What Blancmange Gets Paid to Do

Blancmange gets paid to do lots of things:

• Looking out of the window.
• Untangling my hair.
• Eating.
• Drinking.
• Daydreaming.
• Deciding what colour the desktop background should be.

Blancmange's Last Real Job

Blancmange works (or rather used to work) for Flight Developments Ltd, a rather small company that specialises in Location Based Entertainment, flight-sim games to be precise. Their web page (designed by Blancmange) is at www.hotsims.com.

Flight Developments is the company behind the now obsolete Star Force complex. Star Force was the official name for Blancmange's Space Jihad, a multiplayer space combat type game. Blancmange's first attempt at HTML is the unoffical Space Jihad manual and FAQ.

	The landscape renderer 'morphs' the terrain between several levels of detail in a similar fashion to the method described in a white paper published at Numerical Design Limited's web site, only in a rather naive fashion (NDL's method avoids T-intersections and allows area specific LODs). An unusual feature of the terrain mesh I've used is the arbitrary orientation of the triangle pairs in each square. Although this feature precludes the use of triangle strips, the contours of the terrain are more faithfully reproduced as the nasty stepped contours on hillsides facing SW and NE are avoided. In hindsight, a mesh of equilateral triangles rendered in strips would have been a better compromise.
	The viewing distance has been set to 90km. The lack of depth cueing on the rather textureless hills is not good for gameplay. Viewing distances of 5-20-30km, depending on locality made for more interesting gameplay and visually appealing scenes.
	For the efficient ray casting used in collision prediction, aircraft guidance and radar simulation, the world is divided into 'partitions' 512m a side. Each partition stores the local minimum and maximum terrain heights and links to objects whose coordinate centres lie upon or over it.
	OpenGL makes debugging diagnostics a breeze.
	If you put all these pieces together, you've got yourself an AWACS.
	Even a cheesy fire and smoke effect can look impressive when it's animated. Most of the fire 'blobs' are emitted from a 'Pyre' object, which can be made to stick to other objects. The blobs are emitted at (non uniform) random displacements and velocities and are subject to air resistance and lift.
	Close up, the fire effect is more cheesy than amusing.
	The top half of the image is a collage of the actual fire and smoke animation frames used in the game. The bottom half is the set of transparency masks. Upon loading, the image is converted to an RGBA format used in OpenGL.

Blancmange's work on Fitznik

I had a lot of fun drawing much of the artwork in Fitznik, a neat and very polished shareware puzzle game written by Lerc of Screaming duck Software and released by Dexterity Software.

I did the artwork mainly because I didn't have much else to do and altering the graphics files for the game was kinda fun. I didn't really expect the game to come together within months and end up as a really respectable piece of shareware. Now it looks like I'll be getting a nice bit of extra income. Wha-haaaay!