This week I started working on collision detection for Rival Fortress.

Since I’ll be rolling my custom collision detection/physics solution I had to do a lot of groundwork that you don’t have to do if you pick up an off-the-shelf middleware like Nvidia Physx or Havok.

The upside is that custom solution is lean and mean and fits like a glove, plus I’m learning a lot about the inner workings and trade-offs that you usually don’t have to deal with or don’t care about, but affect your game in some way or another.

I’m using the excellent Real-Time Collision Detection along with Game Physics as references, as I’ve never wrote the whole stack from scratch before.

More Linux Stuff

This weekend I did a little more Linux tinkering. I dived into the fascinating world of Live CD distributions.

In particular I used Porteus, a customizable micro distribution based on Slackware, to set up a 8GB USB thumb drive everything I need to code, debug and test Rival Fortress.

I can just plug in the USB drive in any x86_64 computer (PC or Mac) with at least 2GB of RAM, boot from it, and code away.

The customization process was relatively straightforward, but I had to build a lot of the tools I use from source as the versions on USM, the Slackware package manager that Porteus supports, are out of date.