Martin's Yaroze Site

Welcome to my site. Currently it just has a couple of crap 2d games (can I just emphasise the crap part there):

• Connect 4 A two player version of the classic game.
• Connect 4 with AI As above but with AI options. The AI is taken from Veleng, an open source perfect connect-4 player. It uses an 800K position book file, which takes a little while to download to the yaroze. I've had to restrict the size of the working space that veleng uses in order to cram it into the yaroze's memory and I've done some pretty indiscriminate axe welding to the source, but I think it's still a perfect player (on "hard" anyway). Each move can take anything up to about 30 seconds computing time - a computer vs. computer game will take about 10 minutes or so (the moves suddenly get quicker in the end game). You can change the AI settings at any time, so you can set up positions and see how the computer will play from them.
• Banjo invaders Space invaders. But with banjos. Go on, you know you want to find out.

In case you haven't worked it out, I go for functionality not looks in my games. :) I'm not a graphics designer and I haven't spent much time on the graphics. Also, these games were Yaroze learning exercises, and I didn't do much in the way of pre-coding design and the like. In fact, I pretty much kept just thinking of other effects and things that I wanted to do and trying to bung them in (like: ooo, I wonder if I can make the stars twinkle). Now that I know what the yaroze is capable of I can approach my next projects in a more professional manner... maybe.

Some boring background for those that care: my background is in 3D rendering (ray tracing mostly, but also volume rendering and a bit of radiosity) and most aspects of virtual reality (in particular VR for very large scale models) - rendering, culling, collision detection, navigation and the like. I program using C, unix, win32 (cygwin), OpenGL, Direct-X and Direct-3D. I have a VR for win32/cygwin web page.

Martin Keates
martin@jabadaw.fsnet.co.uk
ICQ: 75241211
MSN: keatesm@hotmail.com

Last updated 8/3/01