Camera space scaling
A new journey
Tech Review: LG 48CX
Prologue: Closing words
Integrating the future

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

31/05/2021

Camera space scaling

Part 2 of 2 in the Space Pew series
Posted in Coding
31/05/2021
56 views
31May

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...

28/05/2021

A new journey

Part 1 of 2 in the Space Pew series
Posted in Coding
28/05/2021
44 views
28May

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...

22/01/2021

Tech Review: LG 48CX

Posted in Review
22/01/2021
153 views
22January

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...

23/11/2020

Prologue: Closing words

Part 8 of 8 in the Small Spheres series
Posted in Coding
23/11/2020
94 views
23November

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...

12/11/2020

Integrating the future

Part 7 of 8 in the Small Spheres series
Posted in Coding
12/11/2020
90 views
12November

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...

09/11/2020

Elliptical orbits summary

Part 6 of 8 in the Small Spheres series
Posted in Coding
09/11/2020
87 views
09November

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...

09/11/2020

I lied, there’s more physics

Part 5 of 8 in the Small Spheres series
Posted in Coding
09/11/2020
98 views

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...

29/09/2020

Simulating the solar system #2

Part 4 of 8 in the Small Spheres series
Posted in Coding
29/09/2020
105 views
29September

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...

22/09/2020

Simulating the solar system #1

Part 3 of 8 in the Small Spheres series
Posted in Coding
22/09/2020
92 views
22September

Last time we left off having figured out what the physics equations behind everything will look like. Now it is time to get to coding. First off, I like to keep my code separated into small classes/components each doing one very specific thing. It is suprising how many complex behaviours can be broken down into these very simplistic components. Let’s make sure we have a way to reference...

22/09/2020

Newton was almost right

Part 2 of 8 in the Small Spheres series
Posted in Coding
22/09/2020
63 views

In this day and age it is clear that Newtonian physics works well at a small scale but not perfectly when trying to calculate trajectories of planets and such. Nonetheless, it is still a good enough aproximation for a game and as such that’s what I’ll be using for this next phase. Essentially, what I’ll talk about today amounts to creating a solar system replica in C#. For this...