Adam Kane

To aspiring game programmers: Pay attention in math classes!

Working on my latest game, I need to simply calclulate the distance of a point to a line. Checking Wolfram’s math site, I find:

Which resolves to:

Good freaking lord.

I continue to be amazed by the courage shown by corporations in regards to Second Life. The graphics are dodgey, the framerate is terrible, the user interface and user experience leaves a lot to be desired, and still large companies are jumping in. You’d think that they’d be too scared to present their brands in such a “low-res” way.

With that said, I think it is entirely the right choice for big players to get into Second Life now. While there are questionable short-term returns, now is the time to get your feet wet and gain an understanding of the space and culture. Issues like graphical quality, framerate, and ease-of-use have all been solved many times over in other applications (i.e. games) and it’s just a matter of when, not if, the overall resolution of the experience will improve.

At that point, it will be the folks that have been kicking around in the current, klunky, implementation who will know the ins-and-outs of development, art, user experience and in-world culture who will be able to best express themselves with a more polished rendering and simulation engine.

Working on Lilly Bloom’s Magic Garden. This is a non-violent Adobe/Macromedia Shockwave 3D browswer-based online game.