GLSL: Getting active uniforms

When you load a vertex and fragment shader in OpenGL you need to pass in data such as the current viewport transform, camera transform and lighting data. You do this via Uniform variables.

Each of these Uniforms is addressed via a location which in true OpenGL style is a GLuint …

QMAKE_BUNDLE_DATA doesn’t bundle frameworks

I’ve been playing with building an App using qmake as the build system. I started with a simple QT App built using the wizard in QTCreator and tweaking it.

I ran in to the problem that I needed to copy the SFML frameworks in to the App Bundle. The …

Python Script to build a Texture Page or Sprite Sheet

Why pack textures/images?

If you’re making a game then it’s more efficient to tell the hardware:

1
2
3
4

use packed texture 1
draw primitive 1,2,3,4,5,6
use packed texture 2
draw primitive 7,8,9,10

than to

1
2
3 …

HP ProLiant MicroServer: thoughts

I’ve been looking for a new home server for a few months. Recently (the last six years) have been running EPIA Mini-itx motherboards in Cubid cases. They are basically silent and powerful enough to run a small fileserver and webserver.

My EPIA boards were starting to show their age …

Graphing Electricity Usage with Current Cost and Munin

Many years ago I bought a Current Cost meter. Infact it was so long ago now that they have called my version The Classic. I wanted to see how much electrical energy all my servers, home computers and gadgets were using.

The Current Cost package contains two main parts, a …

Using Python and Tkinter to capture script output

In order to build the assets for my games I have a series of python scripts that know how to take files TexturePacker, Tiled, and Blender and build them for use within the engine. My main platform is OS X and it has good terminal support and more importantly I …

Generating Anagrams in Lua

I’m working on a game where I need to generate anagrams of words. My new game engine, which is Max Astro’s engine but with a few tweeks, integrates Lua and all the game logic is in Lua.

So given a string like “chicken” I want “kcehcine” or some …

Starter Blender Exporter

I’ve settled on using Blender 2.6 both as a level editor and modeller for my next game (code name BBM). BBM is a 2D game but modelling the characters and rendering the sprites will save a lot of time. Blender isn’t the best level editor but it …

Logical Bit Operators in Lua When Using Floats

I’m making some changes to the codebase that drives Max Astro before making my next game. The biggest change is that the engine is going to be controlled by Lua. Lua will run the main logic loop and lua will be the configuration language.

One of the oddities of …

iPhone App Version Information In XCode

When you create an iOS Application in XCode by default the version of the application is stored in-Info.plist. It would be really handy to get this in to code for compile time checks and #defines.

PList files are actually XML files which makes them easy to read in a …