for my new job… Today it was a day for learning DirectX 11… This wasn’t that hard, since I’m very experienced with DirectX 9.0, and 11 is not that different… It’s just a bit more organized in places, and there’s some new concepts (which I usually implemented at a […]

Physics in UE4

Started working with physics on UE4, combined with making a small physics-based game… The game will consiste of a platform and some cubes falling on it, and the player has to use it’s own weight to balance it… pretty simple stuff, but it should provide me with enough stuff to keep me busy learning UE4. […]

More UE4

Still learning UE4… Ran through most of the tutorials and the development/programmer guides, so I have a good grasp on how things work (although I couldn’t actually do anything by myself yet)… Now I have three things I can do: Try to build a small game using UE4 Learn PhysX (that will be important in […]

Learning UE4

Today I started learning UE4… As I think I mentioned before, I got a contract job which will start in November… For that work, I’ll have to work with Unreal Engine 4, so I need to learn it before I start… My first contact with it wasn’t that good… It takes forever to compile, run, […]