The random ramblings of a French programmer living in Norway...
2012
  Tilemap tutorial (part 5)
Sun 9th December 2012   
Welcome to the fifth and final part of the Tilemap tutorial.

As promised in the previous article I will finally explain how to render the tilemap using a special shader that allows you to draw the whole tilemap with only two triangles.

  Tilemap tutorial (part 4)
Sun 2nd December 2012   
Welcome to the fourth part of the Tilemap tutorial.

The previous article explained the concept of batching and using texture atlases to draw a tilemap more efficiently.

This new article will finally attack the final topic: How to write a Tilemap optimized shader.

  Tilemap tutorial (part 3)
Thu 22nd November 2012   
Welcome to the third part of the Tilemap tutorial.

The previous article left us at the point where we could display tiles without wasting time drawing any of these out of the screen.

I will now explain the next step, which is to be more efficient at drawing the tiles.

  Tilemap tutorial (part 2)
Mon 19th November 2012   
Welcome to the second part of the Tilemap tutorial.

Hopefully at this point you should have a reasonably clear idea of what tiles and tilemaps are. Now is the time to see how this all translates in programming terms.

  Tilemap tutorial (part 1)
Sat 17th November 2012   
This is the first real article with technical content.

The reason I am writing it, is that apparently there are many people out there who are writing games using 2D tilemaps for the background, but unfortunately are using totally inefficient methods.

When I explained what I did on the #sfml support channel there was apparently a number of light bulbs appearing over people's head. So I thought it would be worth sharing what I did.

  Minitel memories
Sat 3rd November 2012   

What's this Minitel thing anyway

Outside of France most people never heard of the Minitel.

Released in 1981, first as a small scale test in Bretagne and then extended to the rest of the country, the Minitel business plan was a stroke of genius from France Telecom: Give the choice between the regular printed White Pages and a small dumb black and white terminal allowing you to find the same thing faster; then use the large number of available terminals to allow the creation of commercial offers to make a profit of it.