stolk.org

In the picture: history's first bug.

Complex software will be guaranteed to have bugs in it. And most of the bugs are caused by state changes.

The human mind has limited capacity of keeping track of state (data, variables.) Hence, there is a discrepancy between what the state looks like …

I've been learning a lot about transistors, lately. This is because I found myself having to switch a load that would be too large for an IO pin. Here I summerize my newly gathered knowledge on them.

A BJT transistor is switched ON/OFF using current at the base. This …

I am evaluating bi-colour LEDs that are RED/GRN, and can be mixed to ORANGE/YELLOW. The two candidates are SunLED GMDKVGX10D and KingBright DC10EGWA.

I've found that the SunLED has a bright GREEN with an even brighter RED. You need to drive the green channel with at least double …

I am using the TLC5928 constant current sink driver to light up my LED bar graphs.

The neat thing about this part, is that you can set a current (for all 16 outputs) using a reference resistor. The higher the resistor, the less current the chip will output. So far …

Today, I was in need of electronic circuit simulation. Let's see what is available for Ubuntu.

First I tried ngspice, but that seems to be text based.

$ ngspice
******
** ngspice-34 : Circuit level simulation program
** The U. C. Berkeley CAD Group
** Copyright 1985-1994, Regents of the University of California.
** Copyright 2001-2020, The …

I found that programming microcontrollers and designing electronic circuits is so much more fun than modern software development for PC. I have really taken to the hobby. So much so, that I'm beginning to think a pivot is in order.

When I started mobile game development in feb 2009, I …

Two LED bar graphs. You would think they would be much alike, but no.

On the left: LTA-1000Y (2017 Thailand.) On the right: FJB10Y.

The polarity is reversed. The LTA has anode on the side of the first pin. The FBJ has the cathode on the side of the first …

Last year, I did a project with the Arduini Micro kit. This is an ATmega32U4 microcontroller.

With it, I built a USB input device, with knobs, to tune my noise fields for Ring Miner.

In that project, I was simultaneously writing USB HID data, reading turn knobs, and writing OLED …

wow

I have been doing a lot of procedural animation, lately. Making a humanoid walk, and swing a torch at spiders.

I also needed a proper way to catch a fall, with the legs. Because I already had the Inverse Kinematics sorted, I just needed to shift the pelvis down, and …

Computer monitors come in different aspect ratios. From the old school 4:3 to the ridiculous 32:9.

In my 3D games, I have to choose a Field-Of-View for the camera. Wide angle, or narrow angle views? To do this, the convention is to set a fixed vertical field of …

(Just 120 particles, looks better in 60Hz and without GIF artifacts.)

This is a quick 'n dirty approach for getting a fire visualization using OpenGL.

Fire blends somewhat with its background, so we will be using blending. But unlike regular transparency, fire works a little different: it only adds light …

It is incompatible with MacOS, as there is no inotify in MacOS.

how to install ChiaHarvestGraph, ChiaPlotGraph and ChiaHeightGraph on macos?

When you farm Chia, the proof-of-space blockchained coin, you learn a few new things.

• Which PCIe generation your motherboard offers
• NVMe performance
• NVMe endurance
• The fstrim command
• XFS options like crc=0
• What the term JBOD means
• The performance of NFS over your LAN
• The thermal characteristics of your drives …

UPDATE 2021: This machine is now plotting and harvesting Chia. Could use a faster CPU, though.

I have implemented directional light for Practica Boxel. It simulates a harsh distant sun.

Because there is only one bounce, there are fully black shadows with 0% light in the scene. I'm not sure I like it.

It's main advantage is that it is easier to render in chunks, as …

With the implementation of Practica Boxel I was able to verify that for simple (aab primitives) and small (200 blocks) scenes, you can compute indirect light at 60Hz. This is an encouraging result! (Notice the red glow in the room, as the light drops.)

But it does leave me wanting …

I am making a real-time Photon Mapper, called Practica Boxel.

Photon Mapping is an algorithm that computes Global Illumination for a scene. This means that unlike traditional real-time rendering techniques, it does not merely compute the direct illumination, but it also considers light that is diffusely reflected from an object …

Today, I unveiled my latest work-in-progress: "Practica Boxel." Here is the video, introducing the tool, which does WYSIWYG Global Illumination.

In a way, it is a continuation of my SIMD-raytracer of a few years back. But when doing that (on CPU with AVX) I realised that only firing one primary …

Thank you very much for the tip!

CUDA terminology can overwhelm you. SM, Warp, Core, Thread, Block, Scheduler, Grid. I have been writing CUDA kernels for my RTX 3070, and I thought I would write down what I learned.

First things first: when you write a compute kernel, you write scalar code. So in my case, doing …

Yay, it is the year 12021 HE already. A palindrome year! And this is my first blog post for the year.

So you are still writing Objective-C? Not going with the times, my friend. Or you are still writing C/C++ Android apps? Again, you are not making it easy …

I've built a Xeon workstation, and had a lot of issues with the NVMe drive not being found by the BIOS. It would take roughly 3 reboots, before the WD SN550 would be found.

I've replaced that drive with a Crucial NVMe drive, and since I did that, the boot …

This is for my own benefit... when setting up a new Ubuntu distribution, adjust the following...

Recording gameplay videos on Ubuntu can be a big frustration. Here are some lessons learned.

$ sudo apt-get …

This is a one-man's quest on making an Open world game, with a capital-O.

It seems ages ago, that I was playing an Elder Scrolls game. It was big, and it was open. What impressed me most about it was the following:

With a hundred settlements on the map, and …

I am from the school of thought that recognizes the fact that typing is not the bottleneck for software engineering. So I am perfectly fine to use my command line, my vi and my Makefile. My peers consider me a weirdo for not using an IDE. Additionally, a powerful debugger …

Amazingly, the PC that I built has lasted me a whole 7 years. It is still a fine PC. It had one or two graphics card upgrades, and some extra RAM, but other than that, a Haswell CPU is still a perfectly fine workhorse.

I would have continued using that …

UPDATE: That amd gpu pro driver is so unstable, I decided to return the Radeon to Amazon for a refund. I will not be dealing with that mess.

I've been developing games for a long time now, but solving collisions remains a hairy subject. The Physics Engine I have used the most is OpenDE. It worked well for Little Crane. But the fact that OpenDE considers a triangle mesh as a generic 'triangle soup' as opposed to a …

So, the game I am currently developing was written around Procedural Generation of terrain, using the CUDA language. CUDA is great for doing GPGPU (General Purpose computing on a Graphics Processor.) It's well thought-out, and straightforward to use. It only has one drawback: it will only run on nVidia GPUs …

Update 2020: It finally got replaced by a Xeon W-2140B workstation. It's CPU is second hand, pulled from a Mac Pro.

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A naive way of generating a random direction d(x,y,z) would to take random values for x,y,z and then normalize the resulting vector d. But this will lead to a skewed distribution where too many samples fall in the "cube corners" directions.

A proper way to …

Back in 2011, my first attempt on porting to Android was to compile the existing code-base as-is, in Objective-C. With a third party Stella-SDK you could pretend your Android Device was an OpenStep device, very much like an iOS device. However, this never fully worked, so had to be abandoned …

Aristotélēs postulated that Nature abhors a vacuum. There is probably an equivalent postulate for the Internet Age about unused computing resources.

I've been dumbfounded many times about the ridiculous amount of bloat in software.

Be it the 18,000 classes in an iOS app. That is 18,000 classes, mind …

I got a couple of requests for Hexa Trains to be available from itch.io and not just Steam. At first glance, that should be easy enough, I've published stuff there before.

But with Hexa Trains there is a complication in the fact that the end-goal of the game, is …

I have some early results to share about my Google Play Experiment. To recap: I released a game that requires Android 9+, hence is available for a mere 10% of the devices that use Google Play. So, is store-traffic reduced with -90% as well?

I was baffled to see that …

Yes , that's weird.

In 2015, I released a successor to The Little Crane That Could on Steam for Windows, Linux, MacOS.

In the sequel, I wanted to do something special, and decided to make the terrain deformable. This means, you can dig into the terrain, anywhere, and deposit soil anywhere. And not just …

In my attempt to squash all bugs, I ran my Android app with clang's address sanitizer. Because the steps are not trivial, I thought I would documents the process here.

This recipe makes some assumptions, though:

• I'm on Linux.
• I use AndroidStudio with CMake.
• I run on the Android emulator …

So, if you use ASSERT macros a lot, you typically want to point to the offending line of code, and use __LINE__ and __BASE_FILE__ macros for that.

Now, where it gets tricky: VisualC does not have __BASE_FILE__ so what I did was use __FILE__ instead. But that has …

I am a one-man indie game studio (I like to use the term INDIEvidual.) The lack of employees means that I need to shoulder all the tasks, including art work. With so many tasks, I can not afford to spend a lot of time on it. Here are some tricks …

For debugging OpenGL under GNU/Linux, there are three tools that are very similar to each other. They can capture the stream of OpenGL commands, and let you examine the state at each command. These are the tools:

So, my Hexa Trains indie game features some outlandish planets with freaky colours. Obviously, they cannot represent Earth, as the continents are all wrong too. So, railroad building on Alien Worlds, it is then.

So, when the time came to implement loan interest for the game, it made me realize …

When doing my game development there is often a task or two that are just a little too computationally intensive for a smooth framerate. And I put my framerate targets very ambitious: typically 120Hz for proper operation on an iPad PRO. At 120Hz, there is only 8.33ms to do …

After a successful exploration of unity earlier, I though I would test-drive Unreal Engine 4 to see what that is all about. Here are some random observations I made:

• For linux, the engine and editor have to be built from source. Which is fine, but it does take an hour …

I'm on a mission to reduce my Android game's crashes as much as possible. And it turns out it is incredibly hard to approach a zero crash rate.

First off, I would like you to consider this: If 1% of today's users of your app experienced a crash today …

This call stack, captured from Google Play for one of my apps, shows what's fundamentally wrong with Android.

The app didn't even finish launching, and this is how deep the complexity runs?

backtrace:
  #00  pc 00000000000264f4  /system/lib/libharfbuzz_ng.so (hb_ot_layout_has_glyph_classes+28)
  #01  pc …

Are you aware of this post https://www.executionunit.com/blog/2019/01/02/how-i-support-windows-mac-and-linux/ from Execution Unit? It evals custom engine vs using third party engine (close or open source)

Two days ago, I started using the Unity3D game development tool. Interestingly, Unity3D is the most pervasive tool in the Game Dev industry... it is everywhere. I've been making games since 1982, but have never used it before.

I'm one of those dinosaurs keeping to the old way of doing …

I released a new software application. It is named "Sprinkle, Sprinkle, Little Star" and is available for free for Windows and Linux.

It is a 2D simulation of Gravity acting on a galaxy of stars. It is completely interactive, and you can paint your own galaxy onto a grid, and …

Last time I tried it, I liked it. But it's been a while.

I have been programming since 1982, I guess that shows my age. But in those 36 years, I have never designed nor implemented a programming language. With the current anti-C++ sentiments on Twitter, it made me ponder on what a better language would look like. So let's start the first …

I investigated an interesting conundrum this morning: why was my game running so much differently on my iPad PRO? The tank was snappy, and turning aggressively on the iPad PRO, but not on Linux and Android.

The main difference between iPad PRO and other platforms is its higher display refresh …

I just did a fun little exercise to figure out the steering in my Flank That Tank! indiegame. Of course, the best way to steer a tank is by using two throttle levers, one for each track. This will let the tank driver directly control the differential steering of the …

I tried to record a video of my game this morning, and it bugged me that it wasn't 100% smooth. The game did report 60fps though, so let's find out what is going on.

First order of business, is to graph the delta-time for each frame, instead of just reporting …

I am currently developing my, still unnamed, indiegame. This game is a 2D top down tank fight. And its main gimmick is the 100% destructible world.

Nice destruction if I say so myself, but notice that the tanks don't leave track prints. Today, I will write about implementing track prints …

It occurred to me that the new iPad Pro 120Hz display is a great motivation to update my Little Crane game for iOS. So after a long time, I returned to my iOS codebase. Here I report some random findings.

In my pursuit of doing Real Time (60fps) Ray Tracing for a game, I have been doing a lot of profiling with 'perf.' One way to quickly analyse the results from a perf record run, is by making a FlameGraph. Here's a graph for my ray tracing system:

Click here …

So, The Little Crane That Could is waning. Here are the 2017 results (Number of free Downloads.) It did manage to surpass a 19M lifetime downloads.

Quick, name the one technology that is hotter that Virtual Reality or Machine Learning today. Yep... the hottest thing right now is crypto currency. But did you miss out on the gravy train?

Well, judging from the dizzying levels of the two heavy weights in the crypto world, Bitcoin and …

Speaking of profiling, I wrote an inline profiler for multi threaded Linux apps called ThreadTracer. It's quite good, as it records both wall clock time and cpu time. And on top of that, it also keeps track of pre-empted threads and voluntary context switches.

It's a fine tool, making use …

In the past, I have been using Remotery, an in-app profiler. I recently became aware of Minitrace, a similar app. So I decided to compare results.

The good news is that when my ray tracer is working in single-threaded mode, the results are in agreement. 6ms or so is spent …

In part one, I described what you need to do after simulating light before you can show it on a monitor. You need to brighten it by going from linear colour space to sRGB colour space.

Here I talk about how to avoid polluting your calculations with non-linear data. Light …

I keep screwing up my colour spaces, so I forced myself to write down the rationale behind it. A lot of it comes from Tom Forsyth.

CRT monitors respond non-linearly to the signal you drive it with. If you send it value 0.5 you get less than half the …

UPDATE: Corsair H100i stopped working after 4 years. Out of the blue a CPU fan warning. But the fans are running, it's the pump inside the cooler that is broken. Buyer beware.

Note to self: before running vtune, do:

echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope
sudo chmod 755 /sys/kernel/debug
sudo chown -R bram:bram /sys/kernel/debug/tracing

If you render your RGBA sprites in OpenGL using...

glBlendFunc( GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA )

and you use GL_LINEAR filtering, then you may see black borders around your sprite edges.

The reason for the pixel artefacts on the border (they can be white too, or another …

I decided to challenge myself in writing a quick and dirty Match-3 game. Not sure, how I came up with the theme, but it occurred to me that Smileys with facial feature permutations would make for interesting content.

I spent a full day on art, using Inkscape and OpenClipArt. A …

A lot of software bugs are caused by the following scenario: The programmer assumed a certain situation and wrote code that would rely on this assumption. Very often, these mental assumptions are never made explicit, and live in the programmer's mind only. A standard weapon against these bugs in the …

Every year or so, I come back to Android development. And often, quite a bit has changed. On top of that, I will have forgotten gotchas, and fall in the same trap twice. Hence, I need to document my process better. So here's another Android report.

I managed to hold …

In 2015, I've been tinkering with a real-time photon mapper to do Global Illumination for simple voxel worlds. Recently, I thought there should be more I could do with this idea.

So my Real Time Ray Tracing experiments are back, but with a twist. The minimalistic voxel world was a …

Consider the de facto standard user interface for computers and computer software. It is what we call the Graphical User Interface, or GUI. Comprised of a mouse cursor and windows, sliders, buttons, scrollbars and such.

I remember seeing my first computer mouse on a trade show. I'm going to venture …

I am announcing my latest indie title, which is currently under development: "The Little Bike That Could."Like many of my previous titles, it comes with an exceptional physics simulation. It's been fun implementing and tweaking it. Wheelies, Stoppies, Slides and even loopings on a half-pipe are possible.

It is …

Also, did the installation directory for shared library files change when going 64-bit? It seems so: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41709129/lib-directory-missing-after-installing-64-bit-android-application

Congrats - great success story

I've reinstalled windows on my PC, going to Windows 10. Here's a list of things to do on a new install:

• Expand the explorer 'ribbon' to set the 'View' properties on your local drive. This is needed if you want to see file extensions.
• Installed Visual Studio 2015
• Installed Sys …

So, The Little Crane That Could is holding stable on Android, but dropping on other platforms. Here are the 2016 results (Number of free Downloads.)

Little Crane is reportedly free for Raspberry Pi on the pi store? pi store is gone. apt-get install littlecrane does not work... Is it still available? Is it still free? charleshuff1953@gmail.com

Some game developers dislike reading comments and feedback so much, that they completely stop doing that. In my experience, some of it is indeed downright abusive. I shrug it off by assuming the really threatening messages are written by kids, not adults.

But if you stop reading feedback, you will …

Ever since doing Android development in 2012, I've been getting crash reports that showed my game was failing to load the shared object library that contains my native code.

This could manifest itself as a:

Unable to load native library: /data/data/com.sample.teapot/lib/libTeapotNativeActivity.so

or sometimes …

A year ago or so, I added shallow depth of field rendering to my render engine for Little Crane 2. Because the details were getting vague, I had to refresh my mind. To do this, I've charted the flow of my render steps. I call them steps, not passes, because …

In my upcoming title Children of Orc the largest computational load is from the GOAP action planner that the NPCs use. I found that simple plans would be found in a millisecond. But larger plans would really tax the CPU. Especially if no plan exists to reach the goal state …

I've always found Rob Pike's debugging story about Ken Thompson very powerful.

Ken would just stand and think, ignoring me and the code we'd just written. After a while I noticed a pattern: Ken would often understand the problem before I would, and would suddenly announce, "I know what's wrong …

I have just introduced my new game to the world. It is called Children of Orc.

Children of Orc is a real-time third-person strategy game that is set on a procedurally generated hex-planet. Check out the trailer video:

To get published on Steam, it can use a little help with …

Currently switched to SimpleScreenRecorder, and for 'gameplay video with talking head in corner' I now use Cheese for video feed (right click title bar, Always on top) and Kazam for audio/video recording.

There are many nooks and crannies in Blender that can catch you off guard. Here I will document them for reference by my future self, lest I would forget.

By default, Blender uses CPU, to use GPU on Linux, you have to, once as root, start blender -> User Preferences -> System …

I'm working towards the release of my new game Imhotep, Pyramid Builder on Steam. As I did for my previous game, I will report on the progress each and every week. Even if there is no progress, the report will be made. This is the best way to keep on …

I'm working towards the release of my new game Imhotep, Pyramid Builder on Steam. As I did for my previous game, I will report on the progress each and every week. Even if there is no progress, the report will be made. This is the best way to keep on …

I'm working towards the release of my new game Imhotep, Pyramid Builder on Steam. As I did for my previous game, I will report on the progress each and every week. Even if there is no progress, the report will be made. This is the best way to keep on …

Every time that I try to develop for windows (with Visual Studio), I have a hard time. And I do this so infrequently, that I tend to forget stuff too. I now try to make a windows version of Imhotep, Pyramid Builder.Here I will document some gotchas when developing …

I'm working towards the release of my new game Imhotep, Pyramid Builder on Steam. As I did for my previous game, I will report on the progress each and every week. Even if there is no progress, the report will be made. This is the best way to keep on …

I'm working towards the release of my new game Imhotep, Pyramid Builder on Steam. As I did for my previous game, I will report on the progress each and every week. Even if there is no progress, the report will be made. This is the best way to keep on …

I'm working towards the release of my new game Imhotep, Pyramid Builder on Steam. As I did for my previous game, I will report on the progress each and every week. Even if there is no progress, the report will be made. This is the best way to keep on …

I'm working towards the release of my new game Imhotep, Pyramid Builder on Steam. As I did for my previous game, I will report on the progress each and every week. Even if there is no progress, the report will be made. This is the best way to keep on …

So these hieroglyphs (in this case, read from right to left) spells htr sr. We only know the consonants of the Ancient Egyptians, and the scholars do not know what vowels were in their words. This 'htr sr' translates to Tax Official in English.

The twisted wick is the 'h' …

So, my game Imhotep, Pyramid Builder has been given the green light for publication on Steam. This would make it my second published game for the Steam network. So starting next week, expect a weekly progress report. I found this helped me a lot to bring Little Crane to the …

With Blender you can bake the lights using the Cycles renderer onto light maps. For static geometry, you can get some really nice lighting with diffuse bounces for your models. This posting roughly describes how to achieve this.

Baking requires quite a bit of computational power. It's best to do …

Something I learned today: if you want to pick a 3D object from mouse coordinates, you can go from screen space coordinates to object space but you need to pay attention to the normalization of the screen space coordinates.

First, to get the screen space coordinate, you can use the …

So, The Little Crane That Could on iOS is straining up hill, but still going. On Android it seems to have caught a second wind. Here are the 2015 results (Number of free Downloads.)

I should mention this is outdated, as I now think that SDL2 is the way to go for creating an OpenGL context on GNU/Linux, and not GLFW3.

Last year, I released my game The Little Plane That Could, which included an Android version. For this Android version, I had integrated leader boards and achievements via Google Play Games C++ SDK (also known as gpg-cpp-sdk). I am revisiting this SDK, as I plan to use it in my …

So two years ago, I've been coding a function that solves quadratic equations, 8 at a time using AVX. Lately, I have been looking into ARM NEON to see what performance can be had on mobile devices. This is what I came up with. The square root implementation is available …

My Pyramid Building Simulator is coming along nicely. Check out the game play video I made for it.

So my Core i5-4570 and nVidia GTX 750Ti run this simulation at an easy 100fps at 1920x1200 pixels. It always leaves me wondering, could it possibly ever be done on mobile, 64 …

So, I have embarked on a new game project: A pyramid building simulator. And I decided to go hard-core on authenticity and do all of the UI in hieroglyphics. I've familiarized my self with the script, and the Gardiner classification.

And in Inkscape, I've created a set of words from …

For game development, I often use function from the math library, as there are: sinf(), cosf(), atan2f(), acosf(), logf() and such. And these functions tend to be quite expensive in CPU cycles. However, in game development, low precision math functions will often suffice. Which means we can skip computing a …

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My next game could well be a 2D tile based game. This is mainly, because I want to use my 2D grid based crowd simulation code. So here I will collect some inspiring art work I found with Google. Note: none of the images are mine, they are all copyrighted …

The Little Crane That Could was released on Steam today!

Yay! The Little Crane That Could -- steam edition is finished! So today, I submitted my game for review, and if it gets through, it will be out on April 27.

I also made this launch trailer:

I'm excited for its release. I've worked very hard for 9 weeks after I …

The eighth week of work since I got Steam Green-lighted has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.

I have done most of the Steam API integration, and tested this on Windows and …

Great work! I'm excited the crane is coming to Linux!

Ok, I've put something in, that is along this lines. Thanks again for the suggestions.

Looking Good!

The seventh week of work since I got Steam Green-lit has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.

Some good news: Again, I added two new levels this week, bringing the total to …

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll think about this.

I really liked the levels from TLCTC where you had to build something and then use. Like the bridge one and the train one. What if you had a level where the big truck was full of cargo on one side of a gap trying to get to the other …

The sixth week of work since I got Steam Green-lighted has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.

This week I added two new levels, bringing the total level count to six. Both …

The fifth week of work after the Steam Green-lighting has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.

I have added two new levels for the bulldozer. In the first level, you need to …

The fourth week of work after the Steam Green-lighting has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.

I have added a level selection screen to the game, using my Dutch-Blunt vector font. Like …

The Second week of work after the Steam Green-lighting has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.

I'm not going to lie: this was a week of frustration. Source of the frustration was …

Willarth, the release will definitely be this year. I don't know yet at what price, I have to see what Valve recommends. But I don't expect it to be much more or much less than $10,-. Thank you for following this project and commenting on my blog.

The first week of work after the Steam Green-lighting has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.

I've spent this week on actually building a crane vehicle. The code base so far only …

Such great news, Friday 13th of February 2015: The Little Crane That Could has been green-lit, meaning my game will be published on the Steam store. Yesterday I announced that I pledge to, EACH AND EVERY WEEK, publish a progress report on my steam publication.

So without further ado, here …

So I have been developing a new game where a rocket engine Globally Illuminatesits environment. It started out as an AVX2 implementation, but since then I have been pursuing other acceleration techniques. For instance, can I run the photon mapping algorithm on the GPU instead? Here are some initial …

Programming is my passion. It is the best life-time hobby I can imagine. It all got sparked in 1982 when I played Munchkin on a friend's Videopac G7000. This pacman clone blew me away, and I desperately wanted a 'game computer'. My father replied to my plea: `No we are …

So my Global Illumination experiment made some more progress. The technology demo is slowly evolving into an actual game. And the hero of this game might very well be a spelunking rocket. Maybe I should call the game Spelunking Rocket? It currently has a single Google hit, so it should …

So I have been playing with my real time Global Illumination renderer some more. I added a particle system to model a rocket engine. The particle system is comprised of 1024 particles. And the kicker is: each and every particle is a light source that casts both direct and indirect …

So my Global Illumination Voxel Engine Research is making progress. I've added colour, indirect lighting, and also SIMD intersection tests. The SIMD is AVX 8-wide. And the speed up compared to scalar code is 4.5x which leads me to believe there is some room left in optimizing it. It …

So, The Little Crane That Could is still chugging along, but undeniably it has peaked. I hope there is life left in the brave little crane, but it may be running out of steam. Here are the 2014 results (Number of free Downloads.)

When doing the AVX2 implementation, min/max across a vector will come in handy. Here is a SIMD horizontal min or max: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23590610/find-index-of-maximum-element-in-x86-simd-vector

In yesterday's post, I introduced my new hobby project Photon Mapping Voxels.Today, I made some more progress, and managed to properly interpolate the shading. The voxel faces in a plane now share vertices. But there is still a matter of ambiguity when shading a quad, which causes the triangle …

With my latest game, The Little Plane That Could launched, it gave me a good opportunity to start some experimental coding. I would like to crack the challenge of real time indirect lighting. My idea is to use voxel-geometry only, and run a photon mapper on this geometry. Because the …

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This is just a heads-up that my new game The Little Plane That Could has been released for iOS, Android and GNU/Linux(64bit).

It was made available for Oculus Rift (Win64) earlier and a Mac OSX version is still in the pipeline.

Its highlights are the great physics, the …

The last two days I have been porting The Little Plane That Could to iOS. It was already running on OculusRift(Windows), Linux, Android and Mac OSX. When porting it, I struggled with the poor OpenAL implementation that comes with the iOS SDK.

I knew that there was a very …

This looks great. Now the challenge is to make it into a compellingly fun game to play.

So, it's been quiet for too long on this blog. It is about time to report on what I have been up to. Why not start with a small snippet of video?

Since July 2013 I have been mulling over the next step for my crane sim game. And as …

The hud control will not show up in case you or your opponent has a router that has a too restrive NAT. More here: http://thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.ca/2014/08/routers-with-restrictive-nat-spoiling.html

Great idea, I do the same time. It always amuses me when I come back to take my own advice months down the road.

I can't drive or move the turret in online mode and the space key is the only thing that works (it fires the gun). After a few seconds it says "opponent forfeits". Is this a bug?

I've purchased an Oculus Rift Development Kit 2. In a sense it feels like going back to my thirties. Much of my professional career was in Virtual Reality. I can't remember for how long exactly, but I think it was for 8 years or so, that I developed software and …

I have published an online tank simulator for both iOS and Android. On the app store it is called Buggy Bang Bang! and was renamed as Six Wheels and a Gun on Google play. Players on iOS and Android can even play each other, as they are all pooled on …

Anyone know how to get libsdl2-2.0 for Ubuntu 12.04?

Oh sorry, i am an idiot. I don't have SDL2 installed. sorry :-\

Not yet

Is there a linux download?

Still some work left to do, because I see this in the logs when I play a lot of sources: "Skipping starting source 2072467088 due to lack of CPU time."

This posting is for future reference, if I ever have to get OpenAL working again under Android's NDK. It will also be useful to my peer game developers who intend to do the same.

My current project is biplane combat simulator. I have been developing it under GNU/Linux, and porting it to Android. It needs a commercially viable platform to run on, and I am pretty sure GNU/Linux games are not making money at the moment. This may change with the Steam …

This is mainly a note to future self, and also others that need to record a video of game play under Ubuntu. First off, it is of no use to use non-standard resolutions when uploading to YouTube. I recorded some videos with a vertical resolution of 608 lines, which ended …

Nice game

Ugh, how I hate it. That feeling that you are struggling to fix an issue with your code, and you know you have battled with it before on a different project. Of course you can't remember what the fix was, and the two code bases are too different for easy …

Thanks Daniel, yes that helps.

By the way, acceleration in Little Crane sim was much simplified. I simply adjust the wheel velocity towards the accelerator setting with limited (but constant) torque available to do this. There is no gear box, no clutch, no rpm (other than sound effect where engine rpm and loudness go up …

I like car racing simulations. I spent a lot of time playing Gran Turismo Prologue on my PS3 years ago. So I thought it would be time for me to try making my own racing game. After coding a Hover Bike and all sorts of Heavy Machinery that should be …

Evandro, Ubuntu is not picking up my updated build. It just sits there in their queue. If you send me an email, I will send you a copy of the game.

I bought a laser printer recently for home office use. I went with the Ricoh Aficio SP 3510DN. What scares me is that some people sell smartchips. Apparently you need to replace a chip if you refill the toner with a non-Ricoh product. It is disgusting how printer manufacturers do …

Thanks for the reply. I watched the video and it looks great. I hope progress picks up on it and to see more great games soon.

Sorry, currently there is no custom gamepad mapping available. On Android/iOS there is an option to invert the levers, which currently the win64 build cannot do. It may get that option later as well possibly.

One more thing. I downloaded the game for PC so I could play with a gamepad/joystick and was wondering if there was anyway to switch up the controls. Thanks. Keep making these great games.

Im still loving this for the Iphone. I saw that you were thinking of TLCTC2 was that a joke are will we see that some time?

Not impressed with Ubuntu's response time. Update has been waiting to go live for 17 days no, now word from Ubuntu whatsoever.

Will an update appear on Ubuntu Software Center?

Freshly released, is v6.10 of The Little Crane That Could for linux/64bit [update: and win64]. You can get it at bram.itch.io.

It comes with a tracked vehicle and a hill climbing level. You can see it in action on YouTube (although the game at 60fps looks …

I like it. My only thing, and this is just my preference, is for the gun to track the mouse rather than having to drag the screen and remove the on screen controls.

Emam.... I've put up v1.3 which probably fixes that error. Could you please try again? Thanks!

Thank you, Evandro.

Time to dust off my linux box and get some updates going. Very Excited to test this.

Version 1.1 is up, with a fix for vsync.

Looks like a great game, hope it gets some more beef- (something a bit more then 6 wheels and a gun (maybe 6 wheels and a gun meaning any SINGULAR turret.)) -I think that'd be a great idea, but other than that, I'll be giving it a once over an …

Posted on reddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1vhino/want_to_do_some_combat_on_six_wheels_give_this/

So... I've done a lot of work to port my game Six Wheels and a Gun from Android to ASM.JS javascript in a browser. Just when everything was working, and only networking was left, I found out that Javascript cannot do UDP communication. This means that online play in …

So I've ported my Buggy Bang! Bang! game to Android, and released it under the name Six Wheels and a Gun or SWAAG for short. While doing this port I wrote a multiplayer networking system from scratch, including the lobby server. When doing online multiplayer, I thought it would be …

I am porting my game Buggy Bang! Bang! to Android. The leaderboard/matchmaking in Android has no NDK support and looks complicated. So I think I will need to roll my own online game lobby. I've written a leaderboard service before, in Python, for some of my earliest iOS games …

Could I possibly get The Little Crane That Could to run in a browser window? If a modest Raspberry Pi can run it, why not a 'lowly' browser?

Inspired by a blog posting from Dirk Krause over at web3dblog, I decided to look into this. And my weapon of choice …

I would like my simulation of tracked vehicles to be faster, so it could possible run on mobile hardware. Currently, you need a modern desktop to do it, at the bare minimum my mid 2011 MacBook Air is even struggling. The 1.7 GHz Intel Core i5 struggles to run …

I call this composition "Making a mess." It takes a bit of manoeuvring, but after 15 minutes of playing in the sand, the landscape looks considerably changed.

But the sad news is, I am still having a hard time finding a game play design for it. I've got this incredibly …

Compared to these monstrous code bases. This would designate my game as a 'simple iPhone game app' according to their classification. Also, I do not believe their …

Mafen, thank you for giving it a try.

Very good demo and epic game, i am looking forward to the release of the fullversion

I'm happy to announce my very first release of The Little Crane That Could for MS Windows. You can try the first 6 levels for free, in the Free-To-Try distribution. If you want to play all the 25 levels in the game, I urge you to vote in the green …

This week I have been adding LOD (which is pretty hard for terrains, because cracks appear between the high resolution chunks and the low resolution ones.) Easier was adding frustum clipping. Actually I simply clip against the left/right/top/bottom planes, and don't bother with near/far planes.

I …

After the dozer, I now added a digger as well. It's already pretty convincing I think. Although it does have some difficulties with boulders getting stuck between the jaws, and then suddenly and violently get expelled from the bucket. Movements are jerky, mainly because the app would not sync to …

Today, the 3 millionth Google Play user installed The Little Crane That Could.The iOS user base is still quite bigger, but it's nice to note the milestone. The promotion service AppOfTheDay gave a nice bump on aug 28th. But its effect has worn off by now.

Today, I have been adding caterpillar tracks to the dozer for Little Crane 2. Personally, I think this little dozer is pretty bad ass now. The caterpillar tracks make depressions in the ground.

Actually, I'll just wait for the new cylindrical Mac Pro to come out, and get that beast if it costs less than a small car. That one is so sleek, it will probably end up being exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

hackintosh!

Yeah, i need to investigate a 64bit ubuntu bug report on little crane.

Nice... Are you going to have dual boot (Windows/Linux)?

I've bought a brand new PC yesterday, the last time I did that was in 2005. Since 2008 or so I switched to Mac. But porting my Little Crane game to Windows was too much of a lure, and my Mac Mini with Windows installed was not cutting it.

Building …

Yep. Still wth polyvox. It is a great library!

Very nice, are you still using PolyVox? If so I can stick it on Twitter and maybe our blog at some point.

I made a new video on the development of The Little Crane That Could 2. It shows a dozer that creates tyre marks in the terrain, scrapes terrain, and dumps dirt onto the terrain.

I've been eschewing Microsoft for a long time now. I'm in and in a UNIX guy, and despise the horrible practices of Microsoft, in what they do to standards. Also I have been totally unimpressed by the quality of their Operating Systems. So why did I buy a copy of …

Now spawning dirt when voxels are scraped away from the terrain. It adds a lot to the visual appeal.

It is far from perfect, but at least it is a start. Dynamic terrain modification using a digger in a voxel terrain. For now I use straight voxels, and not the marching cubes surface, as it is easier to debug.

My plan is to spawn cube-lets as the terrain is …

With the use of PortAudio I was able to get sound working on the linux port of The Little Crane That Could. And GLFW enabled me to support a joystick (currently I only support PS3 controllers.) I did have to change the GLFW source code so that it would not …

So I am dusting off my old GNU/Linux PC. It's pretty antique, as I had brought it over from the old country when I immigrated into Canada so long ago. It turns out that it is so old (from 2005 or so), that it can't do 64 bit. (It …

There is a common saying in the #indiegames scene that goes like this: Build it and the players will come.This translates to 'A good game will sell itself (without marketing.)' The current crowd wisdom in my circles is that this is utterly false.

If someone ever hints that "just …

I've made more progress with the evaluation of PolyVox. PolyVox comes with a Marching Cubes algorithm that can extract surfaces from voxel volumes. Paul Bourke calls this polygonising a scalar field. This surface extraction works just fine in Polyvox. However, it does lack that distinctive visual style of Little Crane …

In my pursuit of simulating soil digging, I started to evaluate the PolyVox library. This is a report on that evaluation.

Building on MacOSX is tricky. With LLVM version 4.2 (clang-425.0.28) installed, this error comes up when compiling the very first file: fatal error: 'cstdint' file not …

So, my opus magnum is the game The Little Crane That Could. Every day, people tell me that they want more levels for it. The truth is, my inspiration for new tasks/puzzles to be solved with a crane is now exhausted. That is why I released a level editor …

I will use this first post to introduce myself. I am a software developer from Vancouver, British Columbia. I am best known for a hit game I developed for iOS, called The Little Crane That Could. Since then, I've published many other games, none reaching the popularity of Little Crane …