Mounting USB sticks autmatically in FreeBSD

Getting USB devices to automount in FreeBSD is harder and more complex that it needs to be. All the parts are there but what makes it hard is that it’s changed over the years so you can get yourself in a right pickle. Here is what I did to …


Merry XMas and a happy new year

We took one of the secret levels from Smith and Winston and played with it for a few days to make a Christmas style level. We’ll probably hide this level somewhere in the game, maybe it will only appear on Christmas day?

Anyway, we hope everyone has a really …


Connecting to a m0n0wall box over serial

I dug up my old m0n0wall box today and wanted to see what was on it. It’s an old WRAP embedded system from PC Engines. It doesn’t have any video out. I didn’t want to connect it to my network as it’s likely to have the …


FreeBSD 11 on the Acer Aspire One ZG5

For no reason other than boredom I bought an Acer Aspire One ZG5 notebook for £30 on ebay. I wanted to install FreeBSD on it and with and little google-fu I checked that it was indeed compatible with FreeBSD 11. Auction ended, off I go installing the best OS in …


In Defence of Writing Your Own Engine

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the trouble makers, the engine-eers! - dazza

After reading this excellent blog from ZeroEqualsFalse I thought I’d counter with a defence for writing and deploying your own engine.

I’ve been writing “engines” for 20 years both professionally and for fun. I …


How to stick at it: Three years and still going strong!

To celebrate (and commiserate) the fact that I’ve been working on Smith and Winston for three years I thought I’d answer the most commonly asked question: How do you stick at it for so long? Some of this applies to anything in life, but it’s mostly about …


Smith and Winston Alpha 4

9 months!

It’s been nine months since the last video update. Of course we’ve been busy working on Smith and Winston. Here is the latest video:

We’ve added:

  • Depth of field effect to soften the distant voxels.
  • Complete change of enemy and weapon strategy to bring the …

Steam Refund Policy

If you haven’t heard, steam is offering a refund scheme to players.

Anyone can get a refund if

  • they’ve played the game for less than two hours.
  • they’ve owned the game for less than 14 days.
  • they ask for it.
  • they aren’t taking the piss by …

Bullet Physics: Query objects within a volume

I need to preform a query of the game world to find all Game Objects within a volume. Preferably a sphere but any convex shape would be good. I struggled with this for a few hours before realising it’s actually pretty easy. Bullet Physics is amazing but sometimes simple …


LuaJIT bit.band stopped working

Came across an interesting feature/artifact of using LuaJIT today.

In Smith and Winston we use the bit package that LuaJIT provides to flag and mask collisions. The types of collision (for example world, bullet, vehicle) were hard coded on both the engine and Lua side. Today I moved toward …