Monitoring memory usage

This article at gamasutra covers some interesting stuff (memory usage, fragmentation ...).
It's not for the faint of heart, but for those wanting to delve deep into the inner workings of their application, this is a great way to do it.

This should be in every game platform SDK ... or in every game developers toolkit.
Maybe one day we'll get there.

Posted at at 5:34 PM on Thursday, July 03, 2008 by Posted by Rui Pires | 0 comments   | Filed under:

story is the antithesis of game

After reading this post from Jamie Fristrom, and agreeing to most of what he was saying, I decided to read the article that originated his post.


This article by Greg Costikyan nails it down perfectly. If you are interested in game design, you should really read this.

I recently played a lot of Super Mario Galaxy, and this makes perfect sense. I was not really interested in the story, what kept me wanting to play more was just having fun and seeing what they would think of for the next level.
The game reinvented itself at almost every new galaxy I found...
I don't think it needs to be infinite (it was big enough!), it just needs to be fun.


But truth be told, I never really dedicated myself to playing RPGs (I did play a few) so one might argue I don't know what I'm missing ...

Posted at at 1:40 PM on Tuesday, July 01, 2008 by Posted by Rui Pires | 0 comments   | Filed under:

blender-ogrexml

Getting on with my project, I decided it was time to try and export something from blender, which I want to learn to use at some point in the not too distant future.

The default scene (a cube) looks perfect for a test drive.
But ... I found a bug in ubuntu.
The package blender-ogrexml is installing the export scripts in the wrong directory, so blender does not load them. And I don't feel like fixing this manually. At least not now...

I guess tomorrow I'll see if this is a know issue and if not open a bug report.



EDIT: apparently this bug is already reported for ubuntu (and has a workaround).

Posted at at 12:31 AM on by Posted by Rui Pires | 0 comments   | Filed under: