The TRIBES Engine Networking Model
This is the original GDC 2000 paper by Mark Frohnmayer and Tim Gift and is the basis for the networking in Torque 3D today.  I mirrored this locally as it seems its getting harder to find.

 Robust, Efficient Networking
This is Ben Garney’s AGDC 2008 talk.  It covers alot of the basics of the Torque networking model in an easier to understand way.  Video and audio versions of the presentation too.

 Unreal Networking Architecture
This the documentation of the networking system in Unreal 3 which hasn’t seen major changes over the last 10 years….  here is the original document from 1999.  Its fairly similar to the networking in Torque, but has strong ties to UnrealScript.

Source Multiplayer Networking

Latency Compensating Methods in Client/Server In-game Protocol Design and Optimization

The Quake3 Networking Model
The method Carmack developed for Quake 3 is very interesting.  It would be an interesting experiment to take this same technique and apply it to a modern game.  In Torque we could write the game state to a BitStream and store a history of these on the server.  We would then make a compressed delta between the current state and the last client ack state.  I guess it all depends on how small the compressed delta can be and the processing overhead on the server. 

Networked Physics
This is one of Glenn Fiedler’s excellent articles on physics when applied to networking.  He covers most of the fundimentals of game networking and has a great little demo with source code… a must read.

Defeating Lag With Cubic Splines
This is an interesting idea… use spline interpolation to smoothly move between different snapshots of your networked object.   It can’t be any worse that the simple linear interpolation Torque and other games use.

The Internet Sucks: Or, What I Learned Coding X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter

1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond

Dead Reckoning: Latency Hiding for Networked Games

I moved over to Adobe’s Buzzword … wow… thats what Google Docs should have been years ago.

First after listening to Petra Haden – Don’t Stop Believin’ it then played the original.  Not so big a stretch… they have the same titles.

And just now it went from Beatallica – Leper Madonna to Leper Messiah!

Is it possessed or just coincidence?

(also its cool that i can find any music video i want on YouTube).

NVIDIA ForceWare 185.66 BETA

• Adds support for Ambient Occlusion – the newest NVIDIA Control Panel feature to offer enhanced 3D gaming realism exclusively to GeForce GPUs.

For a second i thought i fell into a April Fools joke…. but really NVidia?  There are no importaint bugs or performance issues to address?  You need to implement your own SSAO in the driver?

I’m sure the art directors of the industry will raise their voices in praise of this huge step.  No longer do they have to concern themselves with how their games look.  NVidia and the game players will “fix” the problems with your art in the driver control panel… the tool of choice for serious artists.

I hope this driver feature dies… bad NVidia… no cookie.

I hope this somehow is an indicator of pent up demand for a new OS that isn’t Vista.  XP is now 8 years old and its no secret that the failures of Vista adoption by the masses, and hence DX10, has set back graphics advancements in the PC game industry.  It seems to still be around 30% of gamers according to the Valve and Unity hardware surveys… not quite enough to bother to support it.

I hope to see a DX11 GFX device for Torque 3D in the near future… some really cool stuff will be possible.

I had more fun with it than the latest GTA release and took notice how some of the half assed art didn’t really matter.

 Make it fun to play… the rest will work itself out.

So i’ve decided to refocus this site on games, game development, and in particular trying to run our small indie team on a daily basis. 

I’ve always found that writing helps me better understand things, so at least it will be educational for myself.