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Monday, July 30, 2007 - 01:52 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Fouiero v0.40

My jiggling of RAM sticks has miraculously caused the BIOS Power-on Self Test (POST) to recognize my system for having the full 512MB that it has, instead of the paltry 256MB it previously detected. Believe me, the difference is palpable. 256MB meant that even opening a new browser window could cause much grinding of hard disk virtual memory and lamentation. Let's not go into trying to run Warcraft III. One of these days I'll reward myself by popping down to SLS and getting myself a gig or two of DDR2 RAM, which I believe costs like S$70 a gig now. Watching XP limp along on 256MB is just torture.

I'll save my accumulated musings for the next post, since a project that demanded my absence from blogging for nearly two weeks deserves an entry for itself. And yes, it's Fouiero!


More information can be found on the official site, but suffice to say that it works, at least on my home network. Quite a few improvements could be made - in the collision handling of the characters themselves and on the ordering of data packets, just to name a couple, but as an initial foray into real-time networked gaming I guess it's not too shabby. Of course, if I had to do it all over again I would probably just throw my hands up and start by devising a robust general-purpose UDP networking library, which would save a lot of later grief.

Funny thing about UDP, and the Internet in general, is that there is no (simple) way for two computers behind routers to handshake each other and set up a high-speed connection by themselves, even if both parties were willing to divulge all necessary information; Which may not be such a bad thing with all the exploits floating around. Getting around this entails more fiddling about with router configurations than the average user may be prepared to do, or a third-party server to act as the middleman initially. Blah.

Well, one thing that I realised in the middle of Fouiero development was that it wasn't really hard, in the way that setting off on a forty kilometre march isn't. Yes, it's tedious and sometimes painful, but one never doubts that one can do it. It is a matter of checking that all the required tools are available, then just plugging away. Once I had the ability to draw pixels and send bytes, it was done.

I would say that a graphics-light 3D first person shooter could be achieved with, oh, half a megabyte - and the extension required from say, Fouiero, isn't even that great, since essentially all that is needed is to add a third spatial dimension and update the collision detection. Might be interesting when I next find myself with some spare time, though I had best push myself to continue on the web-based Utopia/Civ hybrid. Soon.



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