Game Dev on John's Random Review

PKHunter Postmortem

Sun, 30 Apr 2017 23:19:37 +0000

After a long run, Asheron’s call has finally shut down for good. As such, I’ve also shut down the data processing for the 2 related site’s I’ve run for ~15 years: TrophyHunter and PKHunter. Here’s a post about statistics, info, and details about PKHunter. At some point i might do a similar post about TrophyHunter. There’s a little less stats involved there, but the final kill map looks a lot more like Dereth than the PK-only kill map

My XFire "Gamercard" hack.

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 23:09:11 +0000

With Xbox Live, you can get yourself a snazzy little “gamercard” for your website/whatnot by inserting a little html. XFire has the same kindof thing with their “miniprofiles”, but i like the look of the live version better, so i did a little hackery.

XBox Live version

A famous person's gamercard.

My Xfire version

XFire Gamercard

Specifics after the jump! bonus points if you know what “famous person” HiroProtagonist is. :p

Multiplayer Game Architecture Done (Game Development Class 4)

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 18:26:30 +0000

The fourth and final class of the UW Extension Game Development certificate program is done! More later!

PK Hunter architecture

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 05:58:21 +0000

Asheron’s Call is a MMORPG by Turbine Games. Originally released in 1999 and published by microsoft, in 2003, the franchise was bought entirely back by Turbine. A 3-rd party utility application, Decal, was created by players with some programming savvy, which allowed other programming end users to create plug-ins that integrate with the AC client. This allowed for the automation of tedious in game tasks, tracking of statistics, drawing of extra things on the screen, and any other number of things which Turbine would not, or could not add themselves. (for a list of the large number of plug-ins, see sites like Decal Dev or AC Heaven)

I have written 3 plug-ins for Asheron’s Call using decal; one which tracks monsters you kill and “trophy” items you recieve, and submits it to a website (Trophy Hunter), another which acts as a shopping cart when interacting with players who are running special “Trade Bot” plug-ins to act as vendors (Bargain Hunter), and one which tracks Player vs Player kills (PK Hunter). This article covers some design and implementation details that third plug-in, PKHunter.

Advanced Graphics Class Done (Game Development Class 3)

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 05:31:28 +0000

Just finished up the third class of the Game Development certificate program offered by the University of Washington Extension system.

The adv graphics class was, like the first class, taught by Bretton Wade, who works in the XBox group at Microsoft. I don’t know exactly what his title is, but he’s neck deep in the graphics part of the X360, so he’s in the know. (If you google him, you’ll find all kinds of papers and stuff. He’s the BSP tree FAQ maintainer too.)

Other details, as well as my final presentation with screenshots and all that is available after the jump.

AI Class Done (Game Development Class 2)

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 02:58:08 +0000

Just finished up the second ‘mester of the Game Development certificate program offered by the University of Washington Extension system.

The AI class, taught by Steve Rabin of the AI Game Programming Wisdom series of books, was pretty awesome! We added debug graphics, a real time profiler, a state machine system, flocking, A* pathfinding, coordinated behavior, terrain analysis, and gameplay to our game engines created for the first class. More details about the content after the jump.

Game Development Class

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 07:44:26 +0000

I just finished the first ‘mester of Game Development certificate program offered by the University of Washington Extension system. System? Whatever. Anyway, the first quarter is over and i learned more than I can type here! If you want to see how stupid my stuff ended up, there’s a link after the jump. Now that the quarter is over maybe i’ll have more time to update this silly site. But probably not!

Updates to BargainHunter

Sat, 02 Oct 2004 19:43:00 +0000

I’m back into playing AC (Asheron’s Call) again, so i need to go back through and update all of the plug-ins i’ve written! Since Trophy Hunter and PK Hunter are all working fine, but Bargain Hunter wasn’t working completely, so i had to update it first! BargainHunter 2.0.1.0 does all kinds of new things! Colors for imbues, more filtering options, keyword filtering, it works better than ever!

Strategist

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 22:02:16 +0000

I just registered the domain, so that might not be working yet, but i added a link to the strategist site to the bar on the left. Its amazing, i hadn’t worked on this app since 7/11/2001! All of the performance issues i had then INSTANTLY went away just through the miracle of time!