妖怪世捨て人

This article was originally published on GameDev.NET. In it, I illustrate a new particle system that was developed for my Lisp game engine, Trial. It contains quite a bit of graphics stuff, but also a lot of Lisp. I thought it would be worthwhile to share it here as well. For those unfamiliar, a particle system deals in orchestrating a lot of very similar things (particles). The challenge is to efficiently draw and update these particles.

That didn't feel as long as it was. A month ago I promised to do daily streams of game development. So far I've held true to that. I'm sure I won't be able to hold that true forever, but I'll try to keep going for as long as I can. In this one month alone, a lot has changed for the game though!

Starting tomorrow I will be doing daily live game development streams for my current game project, Leaf. The streams will happen from 20:00 to 22:00 CEST, at https://stream.shinmera.com. There's also a short summary and countdown page here.

Common Lisp has a big standard, but sometimes that standard still doesn't cover everything one might need to be able to do. And so, various implementations offer various extensions in various ways to help people get their work done. A lot of these extensions are similar and compatible with each other, just with different interfaces. Thus, to make libraries work on as many implementations as possible, portability libraries have been made, and are still being made.

It's already 2019, and last year I decided, for the first time ever, to sell some of my art. Apparently more people wanted to buy my art than I expected, so I thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about it all and my future plans.

Recently there's been a bit of a storm brewing about a rather opinionated article about game development with Lisp. After reading Chris Bagley's very well done response, I thought I'd share my perspective on what it's like to actually make games with Lisp. I'm not writing this with the intent on convincing you of any particular arguments, but rather to give some insight into my process and what the difficulties and advantages are.

About two weeks ago I said to myself: “You like games, don't you, son? Why don't you try making one yourself again for once? Just something simple, a platformer maybe. Just make a game and don't spend all of your time writing an engine and all that crap that isn't the game itself.” And I replied to myself by spending the last two weeks writing an engine. But, I still really want to make an actual game, so this entry is going to be about that.

A while back I wrote a bit about my adventures with a game engine technique called Geometry Clipmaps and my difficulties in implementing them. After spending what was supposed to be a week wherein I create a game fixing and completing an implementation of the Clipmaps instead, I think I'm now ready to talk about it. I'll also try to answer the questions I posed in the previous entry.

After an excruciating two months of impending exam, I now finally have proper holidays; time during which I don't need to do anything in particular. No deadlines, no requirements. And yet, I can't seem to relax. Why?

Man, it's been a good while since I sat down and wrote one of these whine entries. Well, I guess it's time again. It being such a long time since I last had to write about something like this naturally seems like a good thing, but I think matters are a bit more complicated than that. I suppose I should elaborate on that.

A while back I attempted to implement a technique called Geometry Clipmaps in Trial. This technique is used to stream in terrain data for scenery where the terrain is far too large to be stored in memory all at once, let alone be rendered at full resolution. In this entry I'll go over the idea of the technique and the problems I had implementing it.

This is a follow-up to my previous entry, where I talked about the shader pipeline system. However, I specifically excluded the way resources for shaders are allocated in that article. We'll get to that now, since I finally got around to rewriting that part of the engine to be more complete.

In the last entry I talked about Trial's way of handling shaders and how they are integrated into the object system to allow inheritance and composition. This time we'll take a look at how that system is extended to allow entire pipelines of effects and rendering systems.

In this entry I'll describe the way in which shaders are integrated into the object system in Trial. It serves as a predecessor to the next entry, which will be about shader pipelines.

Welcome to a new article series! I've decided to try to record my thoughts on various matters about game development. This will include observations, discoveries, explanations of existing systems, and proposals for improvements in related projects. Most of this will be directly related to Shirakumo's game engine Trial and the Treehouse gamedev streams. This first entry is a proposal for a new resource management system in Trial.

Well, it looks like 2017 is just about over. I thought it might be a nice opportunity to look back on the drawings I've made throughout the year and have a little discussion about it. This year has been especially tough on me and for long stretches of time I could not get myself to draw anything at all for a lack of motivation, inspiration, and confidence in general. And so in this article I'll talk a bit about a few pieces I found notable in an effort to see if there's anything obvious that could help me get along better in the next year.

In an effort to write some more articles I thought I might as well write one where I lay down my current thoughts on build systems. I've been thinking about writing my own for a good while now, and there's a few conclusions I've come to. I expect that these thoughts will eventually crystallise into a new general build system in Lisp.

This is a blog entry about Shirakumo's sound system Harmony. While Harmony was released some months back, I spent the last few weeks rewriting large parts of it from the ground up, and I think it's worth it to write a short article describing how it's built and what you can do with it. So, if you're interested in doing sound processing and playback in Lisp, this is for you.

This is a listing of projects that I've started, some of which I've completed. The intent is to spread awareness about the work I've done, as I speculate that a lot of people don't know about most of it, even though it might prove useful to their own projects. So, hopefully this article will help a bit in that regard.

I've written about Portacle on a previous occasion, where I talked mostly about the issues I've faced. This time, however, I'm excited to announce that Portacle has finally reached version 1.0. This means that there are no obvious remaining issues that I am aware of. Everything should Just Work™.

I'm not sure how far back it goes exactly, but I think it's been now about a year or more since I started doubting my skills heavily. More heavily than usual. Anything I attempt to do either slips out of my hands and ends up a shoddy mess, and even if it doesn't it feels like a flimsy rehash of something I've already done before. There's no improvement to be seen, no end in sight, no goal reached.

Next Saturday, the 17th of June, there is going to be a live “study session” about Shirakumo's game engine Trial. The intention of this event is to get people acquainted with the internal structure and features of Trial, so that they may work on it by themselves, and thus help improve it in the future.

Right now I'm at Brussels Airport, waiting for my departing flight back to Zürich. The 10th European Lisp Symposium is over, and I got to have my first “real” talk at it. It was, as you might guess, about Radiance and some of the core concepts behind the project. With that, I think it is finally time to announce Radiance's proper release into the wild!

The scorching earth. Forests set ablaze, cities drowned in a fiery inferno. Anna would probably call that an exaggeration, but Monika thought it was a pretty apt description of the weather right now. It was the middle of Summer, and the world wanted everyone to know it. Temperatures were through the roof and drought had set in in a few places. Monika sat in the living room, staring out onto the fields in front of their house. The windows were wide open, but not a single gust of wind blew through them. Monika thought she could hear the hot air simmering under the burning sun, but that might have just been her imagination again. There wasn't really any particular sound, just this strange kind of general noise that lets you know it's summer, permeating through everything.

As announced in my previous post, I've decided to do a write-up that illustrates my adventures in developing Portacle, a cross-platform, portable, installer-less, self-contained Common Lisp development environment.