Patrick Hughes

7,314 reputation

11522

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	age	50
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Currently building and updating tools for a new game engine. Lots of UX and all that jazz.

I am also EMT certified. Not currently active but will be looking for weekend volley or PRN opportunities later this year.

I'm a long time game programmer having worked on many shipped titles, a few AAA releases and one MMO so far.

-Patrick

	7,314 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	2 years
11522 badges		location			seen	1 hour ago

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19h	comment	Legal issues for a “fangame” of a commercial franchise? Of note is that there has been more than one fan project that was looked upon benevolently by the original studio... right up until the studio sold and the new owner shut down years of work without even blinking.
19h	comment	Making a 2d tile based world/map Almost all tiled maps are created with special editors that let you "paint" with tiles as brushes, and have lots of built in helpers to make the job easier. There's definitely not a lot of writing text files except for very small test maps. Search google on "tile map editor" for a good overview and lots of examples of these kinds of editors!
22h	comment	I am looking for a word to classify Game Objects (Trees, Rocks, even Bridges) but NOT include Items/Characters In the traditional world of simulations this fluff in the environment is called "culture." This idea comes from stuff encompassing artificial, "cultural" objects like roads and buildings.
1d	comment	2D Terra(ria)in generation - Accidental noise You really need to step back and follow accidental's examples one step at a time, right now it's like you just walked into a grocery store and looking at all the shelves are wondering how a pizza is made from all those boxes =) You can only make good pizza once you know what's inside the boxes. Byte56's answer is a good place to start, at the lowest levels of just what noise functions produce.
2d	comment	What are the pros and cons of skill trees versus skill lists in RPGs? What have you tried so far, why is it not working out for you? How have you tried to fix it? What is your end goal, what are you trying to achieve with this skill system? You have to decide what you want before you can create a system to make it so. In other words, can you please narrow this down into a specific question that's answerable in less than a term paper length essay? =)
Jun 15	comment	To become a programmer in a game development company, where do I start? Voting to close because this open-ended type of question isn't a good fit for stack exchanges, whose purpose is more geared towards specifics. To get you started, however, have you tried googling "what does a game programmer do" and investigating all the links that come up?
Jun 15	comment	How do I remove unwanted areas while keeping the animated keyframes and wav in sync? I assume that manually playing around with the markers until it works right. In other news, if the animation is compressed and the audio is compressed then areas of no activity compress really very well... in which case removing these gaps may be wasted effort better spent towards compressing the data.
Jun 15	comment	Per frame: Many draw calls with fewer total vertices vs fewer draw calls with more total vertices? These are reasonable and practical numbers to work with. I'll just add the usual "always measure performance for the final answer within your own engine," once known parameters like these have been considered in your original implementation.
Jun 9	awarded	Yearling
Jun 3	comment	When should I hard-code data versus load external data? The term you're looking for is "Data Driven" and yes, it's much faster in the long run to create new stations and ships with XML (or any format like JSON really) files than what you're doing on even a smaller project. Plus later you can remove and edit without having to touch code and recompile, for a second time savings.
Jun 2	comment	What libraries and tools does LISP have that's usefull for games? Side note: Naughty Dog dropped GOAL after the PS2, not least among their reasons was that it couldn't be shared with any other corporate studio and it was impossible to hire programmers. In any case, GOAL was basically nothing more than a gameplay scripting language and not something their main engine was written in, even if they did go a bit overboard with it.
Jun 2	comment	Check for Updates Too simple for an "Answer" entry: typically the EXE you run is just a shell that runs another EXE which is the game itself, but first it calls home and asks if this is the most recent EXE (and data) and downloads if necessary. Alternately it's a shell for a demand-loaded DLL, but same concept.
Jun 2	comment	How to progress an entity-component gamestate in a turn-based game? You have a tightly enmeshed combat sequence so yes, hit is responsible for triggering effects. Not everything has to be broken out into little systems, let this one system handle this because it really is your "Combat System" and it handles... Combat...
Jun 1	answered	Looking for detailed pathfinding examples
May 31	comment	Diagonal line of sight with two corners Only change to the algorithm required is that if both X and Y are changing on the same step then first change X and then change Y, this would eliminate the diagonals altogether.
May 31	comment	Simplex Noise flat land and hills Take a look at gamedev.net/blog/33/… to see how layering different noises works out. You can even use a noise field to filter other noises applying to the base noise, like photoshop masks, and so on down the rabbit hole.
May 31	comment	Diagonal line of sight with two corners Either way, those two black blocks diagonal at 4-5 are not connected into a wall in the first place, and I say this because you are implicitly allowing diagonal movement. You must either square off that diagonal to make it a contiguous wall or make your line walker square off its diagonal moves instead of going purely diagonal like 2-3 and 4-5.
May 31	answered	How to avoid being throttled?
May 30	comment	Could I make my own pokemon game without running into a copyright issue? IIRC the law is that you cannot represent yourself as a member if you are not, impersonating a lawyer is the crime and not the advice. The opposite problem is that if a real lawyer gives advice he can be reported to the bar and/or sued for malpractice if things don't work out and no lawyer ever is willing to put up with that.
May 29	awarded	Guru