The Game Programming Wiki is a website dedicated to the design, programming, and overall creation of computer games. It's a reposity of language specific and language non-specific information including programming techniques, links to content creation tools, and pages that cover a game's design and management. Lots of what's on the site can be applied to BYOND games, so take a look when you have some time.

If you're wondering where to host pictures for your new BYOND website, there are a number of services on the web that let you do that, and for free. http://www.photobucket.com is one of those sites, providing free hosting for images that aren't too large. The monthly allotted bandwidth for free accounts is somewhere around 1500MB of transferred pictures per month(over 1 gigabyte!).

If photobucket isn't your cup of tea, there are plenty of other services out there. http://www.imageshack.us/ is another site turned up by a google search that looks pretty good too.

As a project that will hopefully turn into a game sometime in the future, I started working on isometric stuff in BYOND. I'm trying for a fairly generic engine that would be easily re-usable for multiple games.

One problem that I'm worried about is hitting BYOND's object limit. Whatever game I make will probably have to be either single-player, or multi-player on just a single, not too large map. The isometric tiles are created using either turfs, or pixel-offsetted overlays on those turfs. Anything else(like the walls in the screenshot below) will end up being either an obj, or a mob. Each wall object is really four objs. Two for the bottom left and right, and two for the top left and right.

Here's a screenshot of a 4x4 isometric map made in BYOND. Each tile is 64x32. I had tried 32x16 earlier, but that tile size was fairly small. Also, out of every four isometric tiles, three would have needed to be represented by an overlay.

And here's a screenshot with some half-height walls randomly placed on top of the tiles.

Comments, criticism, and a way to get antialiased models to render out without a black line all the way around are welcome. :)

Edit: After looking around for awhile, I found a plugin to do exactly what I wanted. Here's a screenshot with antialiased walls(the walls also have a different texture size). Goodbye jaggies!

After playing around with my blog's CSS for a bit, I realized that I know next to nothing about how to make good colour choices. While searching for tutorials to remedy my lack of knowledge, I found this site, http://www.visibone.com/colorlab/. The site makes it quick, easy, and painless to test multiple combinations of websafe colours and see how they look together. Hopefully it can help the appearance of my blog. :)

My first post on this blog, and first blog post period! This post is here so I can play with the CSS to try and get a nicer looking site. :)