APDL, long-time distributor of Public Domain and not-so Public Domain software, have taken the next logical step from distributing their PD/freeware collection on floppy disc or CD and have begun distributing it online instead. Apart from the obvious advantage to the end-user of being able to access the software immediately, APDL have also decided to forgoe charging any nominal download fees, making the archive truly free.
 
Of course the age of much of the software is likely to make its relevance somewhat limited (especially if it's not 32bit compatible, or even StrongARM compatible) - but by making the archive available free of charge APDL have given Acorn preservation enthusiasts a big helping hand, and for that this move should be applauded.
 
APDL point out that not all the software from their PD/freeware catalogue has found its way online yet, so some patience may be necessary if your favourite bit of software is missing.
 
Links

• Newsgroup announcement
• APDL's PD library main page
• APDL's commercial software catalogue - much of which is also available for download (although not for free, obviously!)

 

The RISC OS classic 3D shoot em' up, Star Fighter 3000 has been updated to enable it to run on new ARMv7 powered machines. This lets gamers play it on the raft of new hardware platforms that RISC OS Open is pushing towards, such as the BeagleBoard, and it is hoped, the Pandora, Touch Book and other consumer friendly devices.

 

This was going to be a pretty dry fluff piece about the gaming events going on in my home city, something I'd pop in to between renewing my travel pass and getting some new shoelaces.  Then something slightly surreal happened to me.
 
I've just spent around an hour in the company of one of the men partly responsible for getting me into computers in the first place.  And I didn't recognise him.
 

Acorn World - now there's a name from the past. The final show was cancelled in 1998 when Acorn closed its workstations division - now it's back thanks to Dave Moore and the Retro Reunited team. The show, held over the weekend at the Cedar Court Hotel in Huddersfield, offered a range of vintage games consoles and bizarre Acorn hardware hacks. The Acorn scene was mostly 8-bit oriented although there was some RISC OS coverage too.
 

Back at the start of this month I decided to take a break from debugging some code and have a quick de-stressing blast on Team Fortress 2. As I loaded the Steam client, the "updates" window popped up what seemed to be a bargain - Fallout 3, half price just for that weekend! That'll be fun, thinks I, and cheap too!
 
It really didn't turn out that way.
 

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.

 

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.