new interests
When I was in school I figured I’d eventually want to be a graphics programmer, but it turns out that I don’t really want to do that too much these days. At the moment I’m really interested in player/AI combat and behavior. I’ve been looking at Hierarchical Concurrent State Machines and Behavior Trees. They’re hardly new concepts, HCSMs were first described in the paper linked dating back to 1995, and Behavior Trees have been used in games since Halo 2.
They’re relatively simple concepts that have implementations as complicated as the designer/programmer needs them to be. I like them mostly due to the fact that they can be constructed with very basic building blocks that lend well to a GUI, so designers can easily create new combat or behavior trees without much trouble.
I’ve also just started looking at Goal Oriented Action Planning which has been around for a long while as well. I haven’t decided how easily these can be manipulated by designers though, as it’s roughly based on STRIPS, which is rule based, and while that could lead to more interesting behaviors than what a procedural approach could offer. The quality of those behaviors rely on the quality of the rules written by the designer. That’s my understanding at least. Finding a good balance between robustness, scalability, maintenance, and ease of use will be pretty challenging.
realtime soft shadow penumbra generation
Rummaging around in my old repository, I find my Shadow Algorithm Survey, coming in at about 35 pages, and my proposal, which is only a few pages long.
I have two versions of my implementation, one in 2D and one in 3D. At the moment they don’t even compile! That’s fine actually, as I was planning on starting the implementation over. I want to keep up my familiarity with C# so I’ll stick to using XNA. It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve touched any shaders, so that’ll be hilarious.
We’ve got a three day weekend, so I plan on making some sort of progress here. Hopefully I can at least have a base scene with some simple shadow maps rendering over the weekend.
purpose
I’ve started up a site again to help motivate me to finish my thesis! I hope to bring updates as I very slowly make progress. Along the way I’ll post things I’ve been distracted with.