.. and has been updated.

I’ve just released a new version of my action hack & slash game.

Cellular Automata

http://paul.ennemoser.com/files/CellularAutomata.zip

A cellular automata consists of a grid of cells, with each cell having a number of states. The cells of the simple automata, that I’ve implemented in Silverlight, can have one of two states: On (Black) or Off (White).

Each row in the grid represents one generation (in this automata).
The state of a row depends on the state of the previous row, and so on.

A simple rule is used to generate the state of each cell of a row:
For each entry in the row we take the (N – 1th, Nth, N + 1th) cell triple
in the previous row.

Now we take this triple and use a lookup table to get the state of the entry.
Here are the lookup tables for two of the most famous patterns:

Rule 30 cellular automaton lookup table:

current pattern	111	110	101	100	011	010	001	000
new state for center cell	0	0	0	1	1	1	1	0

 

Rule 110 cellular automaton lookup table:

current pattern	111	110	101	100	011	010	001	000
new state for center cell	0	1	1	0	1	1	1	0

See the Wikipedia entry for more information.

the hyper cube | imagine the 4th dimension

Today I’ve met a poor little cube. He lives in 4 dimensional space. Because of that we won’t ever be able to see him in his true glory. How sad!

And as such he decided to dance for us, allowing us to imagine his life in the 4th dimension. Can you? 

Particle Systems

Particlesystems are a great way to create cool-looking special effects. Here are my latest creations:

.

.

Super Shapes – my first WPF application

– Download-Link – (.Net 4.0 required to run)

Super shapes are fascinating completely mathematical shapes that are created using the ingenious Super Formula.

Recently I wanted to give Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the new WinForms, a go. I’ve created Super Shapes applications before using OpenGL and XNA, but neither had a nice interface nor many features.

Follow this Link to see how the program looks like. The user interface should be in English on your computer, unless you’ve also got a German OS like me.

Features:

• simple creation of countless different shapes by simply adjusting the parameters on the right.
• templated shapes to allow for a quick-start
• saving & loading of shapes (stored in human-friendly XML format)
• zooming using the mouse-wheel
• dragging of the shape by holding the left mouse button

And so it began …

What a day! This is my very first post on a blog ever! This blog is mainly going to be about game, application and tools programming. About new .net technologies like Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and XNA. About best practices and design patterns. And to not forget also about my own games. All in all something for programming geeks!

Of course I’ve to explore how everything works now~ Let’s start with something simple like how to embed a Google Video I’ve recently uploaded.

It was orginally a test of proof of my implementation of a Component based Entity-system and the integration of the great Farseer Physics Engine. I actually wanted to extend FlyWeight to be a real game,
but it’s pretty hard to create a ‘fun’ game that is based on physics. Maybe I’ll get back to it in the future.

Another, pretty new, 2D Physics engine for .net is Box2DX. It’s a c# port of the new version of the famous Box2D C++ physics engine from Erin Catto. From what I’ve seen, integration of Box2DX shouldn’t be very hard either. Awesome work.

Let me say some words about GoogleVideo.com, I must say I prefer it over YouTube. It simply feels much better. I’ve also had some problems with uploading exactly that video to YouTube while it worked like a charm on GoogleVideo. *shrugs*

You can find the other videos I’ve made of FlyWeight here, and here.

More blogging soon! This is fun (: WordPress rocks!!

Edit:
Since Google Video is now dead all videos have been reuploaded to YouTube.
Btw: YouTube now has all the features that were missing back then when I complained about it. ;)