planet_3

FlatRedBall and Procedural Textures

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6 days ago
by jjohnson in

My buddy Vic (creator of FlatRedBall) and I were discussing issues with tilemap performance recently. Namely that large tilemaps suffer in performance because of the volume of Update calls on Sprite objects, even if the sprites are small. One of the ideas we discussed to deal with this is that of compositing multiple small tile textures into a single large texture at runtime. This texture could be roughly the size of the screen and you lazy load these textures to be ready just before you need them and unload them as they leave the More >

monitor_resolutions

My Guide to Purchasing a Monitor

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3 weeks ago
by jjohnson in

For a few years now, my primary monitor at home has been a 28″ HannsG with a native resolution of 1920×1200. I bought it used from a buddy for around $200 which was a steal at the time. The monitor was big and had a variety of inputs but that’s about all it had going for it. There was terrible light bleed when the screen was dark, the color would vary drastically based on viewing angle, the response time was low enough that pixel smearing was pretty bad and the refresh rate of the fluorescent backlight gave me wicked headaches. The monitor More >

The Bug Game

0
1 month ago
by jjohnson in

I built this game in AS3 quite awhile ago. It’s very simple and is hardly a game in that there is no objective but to have fun. I started a version in FlatRedBall at one point but lost motivation. I think I should finish it because everyone that plays this enjoys it.

This game is only 8k and has no pre-created assets. Bugs are drawn in code.

 

How To Play:

The bugs start as very fast little whippersnappers. As they age they grow bigger and slower. Once they are old enough they will breed and the females (antennas) will More >

babytanks

FlatRedBall and Lidgren: Multiplayer Networking

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1 month ago
by jjohnson in

I haven’t blogged in a while for two reasons:

  1. Work is insanely busy
  2. I’ve been either working hard or playing hard in my spare time
But now, for your reading amusement, is another beautiful trainwreck blog with copious amounts of bad code! This post is going to talk about some of the challenges and the pattern I used to implement multiplayer networking in FlatRedBall using the Lidgren Gen 3 networking library. I primarily used these resources, along with the Lidgrin library documentation, to plan my networking pattern:

More >

Kicked out by Kickstarter

0
3 months ago
by jjohnson in

I’ve written about Grimwar several times on here. I keep trying to rebuild it and make it better but it’s a very big site with a lot of users and there is a lot of work involved with rebuilding. That being said, I AM rebuilding it. Even though it makes no money, even though I don’t even play Magic the Gathering, I think it could be profitable and I want to build it for the community, if nothing else.

I am rebuilding Grimwar in .NET MVC3 and it’s going really well. Unfortunately, Windows servers are more expensive than the LAMP servers More >

Binary Serialization in C#

3
3 months ago
by jjohnson in

Let me preface this by saying I’m not sure the information here is correct. Prior to this, I have not worked with binary serialization. I serialized to XML or JSON because it was easy to transfer and was human readable. But binary really makes sense for what I’m doing now. I deserialize JSON into objects from a Web API. To make the app run faster, I cache the deserialized objects. Many of them could be cached for quite awhile because they rarely change. So, persistent cache storage is good but I need to keep the cache footprint small on disk More >

Mono for Android List Optimization

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3 months ago
by jjohnson in

One of the big things I’ve worked on lately is optimization of the Android app I’m working on for my employer. I want the app to run at its absolute full potential using every realistic optimization I can.

One of the most-frequently-used components in Android applications are ListViews. Android ListViews are good and bad. They are good in that, if you do it properly, they handle view recycling and can be pretty efficient. They are bad in that the abstraction is so leaky that 90% of the so-called tutorials and examples I’ve seen More >

construct2_events

Construct 2: Kicking the Tires

2
4 months ago
by jjohnson in

I love playing with GameDev tools such as engines, frameworks/libraries, game creators and new languages. I’ve been a big advocate, fan and user of FlatRedBall for some time as you may know.

Today, while reading up on something totally unrelated, I saw a reference to an HTML5 game maker called Creator2. Curious, I read a little about it and decided to play with it this weekend.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how awesome this tool actually is. While I don’t think it’s suitable for a super-feature-rich and complex game, it is a More >

nora_and_i

The R word

0
4 months ago
by jjohnson in

I avoid using strong language. I also try to avoid words that cause offense or harm to specific groups in a professional or public forum. That being said, I generally find jokes that poke fun at racial, religious and other stereotypes funny when they are joking and in the right company or context.

As you may know, my beautiful, wonderful, four-year-old daughter Nora has a horrible neuro disorder called Rett Syndrome. Dealing with Rett Syndrome is a major part of the lives of my family, More >

Digital Economics 101

2
4 months ago
by jjohnson in

As with all of my thoughts, these are hardly original. I have read a bunch of good stuff about economics and the evolution of digital content across the web that got me thinking about these things. But I like to think that I have a knack for reading and understanding the issues, swirling all of the ideas around, and spitting out a somewhat cohesive explanation of what it all means without using big fancy words. Incidentally, this has ties to my last post about how “free” services aren’t free More >

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