Building The Right PC! (Low-End gaming)

Before we start, don't cheap out on ANY important component in the PC, what I mean is don't buy a really fast Processor and get a cheap Graphics Card for gaming. This will cause what is known as a bottleneck, the Processor (CPU) will be able to process information a lot faster than the Graphics Card (GPU), this is basically, a waste of a decent CPU.

There are 3 'ranges' when it comes to computer hardware, High-end, Low-end and Mid-level. The type of system you build is dependent on how much money you have to build a PC with, I had £400 when building my system, which doesn't seem like a lot for a gaming PC. But if you have a Hard-Drive with a copy of Windows on it then that cuts the price of building a PC by about £125.
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So enough with the chat, lets start with a Low-End system (£300-£500). First of all lets pick the right CPU (Central Processing Unit). I will be using http://www.scan.co.uk to pick all of the parts. I recommend going the Intel route, rather than AMD at this moment in time, unless you are desperate for a cheap quad core PC.

£91.38 - Intel Core i3 2120, S1155, 3.3GHz, 5GT/s, HD2000
For a Low-End system I would recommend this processor, a decent dual-core processor can be in some cases better than a bad quad core processor, obviously we will need a compatible motherboard to go with the processor:

£69.22 - MSI Z68A-G43 Gen 3 Intel Z68, S 1155, DDR3, SATA III - 6Gb/s, SATA RAID, PCIe 3.0 (x16)
This motherboard is a very good choice of motherboard, it supports the latest technologies such as SATA 3 and PCIe 3.0, making it futureproof while retaining a cheap price. Another factor when building a PC is RAM or memory:

£39.36 - 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance Blue DDR3 1600MHz
You may think that 8GB of RAM is a little overkill, but a few newer games have recommened having AT LEAST 4GB of RAM or over, so if you want a futureproof system you should go with 8GB of RAM. Next we move onto the Hard-Drive:


£59.48 - 500GB Western Digital WD5000AZRX Caviar Green, 3.5" HDD, SATA III - 6Gb/s, IntelliPower, 64MB Cache
500GB Hard-Drive for a fairly decent price boasting the latest SATA 3 technology which is supported by the motherboard. Now we choose a vital part in the gaming PC, the graphics card:

£70.40 - 1GB MSI HD 6770, PCIe 2.1 (x16), 4400MHz GDDR5, GPU 800MHz, 800 Cores, HDMI/ D-Sub/ Dual Link DVI-I
The 6770 is a decent card for under £80 (it is also the card I currently use) this could change with the release of the new 7xxx series by AMD but as it stands right now the 6770 can deliver decent framerates at medium/high settings. Optical Drives are needed to burn music onto, and obviously install windows:


£13.67 - LG GH24NS90 24x DVD±R, 12xDVD±DL, DVD+RW x8/-RWx6 Optical Drive
Pretty much all Optical/DVD Drives are dirt cheap at this moment in time. The LG is a good choice for a cheap price. We need something to power all this hardware also, so we need a PSU:


£40.38 - 650W PSU, Powercool PCPC650AUBA, 80 PLUS, SLI/CrossFire, Quiet Fan, ATX v2.2
This brings us up to £383.89 (minus delivery charges) which is a good price for this kind of system. There's two more things we need before this system is complete, that is a copy of Windows 7, and an awesome case to store all of this hardware in. Windows can cost anywhere between £70 - £120 depending on which version you buy, I'll be using the 64 bit OEM version on scan, which costs £72.08, which brings the grand total up to £455.97 as you can see by the steep price increase, Windows is an overpriced piece of crap software, but it has to be purchased (unless you *cough* download it *cough* which I do not endorse or recommend it can mess up your new system quite badly.)

£32.28 - Xclio Godspeed Two Advanced Black Mid Tower Case with 2 x180mm Side Fans, w/o PSU
The final item we need, the case. It's entirely down to you which case you pick, as long as it looks OK and provides good airflow to keep the components inside cool.


So that's it an awesome gaming PC for (just) under £500 (£488.25 to be precise). Next I will bring you a Mid-Level gaming PC build, for people with £500 - £800.

Y I no been posting

Well i'm going to make this short and sweet, I haven't posted for the past week because i've been on holiday.

Ill post some stuff soon

Bye

3D game dev has begun!

Full blown 3D game development has finally begun (it's about time).

For about 2-3 years now I have been working on 2D games. At the start of this year my new year resolution was to plan and start development on my 3D game. There are only a few details which I want to reveal, so here they come:

  - The game is a zombie game
  - It will be Action/RPG style
  - It will take place in a city
  - There is no main character, you are in a crew of about 5/6 people (haven't decided yet).

I have a few (by a few I mean alot) of pages on MSWord containing truckloads of information on my game. But I don't have a name for it yet... The past few months have been more focused on the creative side of the game, Storyline and some very bad concept art. The rest of the year is pretty much focused on the development side of it, and polising the storyline and other things like that. All that said, i'll probably still be working on this game in 2 years time.

Progress on all the game stuff below:

  - Storyline | 80% done
  - Game Engine | 100% done (using Unity so I did not make the engine)
  - Sound | 5% done 
  - Textures | 0% done
  - Game models | 1% done
  - Scripting | 0% done

  - Overall | 31% done

Update videos will be posted on my channel, and updates on the more geeky side of the game will be posted right here, on this blog.

Saving and Loading games

Saving and loading, seems simple, right. Well it's not.

For the past 5 hours or so I have been implementing a saving and (somewhat) loading system into my new game. About 2 hours of that was testing, the other 3 were figuring out how I would go about achieve saving and loading. The system now works fantastically, it saves the map into 100 different chunks, each holding data for approximately 187,500 blocks.

One chunk takes about 0.2 seconds to create and save and only takes up ~0.153MB (153KB). Here's some math on how fast it really does save and how much space a FULL world takes up:

  3000 * 1000 / 16 = 187500 blocks in 1 chunk
  187500 / 2 = 93750 blocks created & saved in 0.1 seconds
  187500 blocks = 0.153MBs of data
  0.153 * 100 (amount of chunks) = 153MB MAX in any given world
  Finally 187500 * 100 = 18,750,000 blocks stored in the save files

That's the math over and done with, basically what I'm trying to say is the method I have created for saving worlds is VERY efficient. (after 5 hours of work that's what you would expect). And this is all done in Game Maker 8.0. :)

Now it's time to move onto random world generation, this should be fun.

P.S: If anyone wants to make me a texture pack for the game feel free, here's the reference one (right click save file to your computer to save it):