Game

Describing Nvidia Shield as a mere Android console would not do it justice. The console relies heavily on streaming and cloud computing, so it shouldn't not be viewed as another standalone device. Nvidia sees Shield as Netflix for games, as a comprehensive Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS) platform. While it's still part of the Android ecosystem, Shield could be bad news for some Android game developers, but it also creates a range of new and exciting opportunities.

In Part I of this three-part series on game physics, we explored rigid bodies and their motions. In that discussion, however, objects did not interact with each other. Without some additional work, the simulated rigid bodies can go right through each other. In Part II, we will cover the collision detection step, which consists of finding pairs of bodies that are colliding among a possibly large number of bodies scattered around a 2D or 3D world.

There are many programming platforms used to develop games, and there are a plethora of devices to play them on, but when it comes to playing games in a web browser, Flash-based development still leads the way. What if we could port these games to HTML5 Canvas technology and play them on mobile browsers as well? In this article, Toptal engineer Avinash Kaza gave a solution to this.

Simulating physics in video games is very common, since most games are inspired by things we have in the real world. Rigid body dynamics -- the movement and interaction of solid, inflexible objects -- is by far the most popular kind of effect simulated in games. In this series, rigid body simulation will be explored, starting with simple rigid body motion in this article, and then covering interactions among bodies through collisions and constraints in the following installments.

The need to adapt legacy code and systems to meet modern day performance and processing demands is widespread. This post provides a case study of the use of Erlang and CloudI to adapt legacy code, consisting of a decades-old collection of multi-user game software written in C, to the 21st century.

Building games for the iOS platform can be an enriching experience in terms of both financial and personal growth. Recently, I deployed a Cocos2D-based game to the App Store. In this post, I'll explain the process behind developing games for iOS, from Cocos2D through to publishing.

From the very first days in our lives as programmers, we've all dealt with data structures: Arrays, linked lists, trees, sets, stacks and queues are our everyday companions, and the experienced programmer knows when and why to use them. In this article we'll see how an oft-neglected data structure, the trie, really shines in application domains with specific features, like word games.