Blog for Ben Garney at GarageGames.com

Austin GDC Talks: Robust Efficient Networking and Flash MMOs

Ben Garney — 2008-09-22T19:13:03+00:00

Hi.

How are you? I am fine. Life at my new gig is good. Well, I have to run. I will write again soon!

Your Pal,
Ben

PS I went to Austin GDC and gave two talks, one on Robust Efficient Networking (based on Torque's networking architecture) and another on building Flash MMOs (with Rafhael Cedeno, CTO of Multiverse). The slides are now online and you can get ahold of them on my blog at Coderhump.com.

PPS You can see a video of the talk at my blog as well as listen to an MP3 of the actual talk at Austin.

Next Big Thing

Ben Garney — 2008-05-30T23:47:55+00:00

My five years at GarageGames have been a blast. It's time to hit the big red button and reboot the ol' career.

Obligatory retrospective: I first came to GarageGames as a fresh-faced eighteen year old intern. I lived in a spare bedroom, and wrote docs and code. I came back to work full time six months later. (One of the scariest and most rewarding decisions I ever made was leaving college to work at GG.) I lived in Jeff's garage for a while before I got an apartment. There were about ten of us - it felt a lot like a family. We had a wild and crazy community full of talented people. In the subsequent five years that family grew to include a ton of new faces. We shipped engines, made games, dealt with good times and bad times, and changed the games industry, at least a little bit.

A guy couldn't ask for a better introduction to the games industry!

Now it's time to move on. GG is an awesome company, and it's going to keep going places. InstantAction has huge potential, and Torque is getting some needed engineering love.

But the things I want to do don't match up anymore. I'm ready for a change of pace. And the company has plenty of smart and talented people - I don't need to be there for GG to do well. That's a very liberating feeling.

There's some great potential in Flash and in the mobile space; things are finally getting good enough to make cool products. It would be fun to make some small-scale games on my own terms. I'm excited to immerse myself in some new environments and technologies.

I'll still be around. I'll be speaking at the Austin GDC on networking, and also on Flash technology. I'm starting work on a book; we'll see if it makes it or not. And when the Next Big Thing rolls around... you'll probably hear from me then, too. :)

If you see me around, say hi! You can also track my personal blog or my twitter feed. My e-mail is ben.garney AT gmail (you know the rest).

Thanks for everything, and I wish you the best. It's been a pleasure to be a part of this community and work with a unique group of people.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Pulpolux!!!

Come See Me At GDC 2008!

Ben Garney — 2008-02-12T01:35:07+00:00

Update: If you're in the SF area but aren't attending GDC, drop me an e-mail. It looks like I'll be doing the presentation at the Adobe building downtown, and of course, they don't charge you thousands of dollars to get in. :)

Howdy!

What have I been up to since October of last year?

Well, I wrote an chapter on clipmaps for Game Programming Gems 7. It goes into details on how you can implement a clipmap texturing system similar to what's in Atlas. Useful if you're implementing your own terrain system or just want to learn more of the theory behind that part of Atlas.

This was also my first time being published in a real book. It's pretty dang surreal to see your name in print, much less an article you wrote coming right after it. Weird. :)

I'm also giving a talk at GDC on Tamarin, the scripting runtime behind Flash. Looking for a good scripting runtime? Come to this talk and see why Tamarin might be just what you're looking for.

Finally, you may be wondering about the forest pack, which has a few bugs in the latest TGE release. I'm looking for a contractor to fix those bugs, because I'm simply too busy to do it myself. Are you a sharp TGE coder? Get in touch with me (beng AT garagegames DOT com) and we can work something out.

TGEForest Free Release

Ben Garney — 2007-10-27T08:50:17+00:00

Hey guys,

I mentioned this to one or two people at IGC and I found myself with a spare weekend, so here it goes...

I'm releasing the Forest Kit, now renamed TGEForest, for free, to all TGE licensees. Do with it what you will. It comes with no warranty and few restrictions - use it how you like, but please give credit and do not resell it as your own. If you want/need support or features, let me know (but be aware my time is limited).

You can read some previous .plans about my forest work here and here. Things have come a long way in the past few years - it's sort of fun to take a glance back into the mists of time... :)

Links:
tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/TGEForest/Installation
tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/TGEForest/Manual

Note that this code is entirely distinct from what Tom Spilman demoed at last year's GDC - his work is for Torque Advanced and integrates SpeedTree. This is just for TGE, although the code is accessible to Torque Advanced owners as well. Please don't get them confused. :)

Everything you need to know should be on the wiki article, including the download link.

Please post code questions in this forum thread. General questions can go here in the blog.

This code is basically release-ready. It's been tested but it never quite (due to deals with SpeedTree and such) made it out the door. The docs on the wiki should be enough to get you going. The install process is fairly well documented, although I had to make a few last-minute changes to play nice against 1.5.2 (since it includes many Lighting Kit related changes).

Enjoy! Go make something cool from this. :)

Polysoup Free (And IGC)

Ben Garney — 2007-10-13T01:41:42+00:00

Wow - another IGC come and gone. It was a good time. I won't do a recap here, but I do want to share this video. It represents the highlight of the Indie Games Jam - Justin Mette, Jeff Tunnell, and one of the Frozen Codebase founders do a Ramones cover. Worth a peek.

Also, I wanted to update everyone that the polysoup resource I posted a few months ago is now available to any Torque licensee for free. Commercial, indie, doesn't matter. Go for it. :) If you really like it, send me a nice thank-you letter (or a free copy of your product!).

You can get the polysoup resource here. It's compatible with TGE and TGEA (with a little merging) and uses Opcode to give any DTS file polygon-accurate collision.

Enjoy!

Speaking and Running Into Walls (Collision Fix)

Ben Garney — 2007-01-26T22:47:15+00:00

I went and talked about game dev at a small local school, Pioneer Pacific College. Good times; they had some good questions to ask me and I enjoyed telling them about my experiences in the industry. And I got a free bottle of water! (When you're gonna talk non-stop for an hour this sort of thing is important.)

It's something I like doing, so if you're teacher in the Eugene or Portland areas, feel free to drop me a line.

I also did some work on the ExtrudedPolyList (screenshot from this work pictured), which is a key component in player and vehicle collision, and fixed some nasty intermittent bugs in it that have been plaguing Torque games for the past ten years. Ever get stuck on a smooth wall, or crater when you were moving fast across the terrain? There were some glitches in there, which I've fixed. You can grab the fixed player/vehicle collision resource here. We'll be pushing this out in future engine updates, too, but we wanted to get it to the community ASAP - some people it won't affect, others it'll make a huge difference for.

(Thanks to Mr. Eric Hartman for his help in making this fix happen!)

Finally, if you haven't already seen it, you might want to check out the polysoup collision resource I released last month - click here for the .plan.

Merry Christmas, Community - Poly Soup

Ben Garney — 2006-12-25T01:03:57+00:00

Wow - almost three months since my last .plan. I guess I should write these things more often. What have I been up to? Nothing that's quite ready to be talked about in depth, but in brief: developing ways for us to do more releases at a higher quality and with bigger feature sets.

And probably some smaller stuff that I'll be posting about in coming months, too. :)

Speaking of smaller stuff, I took a few days about a month ago and extended 3space and TSStatic in TSE to support more flexible collision scenarios. Or to speak more directly, polysoup collision. I've collaborated on this with Tom Spilman, who spent some time debugging it, integrating it into a project, and cleaning it up a bit, and the end result is a polysoup implementation that seems fairly usable.

So, here's a screenshot of an orc on a concave donut:

Now, some caveats: this is just the result of a few day's hacking, not an official announcement of GG support for polysoup in Torque. So while it's pretty easy to integrate, you do have to have some coding knowledge to use it.

It's also not bullet proof. We use OpCode, so it's pretty fast & efficient, but if you expect to drop ten orc models into a level and not have a performance hit when you run a buggy into them, you'll have to think again. But if you want to build a building in DTS, and don't go overboard in your model complexity, you should do just fine.

Finally, it collides against ALL the meshes in your model, including invisible ones. So if you want a model to work for polysoup you probably want to kill all your Col-1 meshes & so forth for proper results. Adding some sort of filtering rule wouldn't be hard but it was unclear the best way to do that so we left it a bit braindead.

You can get this at its page on TDN, if you're a TSE owner. Remember, you're on your own using it!

I figure I can't very well give you hearty Christmas cheer this holiday, so I may as well post up something nice and useful. :)

Community Weekend (Not-IGC)

Ben Garney — 2006-10-05T04:28:45+00:00

Hey guys,

So, the community weekend has begun. Let me express this clearly:

I ate Mexican with John Kabus, Tom Bampton, and David Wyand.

Just now!

Isn't that crazy?

It's like some sort of incredible alignment of planets caused us all to collect - accrete if you will - at Daniel's.

And tomorrow a bunch of other associates will be rolling in. In theory everything starts Friday or so. But people show up early. They stay late. We have meetings. Dinner. Lunch. Checking cool demos out. Stimulating conversation. So, practically, my inbox fills up starting tomorrow, and by the time I get back to it on Tuesday or so, it's pretty full.

If it wasn't GMail, and I didn't have like another 2 gigs to go, I might be concerned about it filling up. So no sending me any huge attachments.

I put a picture of space in for two reasons. First to demonstrate planetary alignment and second to demonstrate the vastness of the empty space in my inbox. Pretty slick eh?

So in conclusion... All the GG guys are gonna fall off the face of the planet for the next four or five days. If you're an associate or otherwise attending community weekend, you'll get info on what's up schedule wise very soon now. Everyone else... carry on! Make awesome games! We'll be back among the living soon!

Status Update on Atlas! (also, Ben On Vacation)

Ben Garney — 2006-06-13T19:51:31+00:00

Howdy!

Long time no chat. What's new in the world of Ben?

Well, after a lot of focused development, the new Atlas codedrop is nearly ready to release. Yes! It's exciting! It's a complete refactoring of the current code, to be easier to extend, modify, understand, debug, and use. Many bugs have been fixed from the previous code, as well as a few performance boosts (especially to collision queries with large bounding volumes). It also has a basic GPU-accelerated texture blender, which is the first step in big things to come.

The new drop is functionally equivalent to the current code, with some cool improvements and the groundwork for a lot of future growth. Once it's up in CVS we have several contractors lined up (and a few more we're looking for, post a comment if you're interested in helping with Atlas dev!) to start rolling out editors, enhanced rendering features, file size optimizations, etc.

But in the meantime, life intrudes - I have a family vacation to Disney World and will be gone until the 25th! I was hoping to get Atlas out the door before, but for some reason Brian and Josh weren't interested in getting inundated with a bunch of questions and maybe even bug reports about it while I was out of contact... so unfortunately the general public launch will have to wait until I get back.

I've posted a prerelease rought draft of the docs on TDN at Using Atlas2, so if you own TSE you can check out what's coming. Mostly a MUCH easier to use toolchain (yay!), in addition to the aforementioned core changes. Feedback welcome, just send it to my e-mail address and I'll get back to you when I'm back in front of my computer! (Or if I just made a typo, you can fix it right on the site - aren't wikis great? :)

In other news - there some significant updates for TDN and Elixir pending, which will come after Atlas launches. I've also found someone to help me with the Forest Pack so hopefully I'll be able to get it out the door sooner than later. And the usual hundred and one awesome things that happen and I forget about, have happened and I've forgotten about them. :P

I look forward to getting Atlas into your hot little hands as soon as I'm back in Eugene, and helping my co-developers roll out a ton of awesome new functionality. Meanwhile, I'll be free to spend more of my time on a new, unannounced project... I'll leave you with a teaser shot of some of my research for it. ;)

GDC & Forest Pack Tech Preview

Ben Garney — 2006-02-16T08:32:59+00:00

Forest Pack Tech Preview 1

Over the past few months, with the help of coworker and awesome dude Adam deGrandis, the Forest Pack for TGE has been coming along in the background... and before I disappear for the next two months (see next section), I wanted to toss something out to the community. It is... the Forest Pack Tech Preview. Just a standalone binary that flies through a little test forest with a little bit of art. The code isn't quite final, nor is the art, but it's finally at the point where I really need more info than I can get on my own computer.

Thus, the preview. Give the preview a try, and if you can spare a few moments, toss us feedback at forestpack@gmail.com. FPS (go to console and type metrics(fps);), if it runs OK (no crashes!), any rendering glitches, what hardware (CPU and video card) you're running on... :)

If it tests well, then you might see a full release sometime after GDC. If not, then it's back to the mines for a while longer to tweak it back up to spec.

And that e-mail address once again - any questions, comments, feedback, problems, screenshots send to forestpack@gmail.com.

Thanks guys! I'm sure you'll give it a good pounding!

(Caveats: This build is partially based on Torque 1.3, so some older Torque issues might resurface; there are also some performance hits due to that. The final pack will of course run on latest Torque. The art is a tiny subset of what will come with the pack, and isn't necessarily representative of final art, either. A real demo of some sort will come later on. :)

Game Developer Conference: Where's Ben?

I'll be at the GDC this year. Because of this, I'll also be pretty much disappearing for the next five weeks. A lot of stuff has to get done between now and then, so I'm having to cut back on everything that's not directly related to making kick-ass stuff happen. :)

If you're working directly on a project with me, I'll still be staying in touch, but otherwise, don't expect to see much from me. :) The other GG guys will be pinging me about important forum threads & so forth, so I can participate if needed...

But GDC should rock. Lots of good stuff will be coming, I think. Maybe even a new Atlas code drop. ;)

Torque Developer Network

Done some work on this, too. Logins much improved, and auto-login was added, too, so now it'll remember if you were logged in before. (Don't worry, if you log out of the GG page it'll ask you for a password instead. :)

A bunch of Safari issues have been fixed, too, so the site should be much more usable for those of you on OS X. :)

You can read about these improvements in the TDN forums.

We also have some other cool TDN-related stuff that we'll be announcing in the near future. But more on that later... :)