CFour!

I've recently taken a bit of time off from jME work to play around with the three rings GameGardens multiplayer framework. It's really easy to work with and in just three days of fooling around part time I managed to put together a decent connect four clone.



The only irksome thing was that as I was posting the game to the GameGardens website, another fellow came along and posted another connect four clone. Talk about coincidence! Ah well.

Have a go at it here...

Big news!

On a brighter note than my last post, my wife has recently been confirmed 8 weeks pregnant! We are both very excited as we've wanted a sibling for Aaron for a long time now.

Since we all know everyone loves ultrasound pics... Here's one to enjoy. I think the baby has my nose, poor kid.

Healing film?

So as you may have read here a few months ago, I got ASA laser surgery done on my eyes to correct my nearsightedness. At the time I was 20/800 in my left eye (yeah that's eight hundred) and 20/450 in the other. The surgery was a nice success with me ending up with about 20/25 in both eyes.

Well, over the last six weeks or so I've noticed that my vision in the left eye has been getting a bit blurry... A bit more nearsighted yes, but different than before I had the surgery. Things seemed tinged with a little frostiness or milkiness.. Just slightly, but enough to be annoying. Was it going to get worse... stay the same, etc? I went in to the eye doctor yesterday (good place if you are in the phoenix metro area... he's a good doctor and nice, but a bit too popular, so you'll spend relatively little time with him as he bustles from patient to patient.) Anyhow, he told me I have a healing film on my left eye and gave me some Predforte drops to hopefully clear it up.

And that's all the gory details. You're welcome.

Holidays make you braindead

Ugh. What with people going on vacations, food galore, short, cold days and inundation of marketing (buy THIS for your child or risk the hell they will unleash upon you!!!) I feel like a zombie when I get in front of my computer. Am I the only one that finds it next to impossible to get anything done this time of year?

They come and go

This week I received an interesting letter from a major game studio (I'll leave them unnamed, but I'll mention they are based in Korea) looking to see if I would be interested in interviewing for a spot on a new team being put together here in the US. The team would be developing and building 3d multiplayer games in Java. Definitely got my attention as I'm currently at the end of one project and ready to start another. With the knowledge I've accumulated working on jME over the past two years or so, I think I'd have a lot to offer such a team.

Unfortunately, to participate I would have to move to another state and since we've recently purchased a home here in Arizona, the prepayment penalties and capital gains would simply kill us. Talk about frustrating... Opportunity is there but for reasons out of your control you can't grab it.

Oh well. Any other game companies out there need a skilled Java - jME consultant?

Shadows part 2

Shadows are now officially part of jME! Currently they are zpass only, with a failover to zfail in the works. Shadow color is rendered to the scene in one of two methods (selectable by you of course) - either additive light or modulative shadows which basically means you can either choose to start with ambient light only and light up the places where there aren't shadows, or start with a fully lit scene and darken the spots in shadow. The first method looks nicer, but drains more fps.

Here's more screen fodder for all six of you that read this blog. Notice there are 3 lights in the scene casting shadows. :)


(click for big picture)