kamih's stuff

A couple days ago I noticed that VoidStorm (36 hits) was running a bit slower than usual on one of my test machines. The frame-rate was still 60Hz, but all the ships were moving a little bit slower. Eventually I saw that my frame time delta was smaller than usual: it should have been about 16.667ms (since I have VSync on), but it was around 11ms instead.

After a bit of investigation with a friend (thanks Alban!), we figured out that QueryPerformanceFrequency (27 hits) (which I use with QueryPerformanceCounter to measure my fame times) was not telling the truth.
We were indeed shocked to see that a QPC/QPF based timer was slow compared to a real-world timer.

I ended up writing this little test program: http://pastebin.com/GeekTiSQ (90 hits)
It compares timing between QPC/QPF and the timeGetTime (31 hits) function, and if they don’t match (within a millisecond), it adjusts the count frequency returned by QPF. It then starts a timer loop and shows the three different timer values (QPC/QPF, adjusted QPC/QPF, and timeGetTime).

In VoidStorm, I now check every 4 seconds (which is when I print the frame-rate and other profiling info) that QPF hasn’t changed (I read that this can happen), and that it matches the timeGetTime timer. If it doesn’t, I adjust it by the ratio like in the test program.

Since allowing the player to go into slow-mode any time and for however long they want would make the game too easy, I added an energy bar. Going into slow-mode uses energy, and the energy replenishes itself when the player is not using it.

(30 hits)

So a couple months ago, I decided that I wanted to see if I could make a Geometry Wars (88 hits) clone by myself.
I decided to write my own engine.
I’m calling it VoidStorm (36 hits).
It uses OpenGL for graphics, OpenAL for audio, and Lua for game-logic scripting.
So far I’ve had a lot of fun working on this and optimizing it. I’ve also learned a lot about game programming.
It’s also given me a great opportunity to try my hand at making some sound effects, which is something I’d been wanting to try for a while now.

Here are some videos and screenshots:

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Some people have complained that I haven’t released anything the last couple of months.
I haven’t been as productive as I wanted, but I have some tracks in progress that I’m not completely sick of yet.
Here are some previews:

Here’s a spacy ambient electronic tune. For this one I used LazySnake (heavily effected for the main ambient keys), Synth1 and Alchemy. Drums are made with MicroTonic.

download (0 hits)

From now on I’ll be releasing my ambient electronic tracks under the name MoonPhase.

This is a track I’ve been working on for Bal’s entry for the Polycount Beat-em-up level design challenge (277 hits). Music and level design are still work in progress.

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Here is a calm and airy instrumental track featuring my Ovation acoustic guitar tuned in DADGAD (which I also used to record the main beat).
A little melody introduces the track, which then goes into a first part in G major (lydian melody), before modulating to D minor.
Composed entirely in Ableton Live 8 with 16 tracks. Instruments used were (besides my guitar) mostly Alchemy and Synth1.

download (272 hits)

And here is a cool version with strings recorded by my friend Pravda: http://pravda23.com/update/?p=2715 (188 hits)!

I’ve recently acquired Sonic Charge’s amazing drum synth plugin: MicroTonic (353 hits).
This thing is really great for making all sorts of crazy electronic beats and rythms.
These guys also have a genetic algorithm running on their servers that generates new beats using user feedback: The Patternarium (243 hits).

Here are 30 free drum loops I recorded from some of the generation 7 patterns.
All loops are recorded as 24bit, 48khz stereo wav files.

Patternarium7_loops_part01.zip (21.7MB) (179 hits)

And here’s a demo of the loops:

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