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I wrote an article for Dev.Mag covering some techniques for working with seamless tile sets such as making blend tiles, getting more variety with procedural colour manipulation, tile placement strategies, and so on.
Check it out!
The Python Image Code has also been updated with some of the algorithms explained in the article.
I studied computer engineering at the University of Pretoria. I worked in game development for almost three years, before I joined InnovationLab to help them create interactive simulations and serious games. I am currently doing my honors degree in computer engineering (which is why the posts are a bit slow this year 
).
Some projects that I have worked on:
More music: http://www.youtube.com/user/hermantulleken2
Articles for Dev.Mag:
Email: herman.tulleken@gmail.com
Tags: AI, Dev.Mag, Game Development, Perlin noise, sampling, Simulation, tiles
Random steering is often a useful for simulating interesting steering motion. In this post we look at components that make up a random steering toolkit. These can be combined in various ways to get agents to move in interesting ways.
You might want to have a look at Craig Reynolds’ Steering Behaviour for Autonomous Characters — the wander behaviour is what is essentially covered in this tutorial. The main difference is that we control the angle of movement directly, while Reynolds produce a steering force. This post only look at steering — we assume the forward speed is constant. All references to velocity or acceleration refers to angular velocity and angular acceleration.
Whenever I say “a random number”, I mean a uniformly distributed random floating point value between 0 and 1.
Tags: 2D, AI, artificial intelligence, blending, C++, Game Development, Game Maker, Perlin noise, probability, random, random distribution, random motion, random steering, response curve, Reynolds, sampling, Simulation, steering bahaviors, steering behaviours, vector field, wander, white noise
The quadtree is an important 2D data structure and forms the core of many spatial algorithms, including compression, collision detection, and stitching algorithms. Below you can download general purpose quadtree implementations in Java and Python.
The code accompanies the Quadtrees article in Dev.Mag Issue 26. The tutorial explains how the implement a quadtree that can be use to store 2D data efficiently, lists what considerations there are in real-world applications, and gives some debugging tips.
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| The original image (by smcgee). | The image after being loaded into a quadtree. |
Tags: 2D, AI, compression, computer graphics, Dev.Mag, Game Development, Image Processing, Python, quadtree, quadtrees
Google App Engine has many properties that makes it suitable for indie development. Two articles in Dev.Mag look at GAE for game development (Issue 24 and Issue 25). The first is an overview of Google App Engine, with some focus on games. The second is a tutorial that explains the implementation of “Guess a Number” on Google App Engine, for which you can download the code. For the tutorial you will need:
Tags: AI, Dev.Mag, Django, editor, Game Development, Google App Engine, Python, Web Development
Game Maker is a great tool; it is especially suited for rapid development and small projects. However, as a project becomes bigger, it becomes more difficult to find things, easier to break it, and generally harder to work on. This is of course true for any production environment, and there are many things you can do to tame the beast of scale. Here are 60 things to make Game Maker projects more maintainable.
Tags: AI, editor, Game Development, Game Maker, good practices, maintainability, random, Simulation, tiles
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