Last year, when one of my games went a bit viral, I discovered first-hand about the alarming inefficiency of Apache (webserver), especially when running PHP which forces you to accept a process-per-request approach. It became pretty clear that something much more lightweight would be required if I wanted to build gameservers with large player-bases in [...]
Archive for the ‘Techie’ Category
Posted in 
GUI Texture Atlases in Shiva
August 22nd, 2012 
sam As you probably know, it’s important to use Texture Atlases for efficiency reasons on mobile devices. The idea is that you pack lots of textures into one big one, and then use UV offsets to define which region of this large texture to display in your HUD components. This means that only one texture has [...]
Shiva Undergrad Course
May 4th, 2012 sam This is the content from a complete 9-week undergrad course that I taught between January and April this year. I hope it’s useful to some other Shiva developers! WEEK 1 – intro, IDE, API overview Lecture 1 – Introduction Lab 1 – Setup Shiva + Mars Rotator Mars model (Collada .dae and .jpg) (for use [...]
Genetic Algorithms – Game Dev. Magazine Article
May 1st, 2012 sam I was asked to write an article for a magazine called ‘Game Coder’. They seem to have nicely focused special issues, and they were planning an AI one so my article on Genetic Algorithms fitted in well.
Integrating the 60beat iOS Gamepad, versus Xperia Play
March 1st, 2012 sam I was contacted a month or so ago from a company (60beat) who recently released this: It’s a games controller for iOS devices. At first I assumed it was for Android, since my games have been getting much better visibility on the Android market. But no, iOS only for the moment. They offered to send [...]
3rd Party Game APIs
February 1st, 2012 sam I have noticed a big increase in 3rd party game APIs for Android and iOS lately. It seems that the competition is really starting to hot up as they all scramble for market-share. Since they’re all pretty much hinging on social features, I can see why the battle is on. Over the past month, I [...]
Shiva Ninjaz!
January 26th, 2012 sam I have been asked to give a talk at tonight’s “Code Ninja” workshop. Code Ninja is a competition for Galway students involving mobile or web apps/games. So Shiva’s just perfect.. Anyway, here’s my presentation slides (pdf, 1MB).. I hope they’re useful to someone The talk is only 45 mins long, so there’s no way I’ll [...]
Game Localisation with Google Translate
November 24th, 2011 sam I recently wrote a Javascript-based tool which uses the Google Translate Ajax API to translate English phrases, as pasted into a textbox, into other languages. Pretty handy for games. Although the results from Google Translate can be a bit dodgy, I have found that they’re good enough to get version 1 done, and hopefully some [...]
Game’On 2011 Conference
August 23rd, 2011 sam Here’s the presentation slides I used for my A* Pathfinding paper at the Game’On conference.. image quality reduced and Open Office has screwed up the fonts a bit but you get the idea.. [Presentation Slides here] (~1MB)
Pathfinding just like those clever humans..
June 18th, 2011 sam This paper discusses the use of empirical cost-surfaces derived from substantial amounts of player-traced movements in Darkwind, for the purposes of improving A* pathfinding by AI vehicles. My core ideas are that (i) there are a number of subtle factors related to both effectiveness and aesthetic value, which definine optimal routes around the terrains, and [...]
