One of the most exciting trends in the games industry has been how our innovations have been used in novel and imaginative ways by other industries. Game experiences are starting to move so close to reality that they could have a huge impact on how we design and operate within the designed environment. Here I..
Making believable 3d navigation doesn’t just mean finding straight-line paths for AI to travel on, it also means following them in a realistic way. What we really want to be able to do is make our birds/fish/spaceships/planes/dragons move in ways that seem plausible, and one of the ways we can do this is to set..
One of the most fundamental problems facing agents in game worlds is how to move to a specific location. While a variety of solutions exist for characters moving on the ground, for agents navigating freely in three dimensions, such as drones, submarines, or characters with jetpacks, this is a much harder problem. This post looks..
Among all the reviews of Anthem, I found this one in kotaku is one of the few to think about how the game was affected by the culture and leadership of the studio producing it. Which is the angle which means most to our industry, and it got me thinking…what could Anthem have been like?..
Unreal Engine 4 has been engineered with the assumption that code plugins will include their full source code when distributed. However this can often be undesirable, as for example, in our case where we want to offer an evaluation version of Mercuna for people to try out but don’t want to make our full source..
Mercuna now works with Unity! Over the last month we have been hard at work integrating Mercuna with the Unity game engine. There is a long list of small features to be finished off, but the core of it is done and we have agents flying around Unity levels. When we first started writing Mercuna,..
There are some people out there who, for some weird reason, actually enjoy ‘networking’. These oddballs actually get a kick from talking about nothing, for hours, with total strangers and then they somehow become best friends with them. Well, this post is for the rest of us. The introverts. The people who can think of..
8 Things Every Startup Should Do At GDC You know, I love GDC. We spend so much of our working time staring into code, that it’s actually nice to meet-up and share that buzz with like-minded people. With over 20,000 attendees, it is easily the biggest conference for games professionals anywhere in the world, and..
We originally wrote Mercuna with PC and consoles in mind, but recently we got asked about whether Mercuna ran on Android. The enquiry was through an evaluation request, and my initial response was going to be no, it wasn’t something we had ever tried. However, I decided it was first worth looking to see how..
We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.9 of Mercuna. This is a significant move forward from version 0.8, with two new major features and wide ranging refactor. We had intended for 0.9 to be a modest step forward, but we soon realised that with a bit more work we could pack in..