I am giving a talk on the material that I wrote about for Game Developer Magazine – plus expanded content! – tomorrow (today, I suppose – Thursday, whatever day that is)  at the Vancouver Erlang Meetup Group meeting. Page here.

Abstract:

Concurrency is a thorn in the backside of modern game programming. Not only do we have to consider the interaction of concurrent processes across multiple CPU cores, but modern game development involves looking at concurrent interactions between the CPU and one or more GPUs, where parallelization and scheduling is not necessarily something that we can control. As a result, the modern game developer not only needs to wrap his brain around concurrency, but he must deal with additional issues such as vectorization and how to deal with a processor that wants to pretend that everything in the entire world is a triangle. Join Nicholas for a riveting, exciting, and horrifying look at the state of the art in concurrent thought, see why everybody might start doing functional programming in the next five years, and understand why game developers across the world are desperately ripping off the good ideas from Erlang and haphazardly reimplementing them in C++.

Hope to see you there!

So this week has a been big for the website back-end, and my beautiful console.  Wordpress 3.0 came out and has been promptly installed.  I’m pretty excited about a couple of the features; the most notable of which is the ability to generate the navigation menu in the admin panel.  This will help me from having to make hard edits, something I LOVE!

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We are hard at work getting a version of Dredmor (beta 0.4 for those of you keeping track at home) in fighting shape for entry in the Penny Arcade Expo PAX 10 competition. I think it’s looking pretty good. AT the very least, the judges will never have seen anything like it. (Hi, judges!)

In the process of doing this, we went through and did some playtesting this evening. Daniel and I decided to start the game with starting skills, and we’d see who would get the furthest down into the dungeon before we were slaughtered. I will let Daniel discuss his experiences (he beat me), but I had a pretty good early head start owing to the discovery on level 1 (the Crypts) of a sword that shot fireballs and put enemies to sleep. Both at once. That helped me carve my way through the dungeon, leaving a trail of flaming, spurting, asleep monster corpses in my wake, until I encountered a monster zoo on the Moonbase level. Panic and chaos ensued; heck, I thought to myself, my default weapon instantly fireballs anything around me (including myself), how bad can it be? Well, pretty bad.

I made my way to the lower corner of the dungeon (“The Oozing Hole of Lusts” – nobody’s beating that room name any time soon), working my way through a pile of Blobbies, Octos, Diggles, and Djinns. A few Deth monsters – scary looking grim reaper things with scythes – menaced me, and soon I realized that having cleared out much of the room, I was rapidly running out of hit points. Perhaps this was because my weapon tended to hit me as well as the monsters. And now Deths – who cast spells – had started to notice my presence. Trouble! I quickly decided to use some unused skill points and maybe find a skill in my skill tree that could get me out of here so I could regroup. I picked the Frenetic Teleportation spell – an early air spell that I had accumulated enough experience points to learn. I clicked – and ended up landing right next to a Zomby, who one-hit KO’ed me.

RIP Mordred, the Axemaster. His tombstone read, “He Crushed Like a Vomit.”

I am satisfied with this playthrough, in that it represents some of my goals (and the team’s goals, for that matter) with Dredmor. I had a unique experience, I enjoyed myself, and yet I still died because of my own hubris and stupidity. It makes for a quick, nasty little amusing story to tell you so that you can enjoy my experience. Next time I play the game, it will be different. What’s not to like?

…morra horrivelmente (translation: play beautifully, die horribly). In other words, I’m really excited about the world cup, and wanted to find some way of injecting that in somewhere.  (My money is on Portugal, but if they fall over too much I’m jumping ship.)

I have been a huge pain in the ass to David and Nick over the last day or so.

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