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URL Parameters for the Bing Maps website
The Bing Maps AJAX v7 API lets you create and embed a custom Bing Map in your own webpage containing Pushpins, LineStrings, and Polygons, custom overlays and specified map styles etc. However, on many...
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ReMVPed
I just received notification to say that I’ve been re-awarded the Microsoft MVP award for 2012. Which is nice.
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Garbled Circuits, Location Privacy and Secret Proximity Testing
There are more and more location-aware services in the world. Twitter prompts you to “Add your location” to every tweet, Facebook will ask “Where was this photo taken?”, Foursquare will tell you how...
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Machine Learning and the Bing Maps Perceptron
Wow, has it really been that long since I last did a blog post? <checks calendar> Yes, yes, it appears it has been that long. Sorry about that – normal excuses apply: work, kids, moving house,...
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Masking out particular areas of interest on Bing Maps
A recent question on the MSDN Bing Maps forums asked if it was possible to display a Bing Map in which only a particular country was visible, painting out everything else. There’s certainly nothing...
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Installing Apache Cordova/PhoneGap 2.2 for Android development under Windows
I’m dabbling in several projects developing for mobile devices at the moment, and the first thing I’ve had to do is set up the appropriate development environment(s). One such example was to perform a...
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At-a-glance functions for modelling utility-based game AI
One of my current projects involves developing a decision-making AI for autonomous characters (i.e. NPCs) in a computer game. The idea is pretty straightforward – instead of switching between a set of...
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Good Books for Game A.I.
I had a great time last night hosting a presentation on Artificial Intelligence for the Norfolk Indie Game Developers group. Expect to see a series of blog posts on each of the topics appearing here in...
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Useful Online Game A.I. Resources
Besides the books listed in my previous post, there’s a stack of other useful resources available on the ‘net for game A.I. Here’s some of my favourites: Websites http://natureofcode.com/book/ Entire...
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Artificial Immune Systems and Adaptive Strategies in Game A.I.
A.I., perhaps unsurprisingly, often borrows inspiration, language, and models from the world of biology. Two common examples are Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) – based on a model of the brain, and...
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Methods for Combining Autonomous Steering Behaviours
“Autonomous Steering Behaviours”, as first defined by Craig Reynolds in his presentation at the 1999 Game Developer’s Conference, are a simple yet effective method of creating realistic movement in...
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The Norwich Game Expo, or “breaking one’s New Year’s resolutions”
Every year I set New Year’s resolutions. Many years I don’t succeed in keeping them, but I still believe that there’s a benefit in having thought about what you want to change in your life, and at...
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Creating Glitch Graphics
I’m sure most programmers have accidentally created graphics glitches in the past – corrupt image files, incorrect texture maps, that sort of thing, and I’ve certainly encountered them many times as a...
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Hand-Drawn Shaders and creating Tonal Art Maps
I recently submitted my first asset to the Unity Asset Store – a set of shaders designed to produce a variety of real-time “hand-drawn” effects. Drawing on a range of influences, including A-Ha,...
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Smooth Unity Camera Transitions with Animation Curves
I’m creating a game in which I want to transition between two camera views – a top-down, overhead camera that gives a zoomed-out world view, and an over-the-shoulder style forward-facing camera to give...
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Oooh… Shiny! Fun with Cube-Mapping
Cube mapping is a rendering technique to create shiny surfaces that appear to reflect the environment around them. Note that this differs from specular highlights – bright spots caused by reflected...
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Importing DEM Terrain Heightmaps for Unity using GDAL
I know that some folks reading my blog are from the spatial/mapping community, and may have been disappointed that my posts of late have been more influenced by game development and Unity than by...
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Procedural Terrain Splatmapping
If you try searching for information on how to assign textures to Unity terrain through code (i.e. derive a “splatmap” of textures based on the terrain heightmap profile itself), you’ll probably end up...
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Lighting Models and BRDF Maps
A Bi-directional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) is a mathematical function that describes how light is reflected when it hits a surface. This largely corresponds to a lighting model in...
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Sepia Shader
I found this techrepublic page, which gives a conversion algorithm from a standard RGB image to a Sepia image tone as follows: You can obviously tweak these values if you like – there is no exact...
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