December, 2009

I occasionally get requests to write about game AI, especially the AI from MotoGP . I have resisted this topic for the simple reason that I never worked directly on AI code, so I don't really know much about it. But hey, this is the Internet, right? You...

Writing about randomness reminded me of an interesting bug in the first commercial game I ever released. Extreme G was a futuristic racer for the Nintendo 64. Each vehicle had a limited number of turbo boosts, which increased your speed as long as you...

Due to some quirk of evolution, human beings are remarkably good at intuitively approximating solutions to complex calculus problems, but appallingly bad at estimating probability. Pretty much anyone is able to catch a ball, or judge when it is safe to...

When I first started making games, most things were written in C, with critical pieces optimized in assembly language. A skilled assembly programmer could beat the C compilers of the day by a factor of two or more, so this was an important optimization...