A topic thats using up my (rare) Grail-time lately is the topic of how to define where an actor is allowed to walk and how it will find its way there. I found this question quite fun to work on, as it poses an interesting mix of theoretical (geometry) and practical (coding) considerations.

So what is the problem exactly? The answer is: A combination of things:

• Restrict the actors movement to a certain area that will be defined by the game programmer, I call this the walkable area.
• Come up with a mechanism that allows the actor to walk from one point in the walkable area to another one. Thereby the actor should stay in the walkable area at all times, so a path inside the area has to be found.
• When the user requests to walk to a point outside the walkable area, the actor should instead walk to some near point inside the walkable area, whereas near is not exactly defined.

In my previous post I stated a little what I would want/need of a nice backup/synchronization strategy. Now lets structure these into more precisely defined features and see which programs out there cover them. As a disclaimer upfront: Of course I only know a certain subset of backup software. If you have a noteworthy candidate in mind that I didn't mention, please don't hesitate to comment.

For years now I'm constantly changing my backup plans, always a little unsatisfied with the current solution. So let me try to write down what I actually want first and then see what options are there. I know there are plenty of tools to deal with those (I know e.g. unison, git for config files, bup, etc..), the thing is: Without a little planning the best tool won't help anything.

Hey guys, as I should be working at this time of the day, I'll keep this update very brief.

• At beginning of the month I was at the FOSDEM 2012 which was quite interesting. Beyond others I heard a talk about Data-Driven and Component-Based Game-Entities which was quite interesting
• As you might have noticed, there is some activity recently on github. Thanks to feedelli who started working on the dialog system, we now have a plan for 0.1
• There where some problems for I don't know how long with commenting on articles, it should work again now, if not please drop me a mail.

Most recently, I fell for the idea of having a real tiny font for my working environment. Some observations immediately popping up were:

• Almost unecessary to mention that only monospaced fonts are candidates.
• Pixel-oriented / Bitmapped fonts have the advantage of using space more efficently while still being easy to read (because there is no need for antialiasing so things don't get "blurry").
• Especially with such small fonts it is important to be able to easily distinguish letters, eg. lowercase "L" vs. capital "I" vs. the number "1".
• I want the same font in my URxvt terminal emulator as in GVim. That is noteworthy as I experienced some fonts didn't seem to work equally well in both these environments (especially considering the following point).
• I need normal and bold font weight in GVim as well as in URxvt, and of course it should still be readable and not look "blurry".