At the end of the last post I wrote about the actual implementation of my Clockwork Aphid project, I said the next step was going to be display simplification. At that point I'd generated a few landscapes which were just starting barely starting to test the limits of my computer,

Some time ago, I wrote a series of posts about language choice for my Clockwork Aphid project. In the end I decided to start the project in Java, this being the language I'm most comfortable with. Once the project reaches a stable state, with some minimum amount of functionality, the

So, in my last post I remarked that for procedurally generated landscapes to be interesting, they would need features. But what sort of features was I talking about? Population centres, in particular, tend to to be found close to certain kinds of... things. The first of these which always comes

Since I haven't been able to do any actual work on my Clockwork Aphid project as of late, I suppose I may as well talk about the background behind it a little more. Those who talk about it the most are the ones doing it the least, and all that.

Some of the particularly sharp/anal ones amongst you might have noticed that while the technique for generating fractal lanscapes I previously described works (and works well), it's not 100% correct. Specifically, the fact that it uses the the same scaling factor for nodes created by the diamond and square

It took a little bit of fighting with bugs that weren't showing up in the 2D view, and a bit of time to figure out what was going on with the lighting system in JME, but I finally got the 3D display of the fractal landscapes working. The first stage

I don't have any 3D views of the fractal landscapes I've been making to show you yet, as I'm still working through the different implementation options. I did get a little distracted with the 2D views of the landscape this morning, though, and play with the colouring scheme. First of

No, that isn't a typo... but yes, it is a bad play on words. That's the bad news. The good news: finally! A Clockwork Aphid implementation post! If you're building something which relates in some way to virtual worlds, then the first thing you're going to need is a virtual

A couple nuggets of knowledge came out of my "You're Speaking My Language, Baby" series of posts, so I though I'd just take a quick moment to talk about them. The first two are perhaps the most obvious by far. Firstly: if you actually write blog posts, people

So... what's the conclusion? It mostly comes back to the fact that I'm doing this mainly for fun (though you may have trouble believing it). That being the case I'm going to start working in Java. In fact I already have started working in Java, and I've already written the

The last language I'm considering is Objective-C. I know this language the least of three (which is to say: I don't know it at all). To make matters worse, while Java and C++ share a similar syntax, Objective-C is completely different in places. That being said, it's semantically very similar

The second language I'm considering is C++. This is the language that I use the most at my day job. It's also the language that's used to build the vast majority of computer games and one hell of a lot of commercial software. I'm not as familiar with it as

The first language I'm considering is Java. This is by far the language I'm most comfortable and proficient with. It was used for about 90% of my Bachelors degree, I wrote the entire codebase of my PhD using it, and it gets used here and there in my day job.

If you're about to start on a programming project of some sort (and I am), then the first choice you have to make is the main programming language you're going to use. Now, if you're carrying out this project on your employers time they probably have very specific views about

Clockwork Aphid is the name I'm giving to a side project I've had sitting at the back of head for a little while. I'm actually going to try and build it now. What it actually is is quite big and hard to explain, so I'm going to do it gradually,