Tutorials and musings on game design, programming, art, and Amazon Lumberyard.
What Is A Thread Context And What Can I Do With It? A Thread Context is a global structure that stores data specific to the current thread, it can be referenced and modified without having to synchronise with other threads. What should go in the context is up to you and the needs of your … Continue reading Introducing A Thread Context
This is a very short and sweet blog on a neat few lines of PowerShell I have been using to help focus on what matters in the output The D.R.G. Initiative creates. $AbsoluteFilePath = "C:\SomeLogFileFromYourGame.log" if([System.IO.File]::Exists($AbsoluteFilePath)) { gc $AbsoluteFilePath -wait | where {($_ -match "Error") -or ($_ -match "Assert"))} | Tee-Object -file "C:\SomeOutputFile.customlog" } That's … Continue reading Using PowerShell to Parse Log Files
This blog post has been written to encourage game designers to play more games and to highlight what game design tips and tricks can be learned along the way. Mastering a Game There is a wealth of knowledge to be gained from learning how to play a game well. Whether this is 100%-ing your favourite … Continue reading Let’s Play – How Designers Can Benefit from Playing More Games
One of the first tools that we developed in-house was used to distribute test builds of DRG before release. We called it Beam, which naturally comes from the U.F.O. tractor beams which are used to move the build from the servers to the desktop. The tool was initially built in around two weeks over the … Continue reading The beauty of tools development – Pt 2/3 Beam
In this micro-blog, I'll showcase how we at Third Kind Games implemented better logging in our Lua scripts. In order to log something to TTY from Lua you'll typically do that following: Debug.Log("Output to TTY please!") Which is OK and will do what it says, however, in order to disable that particular piece of logging, … Continue reading Bark at the Moon: Better Lua Logging
A few years back I was heading up an in-house team of tools specialists at a major video game publisher. We created a huge range of applications, everything from behind the scenes automation to fully-blown level editors and content creation tools. You won't be surprised to hear then that I've always stood by the importance of … Continue reading The beauty of tools development – Pt 1/3
Well holy smokes Batman... ... this is a useful little tip! I have just had the realisation that I can use the User Defined Language Tool in Notepad++ to enable syntax highlighting and make parsing the .log files from our game *much* easier. Lumberyard, and indeed The D.R.G. Initiative both kick out a lot of … Continue reading User Defined Languages in Notepad++ for Syntax Highlighting in Log Files
Lumberyard uses Lua as its main scripting language (flowgraph and script canvas notwithstanding). Here is a great little 30-minute video which new programmers in Lumberyard may find helpful! https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/CppCon-2017/101
Here's a quick tutorial on how you can create very quick prototype maps in Lumberyard, using actual real-world satellite data. There's a lot you can do with this method, particularly if you don't have access to expensive terrain generating software, and it's a perfectly adequate method to use to create levels since Lumberyard's terrain tools … Continue reading Creating level maps in Amazon Lumberyard using satellite data
At Third Kind Games, we made the decision to not employ a rigorous (and often tedious) buddy review system - rather, we have relied on other methods of ensuring code quality: Swarm tightly integrated into our Slack messaging system Programmers are responsible for understanding when they need help or advice, whether in their own systems or … Continue reading I’m Not Your Buddy, Pal