The last few weeks have been busy: I’ve been working on a prototype for rendering a 3D landscape. One of the key aspects of the game that I’m working on is the deity-like ability of the player to manipulate the game world. The game engine will need to support real-time dynamic transformations like raising and…Read more
Ben
On Playing God
The next game I want to make is going to be a god game. The term was coined back in the 8-bit days to describe a type of simulation game that imbues the player in with god-like powers while putting him in charge of a group of artificial beings. While the specifics vary between different…Read more
(Just Like) Starting Over
Here’s the thing… I find myself coming up with a new game idea once or twice a year. Usually at that point, I drop everything else I’ve been working on and focus all my free time for the next 2 or 3 weeks on it, until I gradually lose momentum. While those initial bursts are…Read more
TIS-100
Despite picking up a bunch of must-play AAA titles and experimental indie games during the recent Steam sale, I’ve spent the majority of my play time on a game about programming a fictitious computer from the dawn of the age of technology. TIS-100 is a puzzle game at heart, but what captured my attention was…Read more
Out with the old, in with the new
I’ve switched this blog over to a new theme – after more than 5 years it felt like it needed a fresh look. Also, I keep hearing them youngsters talk about responsive web pages that actually work on phones, so hopefully that will be a thing now as well. In any case, if you happen…Read more
Creating and monitoring a Glassfish Cluster
In this post I will detail how to create a basic Glassfish cluster and how to monitor it using JMX. First, download the latest release of Glassfish and extract the archive to a folder of your choice. Then start the asadmin utility from the glassfish4\bin directory. Unless otherwise noted, all of the commands that follow…Read more
Implementing a Java Agent (Part 3)
The previous posts in this series described how to create a Java agent and how to dynamically attach it to a running JVM. Once the agent is running, you may want to interact with it, for example to collect data from it or to execute specific methods on demand. Today’s post will show how to…Read more
Implementing a Java Agent (Part 2)
In the first part of this series, I demonstrated how to create a Java agent and attach it to an application during startup. It is also possible to dynamically attach your agent to a running program, as long as you have permissions to access the JVM. The updated source code is available for download. The…Read more
Implementing a Java Agent (Part 1)
This is the first in a series of posts describing how to implement a Java agent. Java agents execute in the same Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as regular Java application, and provide insight into them as well as the ability to modify their behavior at run-time. All of the source code is available for download…Read more
Deciphering Blade Runner
I have been doing some research into voxel rendering techniques as of lately. While the whole approach has fallen to the wayside a bit with the advent of 3D accelerators, I still find it to be a uniquely elegant approach to modeling and rendering objects in software. As part of my research, I thought it…Read more