I know, I know, it’s been a while since I promised it, but my Master Thesis has now finally been added to the download section.

In my thesis, I worked through the architecture of game engines and propsed a new architecutre, based on functional thougts and the devide-and-conquer paradigm. Telesto, my game engine I’m currently working on is influenced by this thoughts (although I must admit that implementing the first AI modules into Telesto is about to change half of its architecture again. A neverending story!)

Enjoy!

“What’s done is done”. Aye, the WGU2011 was an interessting event and we (including myself) learned a lot from the discussions. The event was themed around Artificial Intelligence for Games and took two days (the SGU2011 will probably be a four-day-event again).

If you want to take a look at the slides or the video recording, it’s both up now on the
Winter Games University 2011 page.

See You next time!

Succeeding the Summer Games University 2010, I’m happy to announce the next Games University event at the Stuttgart Media University. The core topic – at least for the first day – will be Artificial Intelligence this time, something we had to skip due to pure time reasons at the SGU2010.

I put a small portal together to mange upcoming events. It’s missing a lot of eye candy, but should serve its purpose. More information should arrive in the next days.
Game Universities

Winter Games University 2011

My slides from the 8th GamesDay at the Stuttgart Media University are now available in the download section. The stream is currenlty.. well.. suffering from some file system issues. Should be up soon.

//Edit:
Its up again: gamesday.mi.hdm-stuttgart.de

Heyho everyone and sorry for the long wait. I was quite busy working on my master thesis.

My topic was the development of a commercial-scale game engine architecture for real time strategy games with MMO gameplay components. Will tell you more in the future. For now, I prepared a small subpage containing my presentation (in German). Enjoy!

Telesto

The first SGU 2010 is over! It was indeed a very interesting event. Well, at least for me. I hope the participants enjoyed it just as much as i did. We will continue to plan similar events in the not-so-distant-future (that’s another very important term if making game-related announcements). Stay tuned!

For those of you who missed the event, or who want to read through the slides again, you may now find the stream and Slides for download on the SGU Subpage .

I spent the bast weeks to organize and prepare for the Summer Games University at Stuttgart. We will talk about game development, architecture and many other fields. The slides will be published here shortly. Enjoy!

SGU Subpage

The recently released Visual Studio 2010 includes the new .Net runtime 4.0 with a hand full of new features, including the official release of F#, our new functional .Net friend! Finally! Besides that, the new Visual Studio got a new, much better layout and few new options, like code metrics, a nice achievement system for the MMO-developer. Being a Visual Basic Developer of the first hour (okay not the first I must admit, but for quite some time now) I’m especially happy about some pure syntax improvements, like getting rid of that ugly “_” char for splitting lines.

Okay now let’s start with the fun. Opening up the first Visual Studio 2008 solution will show us a small converting box, but all goes well. The problems start once you click on the compile button. You will probably either get compile errors, runtime exceptions or a hanging application if using a library which was not compiled against the new CLR v4. Like Managed DirectX in my case.

That’s because of the side-by-side feature of the new CLR, allowing multiple runtimes in one app. Something the older runtimes can’t handle. Lucky, there is a switch with the elegant name of useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy that should allow your older dlls to load fine. But be aware that it also disables the side-by-side feature for those legacy libraries. Don’t turn it on ‘just in case’! Try to avoid it and upgrade your libraries if possible.

It’s too early for me to write a complete review for Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0, but I will post here if I should stumble across something. Happy coding!

Yea, it has been quite some time since the opening of this blog, but life gets busy from time to time..

Time is an interesting concept either way! You always happen to have far to much of it, while having no idea what to do. On the other hand, it’s always short if a deadline comes close. That’s probably not a scientific discovery, but just the result of my bad planning. Either way, time is a very interesting topic we rarely think about, yet it surrounds us ‘all the time’.

The first question that jumps into my mind when thinking about the universe is ‘when did it start?’. What a nasty question! If we consider time being part of our universe (and why shouldn’t we consider that) the question includes ‘when did time start?’. And that’s where the trouble starts! To define a certain point in time (that’s what ‘when did time start?’ should return) we require something to measure it. A clock like in the lower right of your desktop won’t do, as our clocks count time distances from a certain start. We could try to do that backwards.. so lets t_start be the first moment in history, aka the first moment our universe did ever had. Then t_kickoff would be the moment where time started.. the moment before the first moment.. wait a minute!

(continue reading…)