Once again the time has come to wish you all a Merry Christmas. By the time you read this, chances are that Christmas has already been and gone, although I'm sure some of you will have a peek at the site today whilst chomping on your mince pies :)
 
From everyone at The Icon Bar, we would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year. Thanks for reading TIB in 2008 (what there was of it to read!) and we'll see you in 2009. Oh, and don't forget to vote in Drobe Awards 2008 poll while there's still time!
 
Links:
Christmas (Wikipedia)
 

A while ago you may remember that I wrote an article about video conversion for RISC OS, and near the end raised the topic of video conversion on RISC OS using a port of ffmpeg. Although the version of ffmpeg I originally tried on RISC OS was old and broken, Christopher Martin obviously thinks there's some merit to this approach, as he has recently produced !FFmpeg, a working port of ffmpeg for RISC OS.
 
Once more in the interests of SCIENCE, I threw a few test videos at !FFmpeg and measured its performance against that of a similar version of ffmpeg running on my Windows PC.

 

Saturday 6 December saw the Midlands User Group's RISC OS Christmas Show in Birmingham. The show was held at Birmingham University's Guild of Students, and was attended by a steady stream of people throughout the day. What follows is a brief report and some photos from the event.
 

The Midlands Christmas Show kicks off tomorrow. During the day, The Icon Bar will (mobile phone signal permitting) have a live update feed from the show for those of you who can't make it to the show, which you can see at the following URL:
http://twitter.com/riscos/
A more detailed report on the show will be available soon after the show, which is scheduled to take place at the Birmingham University Guild of Students on Saturday from 10:30am until 4:30pm.
 
Further information:
Live update twitter feed
Live photos
Midlands User Group Christmas Show website
 

As stated in the last article, this time I'll be looking at what went into the MK I map generator for my eternally work-in-progress game, DeathDawn.
 
Specifically, I'll be looking at the implementation and evolution of the following components of the generator:

• City block placement. This is arguably the most important stage as it defines the overall layout of the city.
• Edge and node linking. A housekeeping stage that prepares the data structures for the road weighting stage.
• Road weighting. A city with roads which all have the same number of lanes isn't very realistic, so this stage uses an algorithm to determine the number of lanes each road should have.
• Road and building painting. With the city structure generated, all that's left is to translate it into the format used by the engine during actual gameplay.

 

Anyone reading this will have seen it by now, but just in case you gave up hope (but, erm, kept coming back to us for updates), Drobe has - after a few sparks of life recently - now relaunched.
 
There has been some criticism of the new design; visually, I think it looks great, but then I've always enjoyed websites that are clean and simple and uncluttered. My biggest complaints with the old design were that the masthead looked too busy, and there wasn't enough white space; both of these issues have now been addressed. (Although can we have the logo back in colour? Pretty please?)
 

You may have spotted in the forums that Dan Wilson has released the soundtrack from hit game Phaethon in MP3 format. Well, we now have the whole lot archived in downloads section!
 
Download file Phaethon_Sound_Track.zip (59803K)
 

After writing my first article about random map generators, I said I was going to write a city generator. Well now I have, and I'm here to tell you about it over the course of the next few Building the Dream articles.

Blow your own trumpet much?

Although this article could just be dismissed as me blowing my own trumpet, I'm hoping that it will serve a somewhat more useful purpose. Before, during, and after working on the map generator I've searched the Internet for examples of similar generators and failed to find any. Sure, there are odd bits and pieces - descriptions of simpler generators that have given me ideas on some techniques to use, or screenshots of sexy work-in-progress realtime generators, but no actual algorithms or code samples from generators that come close to the required complexity of my generator.
 
So hopefully this article will become a useful reference point for anyone else wanting to undertake the task of writing a city generator, whether they're targeting a grid-based world representation like mine or a vector-based one.
 
Apart from discussing the algorithms used in the generator (and why they're used) I'll also talk about the data structures that are used - so even if you're not interested in random map generators you should be able to find plenty of examples of uses for the data structures covered in the first Building the Dream article, as requested quite some time ago.