2022 was a year of expansion for us here at Mercuna. We’ve got new features, new games, new staff, and a new office. The year absolutely flew by, and standing at the beginning of the new year, we thought we’d look back and let you know about everything that we’ve been up to. Releases First!..
Last year was an exciting year for Mercuna, with a growing client list, new team members and some fantastic Mercuna-navigated game releases. While we can’t believe it is already 2022, we wanted to share some of our 2021 highlights. Ground Navigation Improvements A big focus of our efforts was maturing our new ground navigation solution..
2020 was quite a year for everyone and here at Mercuna we’ve all been remote working since March, but somehow as busy as ever! Here are just some of our highlights from the year. Ground Navigation Our biggest effort was developing our new ground navigation system for vehicles and animals. We knew this would be..
Functional tests are a great way to ensure that the basic features of your game work as expected. They allow you to test more realistic scenarios than unit tests whilst giving more control than gameplay tests. This is especially useful for middleware, such as Mercuna, because our 3D and ground navigation systems have many complicated..
At Mercuna we make extensive use of automated testing including continuous integration. Our AI navigation middleware is used on multiple game engines (Unreal Engine and Unity), multiple versions of engines, on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) and for multiple platforms (the above plus consoles and mobile devices). As such it’s essential that we “fail early”,..
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..
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..
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..
The biggest story in the tech world over the last week has been the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities. So what are they, and how will the fixes for them impact games? This post will focus on the Meltdown attack as the implications of that are more serious and we’ve seen that the patches coming..
“When can we have a ship flying through a hole in a rotating asteroid?” – That was one of the first questions that Chris Roberts asked us when we started working on Star Citizen. We had been tasked with creating the dogfighting AI for this record breaking crowdfunded space sim, and as with all of..