Month: October 2025

  • Stars Reach visual upgrades

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 2 Comments

    For months now, we have been working on a big overhaul to the visuals in Stars Reach. This has involved redoing most of the shaders in the entire game, and going back and retouching every asset. We started by redoing all the plant life and flora, and we have hundreds of those assets that had to be redone.

    Further, they all need to grow, change in response to seasons, be able to catch fire and burn, freeze, shed leaves and die, and so on. We don’t pre-design our biomes; we derive them on the fly from the simulation based on the environmental conditions. The right plants grow in the right places based on the temperature and the humidity and the soil types. (Yes, we even have a dozen soil types).

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  • New stuff on the site

    Hours Categories Game talk, Misc

    I really have been neglecting the blog lately. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been adding content to the site all along. I figured it might not hurt to do a little summary of items that have been added over the last year and a half or more. The last talk I posted up was my GDC talk from 2024!

    So, here’s a bit of a catalog…

    For folks who are interested in the history of Ultima Online, I finally gathered up the various snippets I have posted about why exactly the original ecology system didn’t survive to release. There’s a theory out there that it happened because players were like locusts and killed everything and caused it to collapse, and that’s not quite correct. Players were like locusts. But the ecology system came out of the game for economic reasons and for performance reasons. So if you’re curious, you can read the answer to “did players destroy the UO ecology?” here.

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  • Site updates

    Hours Categories Misc

    It’s been quite a while since the site was refreshed. I was forced into it by a PHP upgrade that rendered the old customizable theme I was using obsolete.

    We’re now running a new theme that has been styled to match the old one pretty closely, but I did go ahead and do some streamlining: way less plugins (especially ancient ones), simpler layout in several places, much better handling of responsive layouts for mobile, down to a single sidebar, and so on.

    All of this seems to have made the site quite a bit more performant, too.

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