Castle in VRage

Not only space shooters can be made in our powerful voxel engine VRage. This castle was made in 30mins using our voxel hand tool.

Minecraft as a side-effect

Thanks to our powerful voxel engine we can get sometimes quite unexpected results. While we were testing a new feature, we accidentally developed new Minecraft clone. And it was fun to play :)

Would you like MinerWars craft mode? :)

NextAfter in C# without allocations or unsafe code

In C99, there is a standard way to get the next larger or smaller float32: the function nextafterf. In C#, there’s no such function and I had to roll my own version.
There are three ugly possibilities.

1. use pointer aliasing,
2. BitConverter.GetBytes,
3. simulate an union.

The main update loop may not make any allocations, so BitConverter is out. Pointer aliasing is unsafe, so I couldn’t use it either. So the version I ended up with looks like this:

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit)]
struct FloatIntUnion
{
    [FieldOffset(0)]
    public int i;
    [FieldOffset(0)]
    public float f;
}

//  Returns the next float after x in the direction of y.
float NextAfter(float x, float y)
{
    if (float.IsNaN(x) || float.IsNaN(y)) return x + y;
    if (x == y) return y;  // nextafter(0, -0) = -0

    FloatIntUnion u;
    u.i = 0; u.f = x;  // shut up the compiler

    if (x == 0)
    {
        u.i = 1;
        return y > 0 ? u.f : -u.f;
    }

    if ((x > 0) == (y > x))
        u.i++;
    else
        u.i--;
    return u.f;
}

Meteor fields

Currently we made a new feature - meteor field. Occasional meteor field is coming from the space, burning, smoking, damaging everything what stays in the way. It combines several tuned effects - HDR, God rays, particle effects.. Non optimized version runs on constant 30 FPS.

Note that our game is made in C# using XNA technology.

Intro

Hello there,
if anyone is interested, I will try to publish here bits of my current work. As a lead programmer in Keen Software House, a company developing MinerWars 2081 game, I meet interesting people, solve mysterious bugs and see stunning game progress every day. If you are curious, be welcome to reading my blog.