Author Archive for Carl Lange

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On Relativism And Games

This is a post about the psychology and art of games, and we’ll return to your regularly scheduled programming blog shortly.

In almost every game I’ve played, there has been a force of evil. In fact, an overwhelming majority of not just games, but films and books, and stories that we tell our children, and legends of gods and demons, have a simple premise: good versus bad. Humans versus aliens. Allies versus axis. Good people versus bad people.

Now, this goes deep into our roots. Those who share our moral views are with us, they’re the good side. Those who don’t are bad people, the bad side. An over-simplified look at things? Well, bear with me.

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Two-hour ACM Programming Problem, the first

So myself and Ciarán (and some other classmates, Kevin Beirne and Keith Cully) are in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest at University College Cork this year. We’d competed last year, but we were so unprepared that we didn’t even bring pen and paper. It was a spur of the moment thing (to drive halfway across the country and compete in a programming competition is a spur-of-the-moment decision for us, oh yes).

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Flax HTML5 Game Engine

Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 7

So, as Ciarán’s mentioned, we’re back at work on Flax. This is, to put it lightly, a good thing. Neither of us want Flax to turn out like so many other student projects (that is, “we’re making a magical [insert project here], and it’s going to be made of unicorn tears and fairies, if we ever actually do it”). That’s why we armed ourselves with whiteboards and the rationalisation that anything we do outside college would have the same, if not more, weight than whatever it is we’re told to do by the college. Initiative, right?

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HTML5 Canvas

Mandelbrot Set in HTML5 Canvas

As you might know, Benoît Mandelbrot sadly passed away two weeks ago. A great mathematician, he almost single-handedly created a new aspect to mathematics, fractal geometry. Having worked with fractals (using the open-source Apophysis) for several years, I felt I owed something to the man, so I thought I’d make a Mandelbrot set using the canvas tag.

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Stop-watch

Base64 encoding versus traditional image hosting benchmarks

While testing different methods of loading images for Flax’s tilesystem, I toyed a little bit with images encoded in Base64, rather than loading them from an external location. We ended up not using it, and I’ll explain why. Now with added (preliminary) benchmarks!

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