Introduction
Cellular Automata are a fascinating and huge subject but I would like to get back to some of the rest of the game framework and the next key element would that of the game tile.
Background
Before GHz & Megabytes & 3D engines there were MHz Kilobytes and tile based 2D games. Storing images & parts of [...]
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Background
The Hodge-Podge machine is an example of a 2D Cellular Automata which mimics chemical reactions. Created by Martin Gerhardt and Heike Schuster of the University of Beilefeld and popularised by A.K.Dewdney in his ‘Computer Recreations’ columns in the Scientific American, August, 1988 magazine. It was designed to mimic a particular kind of ‘heterogeneous catalytic reaction’ [...]
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Background
I blame A.K.Dewdney or rather his regular ‘Mathematical Recreations’ section at the back of Scientific American in the late 1980’s. The concepts were accesible and the coding required managable. Thus, I became quite obsessed with writing Cellular Automata code. For the same reasons I think it’s time to resurrect my interest and translate those early [...]
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Some may mock you for writing a functional specification for your humble home-brew software but regard Joel Spolsky’s wise words:
The most important function of a spec is to design the program. Even if you are working on code all by yourself, and you write a spec solely for your own benefit, the act of writing [...]
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Incomplete initial specification:
Background
The Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture [link] is almost ubiquitous to the point of being a gui/web programming paradigm. It is such a natural decoupling approach that it is implicit in most non-trivial programs, whatever the language. However, making it more explicit through the Observer (Publish-Subscribe) Pattern frees up the ‘pluggability’ power of decoupling.
Overview
The mvc [...]
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With the impending completion of a major piece of work, and some long overdue free time, thoughts return to Java game programming fun. One of the major decisions is how to update the screen and where to do it.
An event driven screen refresh would suit a card or board game scenario whilst arcade genre [...]
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Any non-trivial endeavour should have a specification.
Incomplete initial specification:
Background
Sprite based games, whether board, card or arcade, share a lot of basic functionality and many of the patterns and principles are well defined and developed. The functionality of these patterns and principles is expressed in classes and resources which are combined into a framework. A framework [...]
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