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September 02, 2010

Spring

Spring 0.82.5 bug fix release

Edit: This version is now live on the server.

Thanks for the testing and bug fixing.

Download links:


Detailed changes since 0.82.4:

Engine / General:
  • draw icons for cloaked units again
  • fix NaNs if map hardness is zero
  • fix UnitPreDamaged Lua CallIn

Engine / AI:
  • AAI: do not crash on game end if mod did not spawn a commander in the first 450 frames
  • E323AI: lots of fixes & support for NOTA & Conflict Terra and AI options

Statistics: Posted by hoijui - 02 Sep 2010, 21:06 - Replies 7 - Views 175


by hoijui at September 02, 2010 09:06 PM

Game programming news for newbies

Unigine announces Oil Rush

Yesterday Unigine Corp. officially announced Oil Rush, a naval RTS game, which will be simultaneously released for Windows, Linux and PS3. The game has been in development internally at Unigine Corp. since 2009. In my opinion, this title was needed to showcase the potential of this engine, even when Unigine demos have earned a place as benchmarking tool in Phoronix Test Suite, it is not the same in other popular video hardware review sites for Windows. And, if you check the products list, you wont see any released title.
Another interesting detail is that Unigine Corp. is going for the Linux platform, traditionally forgotten by major game companies. The only meaning I see in this move is to prove that their engine allows developing for Linux in parallell with other platforms (usually game developers program for Windows and then port the finished product to Linux, which is a sure recipe for disaster) lowering costs.
I expect that all of you, Linux gamers, go and buy this Oil Rush.

by roger (noreply@blogger.com) at September 02, 2010 11:56 AM

Grumbel's Random Thoughts

Review: Metroid Fusion (GBA)

I recently replayed Metroid Fusion for the Game Boy Advance. In terms of graphics the game still holds up nicely, it doesn't look quite as good as say a Castlevania on the NintendoDS, but as far as the GBA is concerned it is definitely one of the better looking games. Sound and music are also pretty good. The controls are a bit overloaded due to the lack of buttons on the DS, but work overall quite nicely. The L button lets you aim up or down in a 45 degree angle, holding R lets you shoot missiles or charge missiles and A and B let you shoot and jump. Pressing start will show you a map of the explored area.

Like previous Metroid games this one also provides a chain of of collectable extras that give you new abilities, you get those collectables after basically every boss fight. It is the standard stuff for most part, morph ball, bombs, high jump, screw attack, etc. The one new thing is that you now got an chargeable ice missile instead of a regular ice shoot, but it serves much the same purpose as before.

One nice new core game mechanic is the way how you refresh your energy. Like in previous games enemies that have been killed will leave collectibles that will refresh you missiles or energy, but in Metroid Fusions those collectibles are actually viruses that will, if not collected quickly, respawn into a new enemy. It is also possible to kill two smaller enemies and then have their viruses respawn together as a single bigger enemy. This mechanic gives the game a great sense of speed and urgency as you end up constantly hopping around and collecting things.

Unlike Super Metroid however, this one is a lot more talky. The game is separated into 7 sectors and at the entrance to each sector you will have a short dialog with an AI computer. While every now and then this provides interesting story bits, it sometimes feels a little to much as all you get is another objective to collect this or that item. The story driven nature of this game also adds a bunch of linearity to the game. You always have a next objective to fulfill and there is very little room or reason to go exploring and due to the way many secrets are only accessible with newer power ups that you might not yet have. The one point where you can freely explore is right before the very last boss fight and while it is fun to revisit old locations and explore every spot of the map, it is also rather pointless, as at that point you simply do not need any of the extras any more. Unlike the Metroid Prime series, collectable items will be marked on a map, this makes it much easier to keep track of what got collected.

The one area where the story telling in Metroid Fusion really shines are the encounters with SA-X. SA-X is an fully powered up Samus clone in the Super Metroid suit that you will run across multiple times in the game. It is undefeatable, thus your only job is to survive the encounters. This can be accomplished by either freezing it with ice missiles or hiding. The music, pacing and the fact that they all play out through normal gameplay makes those encounters extremely suspendsful. SA-X and other boss enemies will will also from time to time leave a trail of destruction behind them, thus blocking previously accessible path and forcing you to find another way around.

The difficult of the game is pretty well balanced, providing a decent challenge, without ever getting to hard. The once exception is the Nightmare boss, that one is by far the hardest boss in the game and takes by far the longest to defeat compared to other bosses. The game also has a few situations where it is not all that obvious you have to do. In one instance a locked door will only open up, after you defeated some enemies that only appear after two viruses combined. While having doors open up when all enemies are defeated is not a new mechanic in games in general, it is used only exactly once in the whole game and there really isn't any reason given why that happens. In those cases you are mostly looked up into a rather tiny environment, so there isn't all that much chance that you wander off into a completly wrong direction, but in those few cases where this becomes an issue a few additional hints would have been welcome.

In terms of length the game is not the longest, but fine for a handheld game, an average play through will probably take you around five hours, collecting all the items might almost double.

Overall this is probably my favorite Game Boy Advance game. While the way the story adds linearity and slows things down can be annoying, the story itself is perfectly fine for a handheld game and serves well in giving you points to go to and explanations for new game mechanics. Some non-linearity would however have been welcome instead of giving the player a completely guided experience. There is still a bit of exploration to be done, as your objectives might not give you an exact room to go to or tell you how to get there, but you don't really get to do exploration on a larger scale till the very end. The nice thing about the exploration however is that you will learn a few new moves that you likely never used in the normal game, so while the new energy tanks might be rather useless, you actually do see a few new and interesting things and some items provide a good challenge to figure out.

by noreply@blogger.com (Grumbel) at September 02, 2010 09:13 AM

OSARE

20100902

Gold Coins The latest check-in has gold coins dropping from creatures/containers. Warning: if you get over 2 billion gold yo

September 02, 2010 07:30 AM

September 01, 2010

PixelLight

PixelLight mailing lists and wiki

After one week, we've already received a lot of feedback and questions over various channels. That's really great and we hope that the discussion about PixelLight will not stop too soon.

However, as much of the discussion is taking place on the blog comments, we thought that we should point you to our wiki and mailing lists, which seem to be mostly undiscovered yet ;-)

PixelLight public mailing list:

http://lists.pixellight.org/listinfo/pixellight

PixelLight Wiki:

http://developer.pixellight.org/wiki

Please feel free to subscribe to the mailing list for your questions and/or discussion about PixelLight. And in the wiki you can already find some additional tutorials and documentations for PixelLight, but there is more of it needed, especially more tutorials and howtos for artists would be really nice. So we would be glad if some of you would like to contribute to our wiki, too :-)

by Stefan Buschmann at September 01, 2010 12:33 PM

Game programming news for newbies

Dont piss off your clients!

Your clients pay your salary, dont forget that. So, it is better if you make easy for them to pay you.
A couple of weeks ago I wanted to get some premium content in Regnum Online. My previous experience with premium content in online games was with Travian and its Pay by SMS system. Totally painless: you simply send an SMS from any of the supported countries, you get a code back and done, you have your gold.
But in Regnum Online, your account declared country must match the country from which the SMS is going to be sent. Well, not a big problem, the Tech Support can change update my account... except that Tech Support seems to take up to a month to attend the mail requests. If they attend them at all. Mine never was attended.
Ok, lets take the hard route: Paypal. I cant access my Paypal account from my country, so I have to use a proxy. Well, that shouldnt be a problem. Wrong, it is a problem. Regnum site checks the country from where you are accessing, if it doesnt matches your account country... again, you are in trouble.
In the end, I had to access Regnum site and change the proxy right before clicking the button to pay. But now they have a client that will no longer  pay for premium content.
I cant underestand the reasons to make paying for your services so complicated. Probably, we all should learn this lesson.

by roger (noreply@blogger.com) at September 01, 2010 10:27 AM

OSARE

20100901

OSARE v0.08 "Loot" Released The newest OSARE release is focused on loot. Over 500 items are in the game, dropped from enem

September 01, 2010 06:30 AM

August 31, 2010

Spring

Spring 0.82.4 bug fix release

NOTE: This is not yet live on the lobby server, you still need 0.82.3 to play online!

Some more issues have been fixed since the last release, so hereby we present the next build, which we plan to be the last of the 0.82 series.

Credits to BrainDamage, kloot, zerver and jk for the bug fixing and everyone else who helped testing, reported bugs, submitted patches or contributed in some other form!


Download links:


Detailed changes since 0.82.3:

Engine / General:
  • fix demo desyncs if commands were issued during pause
  • fix abnormal demo speed (during reconnect and temporary lags)
  • fix demo runs away from local user
  • fix mid-game join
  • fix FullScreen mode under Linux
  • fix KDE/GNOME detection for error message box
  • fix another FPU reset in LuaLobby
  • don't reload defaults each time /ctrlpanel command is used (behaves now the same way as /cmdcolors)
  • speed up reflection pass a little
  • disable heatmapping by default
  • fix COB's KILL_UNIT for self-kills
  • fix bugged default-argument passing in path-follower
  • fix broken return-value handling for UnitPreDamaged
  • OBJParser: deal with carriage returns
  • fix holdSteady (and sweeping beamlaser) rotations
  • fix SEGV when /give'ing features
  • fix crash when linking grass shaders on non GLSL system
  • fix specs do not see all features
  • fix Projectiles do not show up for missile weapons or torpedoes
  • fix crash on bad playername message
  • disable team highlighting for spectators by default
  • fix incorrect ClipPlanes in DrawInMinimap if gl.SlaveMiniMap is used
  • fix metal-maker widget

Engine / AI:
  • fix crash on capture from/by AI
  • fix Python AI Interface
  • AAI support version independent mod config files, for example BA.cfg

Engine / Dedicated server:
  • fix/re-add sync-check
  • possibly fix crash when sending data to improperly-connected autohost socket

Unitsync:
  • add support for more then 16 start positions

Installer:
  • fix checks for installed .Net version
  • add SpringDownloader desktop shortcut

CMake:
  • fix _make install-spring_ to work after initial configure
  • fix windows linking (related to -lws2_32)

Documentation:
  • updated man pages: spring & spring-dedicated
  • new man pages: spring-headless & spring-multithreaded

Statistics: Posted by hoijui - 31 Aug 2010, 18:48 - Replies 15 - Views 498


by hoijui at August 31, 2010 06:48 PM

August 30, 2010

OSARE

20100830

Bug Testing for v0.08 The latest OSARE Google Code check-in is my candidate for v0.08. Included is nearly 600 game items,

August 30, 2010 07:30 PM

Game programming news for newbies

CEGUI 0.7.2

Good news (well, I think so) for CEGUI users, we have another release! And this time, we have experimental support for MinGW. What a coincidence, a few days ago I was thinking that I had to build it by myself to keep my Code::blocks project alive.

by roger (noreply@blogger.com) at August 30, 2010 01:13 PM

PixelLight

Problem running the demos on Windows solved [updated]

We've received a lot of reports that the demos don't run on many of your Windows systems. Symptoms are that the demos just "don't start" and if you then have a look into the log file, you will find something like this:


[Error]: C:\PLDungeonDemo_Windows_23082010\PLRendererOpenGL.plugin: Can't load the plugin library 'C:/PLDungeonDemo_Windows_23082010/PLRendererOpenGL.dll'
[Error]: Can't create renderer context instance: PLRendererOpenGL::Renderer


We've looked into that and found out that one of our runtime dependencies for the OpenGL renderer plugin was still using the MSVC Debug runtime. So on computers that do not have MSVC installed, this is not available and therefore it fails silently when the system tries to load the OpenGL plugin (PLRendererOpenGL.dll).

We've fixed this problem and uploaded new demo packages, please tell us if it works for you now.

The problem also applies to the SDK, of course, and we're currently creating a new package for that as well. This will just take a little longer, so stay tuned :-)

Update:

The SDK has been updated, so the problem should now be solved for both the demos and the SDK. You can download the newest PixelLight SDK (Version 0.9.2-R2) from the download page. There is no new version for linux, because this bug only applied to the Windows version.

by Stefan Buschmann at August 30, 2010 11:37 AM

Game programming news for newbies

Cyphesis 0.5.24

Has been a long time since I mentioned Cyphesis here. Im glad to report that at last, another version has been released: 0.5.24.
And talking about MMORPG frameworks, I want to introduce you a new one: MProject. The development blog is in spanish, but you can see some screenshots, the latest showing integration with Particle Universe (the client uses Ogre as rendering engine).

by roger (noreply@blogger.com) at August 30, 2010 11:10 AM

August 29, 2010

jMonkeyEngine

jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK Alpha-2 Released!

The jMonkeyEngine team is happy to announce the release of jMonkeyEngine3 SDK Alpha-2!

Many improvements have been made to the core jMonkeyEngine as well as to the jMonkeyPlatform since Alpha-1 and generally jME3 is gaining more and more steam. We are happy to see many new users and even contributors and that tells us that we are on the right way. Everybody is very determined to make the jME3 SDK a premier OpenGL and game development tool and we are just as eager as you to see a beta soon ;) .

See a partial list of changes hee:

jMonkeyEngine

  • PSSM / SSAO
  • Picking / Collision fixed
  • New Input System
  • Many Physics improvements, esp. Vehicle
  • Physics load/save
  • First implementation of a water shader (WIP)
  • Many small bug fixes and added methods
jMonkeyPlatform
  • Way faster jMP due to fixed logging bug
  • Material (j3m) editing in jMP (video)
  • Improved SceneComposer (see video below)
  • Linking of models into scenes (see video below)
  • Physics support in SceneExplorer
  • Texture editing tool
  • Online Documentation for jMP and jME3 via “F1″
  • GLSL Code Editor (Contribution Center)
  • Collada Import (Contribution Center, Alpha)

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

This is the first release that introduces a new installer and by using advanced compression, we were able to reduce the release download size to 75MB, including jMP, jME and all test data.

jMP alpha-2 also introduces the “jMonkeyPlatform User Contributions” update center. If you go to “Tools”->”Plugins”->”Available Plugins” you can install some new plugins to jMP that are not part of the core jMP but have been contributed by users or are packaged from external libraries/projects (Category jMP User Contributions).

Download jMonkeyEngine3 SDK Alpha-2 for your OS now:

If you have problems after installing, delete your jMonkeyPlatform settings folder:

Windows: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\.jmonkeyplatform
Windows (alt): C:\Users\<username>\.jmonkeyplatform\
MacOSX: /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/jmonkeyplatform
Ubuntu:  /home/<username>/.jmonkeyplatform

Happy coding,

the jMonkeyEngine Team

by admin at August 29, 2010 07:23 PM

Grumbel's Random Thoughts

Fixing Wacom Aspect Ratio in Linux

Older Wacom tablets have a 4:3 or 5:4 aspect ratio, while modern monitors have 16:9 or 16:10, this leads to a distortion of the drawing area. One can get used to it, but one can also easily fix it by using xinput, by issuing a command like this:

xinput set-int-prop "Wacom Intuos2 6x8" "Wacom Tablet Area" 32 0 1770 20320 14470

This will change the active area on the tablet to the last four numbers on the line, which are left, top, right and bottom, different tablets will need different numbers, just calculate them from the default ones. The 32 in that line is just there to tell xinput that we are providing a 32bit integer, it is not a configuration parameter for the Wacom device itself.

The name of the tablet varies, to find out the correct one, one uses:

xinput list

There are also plenty of other configuration parameters that one can tweak, a full list is available with:

xinput list-props "Wacom Intuos2 6x8"

This list also includes the current values of all the properties, so if you don't know what the area of your Wacom is, you can use it to look it up.

Note that a Wacom tablet will normally show up as multiple devices, your pen is one, your eraser is another and the mouse is yet another, so you might want to change the active area for all those devices, not just one. Making changes with xinput is not persistent, so after every restart of Xorg, it will be back to its default values.

An alternative way to accomplish this is described in the Ubuntu Documentation, which works by using the KeepShape option in xorg.conf.

by noreply@blogger.com (Grumbel) at August 29, 2010 11:54 AM

OSARE

20100829

Item Database All of the coding is done for the v0.08 loot update. Woot! What remains is adding all the starting ga

August 29, 2010 09:45 AM

August 27, 2010

OpenGameArt

Top Submitters and Most Popular Art

Hi folks!

Just a quick heads up.  On the home page, immediately below this post, are two new blocks.  One of them lists the top submitters in the last 30 days, and the other one lists the most popular art in that same period.  I've removed the old "most popular" block, as it was self-reinforcing and pretty much always showed the same stuff. :)

Anyway, this is a competition, and unless you're in first place, there are people ahead of you.  Are you okay with that?  No?  I didn't think so.  Better submit some art! :)

Bart

P.S.  Kudos to WeaponGuy, who is in the lead at the time of this post.

Tags: 
Site News

by bart at August 27, 2010 04:32 AM