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Current News
| May 30, 2009 New version of Pointy Stone Othello |
At long last I've finally updated my Othello program. You can download the newest version from my Pointy Stone Othello page.
It's the least downloaded among the game playing programs I've made, but it was the first one I made, and I'm rather fond of it. I didn't spend a real long time on this update, but I managed to do a lot of little things and clean up the code more. Playing strengh is improved only slightly. The biggest new feature is an analysis mode.
It's the only program that I've made that learned it's evaluation values. I want to revisit the automatic learning now that I have so many spare CPU cycles. Also I need to revisit my pruning method. Still, Pointy is not too far behind the very best Othello programs in most areas, except for its lack of a big opening book can leave it without much of chance sometimes.
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This week I finished moving. (Yet again, seems to happen every year or two.) I don't think I missed any email, and I don't update this site very often nowadays so nothing missed there =)
I am now working for Intel on game engine stuff.
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| Nov 07, 2007 Flash Web Game : Xantrolex Classic |
We've finished our first real Flash game : Xantrolex Classic.
It's not the most advanced game in the world, but I think it's good-quality for a free Flash game and a lot of fun. In fact one of the goals was to see how much we could get done in a small amount of time. Unsurprisingly, it took longer than expected to finish. But it was also a learning experience, and if we do a next one it should be quicker.
You'll probably notice it's not on the 3DKingdoms site. We decided on a new site to experiment with advertising, plus it will make organizational sense if we make more online games.
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| Sep 22, 2007 New Features |
I still occasionally update Kingdoms Creator with new features. One of the features I did recently was add a lit alpha pipeline. Now the lights can affect transparent objects the same way they affect solid objects. This is good for things like glass, so you can see the specular reflections from lights as you rotate around the glass. I use pre-multiplied alpha to make the transparency work with multiple passes. Here are a couple example screen shots : Ship Alpha 1 Ship Alpha 2. The ship model is by Josh Hess.
On a completely unrelated note, I participated in a stock-picking contest with about 25,000 players. For a while I had a slight outside chance of winning, but fell to 42nd place. I wrote up a contest journal . (I need to link from my page to feed it into Google.)
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| Mar 06, 2007 Using Kingdoms Creator can be Fun |
As described in "Postponed" below, I'm not currently working on the Villager's Tale. Work on Kingdom's Creator has slowed, but not stopped entirely. Still, now I don't feel bad just playing around in my editor. Part of this is playing with the available rendering effects and parameters. The other is loading up a level and trashing it (users can grab whatever they want and throw it around the editor, including characters.) These two screenhots, test1 and test2 depict the aftermath of this hobby.
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Archived News
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