Welcome stranger,

If you enjoy reading about other people’s achievements and cockups as well as learning the odd thing or two then you came to the right place.
I mainly write about tech and try to provide some tutorials or in depth explanations on topics I come across and find interesting (not WordPress). I’m also broadening my horizons and will be adding more posts about team management and Agile concepts and processes. Below you can find a list of my most recent posts and don’t forget to check out the “About Me” page.

Latest stories

My server setup

As part of the Battleship series, I will cover a bit about CI/CD and TDD. For that part, I will need to go over Drone CI and how I have it set up. However, before getting there, I wanted to cover my current server setup. It might prove useful for other web developers wanting an easy way to self-host their websites, portfolios and CI/CD pipelines. Some considerations first. I have a full bare...

Battleships – Intro

As it happens, I’m looking for a job again. Things are not great in the developer market at the time of writing. There are fewer and fewer positions for less money than a few years ago and mostly none of them are in PHP. So I have to finally make the transition away from PHP as I have been planning for a few years now. I do have some experience with C# and the larger .NET ecosystem but a...

Camera space scaling

During the development of my new game currently called “Space Pew” I’ve come across a somewhat interesting problem. I wanted to have the ships the player will control take a certain percentage of the screen. Essentially, when the longest axis of the ship was aligned with the smallest size of the screen, usually height, the first should be between 20% and 80% of the latter.By...

A new journey

After a few months off where I took some time to focus on my personal life (moved house amongst others) it is now high time I return to game development. Over the past few weeks I have been experimenting and building a few prototypes around a new project that I want to build. This is going to be something way smaller than the proejct I was working in January. It will be more focused and hopefully...

Tech Review: LG 48CX

This story stars back in March of 2020. Back when the by now famous COVID-19 pandemic was getting started my job switched everyone from working in the office to working from home every day. I was never a fan of working from home, mainly due to the fact that all my best and comfortable equipment was at the office but all that was about to change.By April it became aparent that we would be working...

Prologue: Closing words

We’re nearing the end of what I’ll call the prologue of this series. We’ve covered some basic implementation, some basic physics and there’s two or three more things we need to cover before we can go into building this game. Let’s start with talking about the scale of the game. Given that the goal is to be able to simulate an entire galaxy, with more or less a few...

Integrating the future

Last time we went over the orbits and everything nice that comes with it. Whilst implementing the code for those calculations I’ve observed something peculiar. The orbits the objects are following are more or less the same as the ones calculated in the initial state, but not quite.Naturally, I went debugging, and everything seemed fine. Still, the bodies would slowly drift out of their...

Elliptical orbits summary

We’ve covered a lot of things over the past few months. Mostly about gravity and gravitational attraction. We’re going to switch gears now and talk about orbits. Let’s start with the limitatons of what we’re trying to achieve:– the orbits within a solar system are coplanar (within the same plane)– orbits are elliptical and stable, circular orbits being a subset...

I lied, there’s more physics

Last time we wrapped up the basic implementation of all the building blocks we need to be able to create a solar system and update it at a data layer level and then render it in Unity. This time we’ll start focusing on how we’re actually going to create these solar systems.The end goal is to be able to procedurally generate them from scratch. Before that though, we need to be able to...

Simulating the solar system #2

Now that we have the basis set up to start simulating the solar system it is time to get into more interesting bits.I’m going to write a quick updater that will update the positions of these bodies from their start one whenever the game is started. Very important here is to keep in mind that this updater will run in paralel in a different thread than the Unity one. This allows us to decuple...