780 reputation
414
bio website martindevans.appspot.com/blog
location Worcester, United Kingdom
age 22
visits member for 2 years, 10 months
seen 9 hours ago
stats profile views 56
Comp-sci student at Birmingham University (08 class) Startup indie game developer

May
9
awarded  Enthusiast
Jan
16
comment What are some cool examples of procedural pixel shader effects?
@Michael: Fixed it to link to a page on his new website which includes the pdfs as well as a summary of the technique.
Jan
16
revised What are some cool examples of procedural pixel shader effects?
added 7 characters in body
Jan
16
comment What is a good starting platform for a teenage game programmer?
@bobobobo you're welcome to write a better answer. This kind of question has no definitive correct answer though, which means that the best answers will all simply be listing possibilities.
Dec
31
comment How to create a very specific kind of joint in Farseer?
I don't understand why that didn't work, but I do see an alternative that is guaranteed to work. If you use a prismatic joint connecting the center to the two outer ones, with the minimum and maximum limit set to the length (remember to enable joint limit) then they cannot rotate around the center, only slide within a range of 0
Dec
30
comment How to create a very specific kind of joint in Farseer?
Hmm, I may be wrong with this, but if you attach the distance joints from the objects to the centre anchor anywhere other than the centre of the anchor I think that ought to prevent rotation of the system.
Dec
22
comment How to create a very specific kind of joint in Farseer?
Also, do weld joints serve the correct purpose? I thought they prevented relative rotation of the two welded points, which is not what you want?
Dec
22
comment How to create a very specific kind of joint in Farseer?
Try adding a fixed rotation joint on the central (invisible) body, to hold it at a given rotation
Dec
21
answered How to create a very specific kind of joint in Farseer?
Dec
2
awarded  Good Answer
Nov
25
revised What is a good starting platform for a teenage game programmer?
added 107 characters in body
Aug
15
awarded  Yearling
Apr
11
awarded  Quorum
Feb
21
comment Game networking topology - dealing with host leaving
Lots of P2P networks use the metric that the longer a peer has been around, the less likely they are to leave. This probably doesn't hold for games, but it would be a good starting point.
Feb
2
comment Does C# have a future in games development?
@coderanger: I know that currently not many large studios use managed languages, and I'm sure that's going to continue for a very long time. However more and more small scale companies are using managed languages, and I can't imagine that going away anytime soon either.
Feb
2
comment Does C# have a future in games development?
@coderanger Of course super optimised native code can beat jittered code. But doing those kind of optimisations is time consuming and costly. Where writing all your managed code is almost as fast, and a helluva lot easier/faster to develop. And if one of the companies out there started releasing games twice as fast as they currently do, with less bugs, I think gamers would be pretty happy about that - even if it took 5% more CPU load ;)
Feb
1
comment Does C# have a future in games development?
@Guillaume86: Jittered code can currently outperform native code, and Jits are getting better all the time. Also, managed languages produce far more robust programs. So in the end C++ loses it's performance advantage, and is significantly harder to write robust programs in (which means longer development times and more costs)
Dec
20
comment Net code: What are your expected and max latency and packet loss targets?
I always use UDP for games, but then that depends very much upon the kind of games you're making!
Dec
20
comment Net code: What are your expected and max latency and packet loss targets?
I'm no expert, but I usually test with far worse packetloss rates than that; 10-20% at the minimum. Once, I accidentally left the artificial packetloss in and demoed a game with 90% packetloss (it worked perfectly) ;)
Dec
19
awarded  Commentator