the blog
Check out some of my blog posts - programming talk, inane ramblings, you name it!
A New Look - Going Full Vectorheart
If you've visited before, you might have noticed things look a little... different. Gone is the polite grey-and-blue look, and in its place is a whole lot of cobalt, chunky pipes and angled lines. Welcome to the new MasterOf.Dev, now in glorious vectorheart!
Magnetar - Global Game Jam 2022 - Day 3
And with that, the jam is over, and my game is complete! It's got a full gameplay loop and everything!
Magnetar - Global Game Jam 2022 - Day 2
A lot has happened today, and at the ripe ol' time of 4am, that concludes day 2. Tomorrow (But really later today) is the final sprint towards the finish time of 3pm, so after writing this I'm going to have a short rest before I continue. I need it after redesigning the entire game concept a good three times...
Magnetar - Global Game Jam 2022 - Day 1
It's been a long time since I've done a game jam, so I've decided to take part in Global Game Jam 2022. I've finished day 1 and made both more and less progress than I would have liked.
The Return of the Development King
Ok, so my domain ‘masterof.dev’ might be considered a tiny bit extremely narcissistic, but a friend suggested it when .dev domains were first announced and I just had to buy it. And then, after wrangling SSL certs into place…nothing. But that changes today. Today, I am back.
Three Thing Game – I finally won one!
So last Saturday (The 13th), I took part in Hull University’s Three Thing Game competition, possible for the last time. This competition has each team be given three random ‘things’ from a pool, and our team was given the things ‘Ambient Occlusion’, ‘ASCII’ and ‘Psionic’. Huh. Not the most inspiring words, but we worked with it and in the end we won! Well how about that?
C++ Reflection for Fragment Engine
Reflection systems – allowing a program to inspect it’s own code at runtime – is extremely handy for game engines. For example, rather than hard coding a list of objects that can be spawned by the console or be selectable from the editor, the engine can just look for all classes that either subclass a particular type or have a particular flag. Another example would be for networking – and is something that I’ll be writing for some upcoming coursework – whereby instead of writing bespoke methods per class for networking, a programmer can just add a ‘replicated’ flag to a particular field and a generic method handles updating automatically. The same would work for Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) – just mark a method as an RPC method and the reflection engine (And some form of preprocessor) can handle it as appropriate. C# has a built in reflection system, as well as a very handy attribute system (You tag types, methods and fields as you define them in a pretty intuitive way). Sadly, Fragment Engine is built in C++ (Which may be ported to D, providing slightly more features here, but it’s C++ for now).
An Introduction to C# Attributes and Runtime Reflection
Hey there! As I’ve had some questions from my friends about this, I’ve decided to write a basic guide to C# attributes, C# reflection and potential use cases for both. For the sake of definition, ‘reflection’ means the ability for code to look at or ‘reflect’ on itself, also often known as introspection.