FreeGameDev Planet - Development

OGStudio - Some new screenshots

2012-02-06T22:02:19+00:00

OpenMW - Not bad.

2012-02-05T13:57:54+00:00

Hello everyone!

OpenMW have now brand new http://www.youtube.com/user/MrOpenMW Good idea since until now videos was scattered around few youtube channels. That’s thanks to new guy called ElderTroll who joined our team to participate in PR efforts. Although We was a little confused at first (mostly because nick suggested some kind of treachery) He seems to be so enthusiastic.

http://openmw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Project_History contains now old changelogs. Also ElderTroll job.

Also another new user: Mircceam94 joined us recently and started to mess up with the code, becoming new developer.

Since chatspike had some problems #openmw was moved to freenode. And it seems that channel is now more active by far. Yesterday I spent too much time on this channel for sure.

lgro reports that rootnode was attacked by hacker nicknamed Brudny_Koń (translates into Dirty Horse). Everything was already spoken on forum.

I guess that there is no reason to fear since we have backups anyway.

When it comes to development:

GUS is doing dialogue task. It’s not that simple, mostly because lack of documentation. Actually GUS could use some support of experienced modder to answer his questions.

Yacoby have some problems with terrain. Ogre3d terrain lib seems to be not so perfect as initially looked like and some bugs are difficult to fix. Ogre3d forum support helps a lot.

Jhooks is looking into our and project aedra physics code. As all of us know current physic implementation is pretty bad…

… and project aedra has a better one for sure. Although our project is very different from aedra we both use libbullet so examining aedra could give us a lot.

The bad news is that numerous bugs showed up recently and a lot of bugfixing is needed to solve it. Zini is a little angry because of this situation but no one can blame him, really.

jMonkeyEngine - Interview with Jeremy “phr00t” – Developer of 3079

2012-02-05T10:31:11+00:00

Back in October, a user called “phr00t” wrote a guest post on our blog called The Making of 3079. Since then, the cube based shooter-adventure game set in space known as 3079 has risen to fandom status in the indie circles. In this interview, Jeremy “phr00t” talks about his peculiar road to the fleeting wonder that is online fame.

So, let me just start by saying, WOW! I think a lot of us saw great potential in 3079, but I’ll be the first to say, I never expected such an explosive popularity, at least not so soon. What can you attribute it to?

Thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you and jMonkeyEngine’s community help.

What can i attribute the explosive popularity to? Well, it started to ramp up quickly after posting a trailer to reddit’s gamedev community where it was well received. A public relations guy for the game Towns, Alex Poysky, saw my game and he has really helped me get 3079 to more places. Yogscast also did a video of my game quite early in development, which helped quite a bit.

Erlend: hah, no doubt. almost 1 million views on that video now I believe

Jeremy: oh wow!

Do you have a favorite statistic thus far?

I was #1 on Desura and IndieDB for a bit. I was also the most common search term to get to Indie Game Magazine‘s website around that time

Let’s talk more about Desura. What has your experience been like with this up-and-coming payment platform?

It has been overall pretty good. It was a bit of back and forth to get it actually up on Desura. Basically, you have to show that your game will sell, and I was selling 3079 on BMT Micro for about a month or so before trying to get on Desura, and that helped. Alex also was a big help, since he already had a game up on Desura. Having my game up on Desura has brought the game to many gamers, but, if i had to nitpick, I’m not a fan of the update authorization waiting period. I put out an update, and it takes about 32 hours for the Desura team to push it out. People who purchase through my website, BMT Micro, get the latest update immediately.

So 3079 was in development roughly 6 months before launch, correct?

I suppose that long before launch on desura, but I was selling it on BMT Micro at around 4 or 5 months

Erlend: and you’ve been holding a day job alongside your game development all this time?

Jeremy: I have, and raising a 4 month old son — I’ve been pretty busy!

Has the success of your game made you reconsider your employment status, or are you happy as a hobby developer?

Wwell, it depends on how things go in the mid to long term. I’m quite happy at my day job, and I enjoy the people I work with. I’d be pretty lonely without my job. If 3079 really continues to take off, we’ll see

So how long would do you reckon you’ve been actively developing games as a hobby?

Since middle school?.. 10-15 years, somewhere in that range. I started with QBasic.

Erlend: To be honest, as much as it scares me, that seems to be the average amount of time required for an indie developer to finally make a hit game not meaning 10 years of development on one project, but 10 years of trial and error.

Jeremy: i never really thought of getting into commercial game development until about a year or so ago, when i started making android games. But yes, trial and error has much to do with it, and taking lots of constructive criticism to find out what people like even though you will never satisfy everyone!

Would you say your decision to look at games as more than a hobby, and rather a prospective income, helped you push 3079 to success?

Honestly, not really.., developing games has always been my hobby and even as I develop 3079 today, it still feels like a hobby. But it is one i take very seriously and enjoy. Having it sell and make money is really just icing on the cake

So what are your plans for the future as far as game development goes? judging by your personal website, you’re not a one-epic-project kind of guy. how long do you see yourself fully committed to 3079?

That is really difficult to say. I don’t really have a time or date set for when i will stop working with 3079. All of my previous games were fun to develop, but none of them were anything close to 3079, which still has so much potential.

So if all things 3079 were completely erased from existence today, would you already have one or more ideas you’d consider pursuing?

Yeah, i actually have another 3D game idea that I’d like to work on, but I’m currently on 3079. Alex, the PR guy working with me, also has an idea he’d love me to work on too, hehe.

I’ve made lots of 2D games, and now that I know how to make successful 3D games, I’d like to recreate some of those games in 3D

Erlend: with jMonkeyEngine?

Jeremy: of course. Seriously, jMonkeyEngine is where its at, and that is no lie. Cross platform compatibility out of the box, great performance and it is relatively easy to use. Community has been very helpful. Why would i want to go elsewhere?

Erlend: he he, much appreciated.

If you could improve on one thing in jME3 / jMPThe jMonkeyPlatform, a full-fledged IDE with plugins for editing jME3 content and assets. Integral part of the jME3 SDK., what would it be?

I remember when i first was getting started, I wanted more GUI options, and there was NiftyGUI. But I don’t think there was a way to develop the GUI inside the Java code. You had to make XML files. This might have changed by now, but I remember wishing I could just make NfityGUI elements via code.

Lastly, any word of advice for all the budding game developers in the jMonkeyEngine community and elsewhere?

Keep developing and take feedback from your supporters. And set goals. Like, are you trying to make your current game sell, or is it a learning project? It can be difficult to start a new project, wanting to learn how to make games, while at the same time making it polished and commercially viable although a learning project may turn into a commercial game, I suppose.

Also I’m surprised at how time consuming it is to have a popular project, responding to help requests, feature requests etc.

Alright, extra ninja question: What was the 3079 goal?

I wanted to make a 3D game i’d be proud of. I made 3069, a 3D game i wasn’t really proud of. It was decent, but I really wanted to do something better.

My new end goal for 3079 is to get on steam!

You might be interested in:

OGStudio - Sign-up via facebook is now tested and available.

2012-02-03T17:10:07+00:00

We managed to fix all issues with SocialLogin plugin, and now you can use your account on Facebook to sign-up on our site.

OGStudio - Sign-up problem with Facebook and Twitter

2012-02-02T18:20:02+00:00

Unfortunately, we had some problems with sign-up on our website using the account in Facebook and Twitter.
We have fixed the registration via Twitter, but the problem with the Facebook still remains.
We are removing the Facebook account linking from the list of ways sign-up.
All other methods from the list were checked for serviceability.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused to all those who failed to sign-up using theese methods.

OGStudio - OGS Mahjong 0.9 is ready

2012-01-30T22:56:56+00:00

We have reached the next stage on the way to the cherished version 1.0. We’re releasing the OGS Mahjong 0.9, and we’re calling this version our first release candidate. All features that we wanted to see implemented in this game has been done. Of course, we need to fix some bugs, polish the game and add some new features requested by players. But overall, we’re getting to the finish line and soon we’ll be ready to finish the development of this game and move on to the next project.

But this will happen in the spring. And now – the work continues.

Changes

In OGS Mahjong 0.9, we’re offering you

Completely new environment for the playfield (thanks to Anton Chernoff for the room model).
Support for shaders in materials of tiles and scene.
The possibility to select the environment and the tileset separatly.
Support for kmahjongg-1.1 layout format with non-standard sizes.
A new, more user-friendly game settings interface.
Dynamic language switching. French localization (thanks to Thierry Delaunay for the translation).
Installer for the version for Windows.
The layout editor with support for kmahjongg-1.1 format.
Three new music tracks in the additional music archive (one from Kevin MacLeod and two from JewelBeat.com).
And a lot of bugfixes.

Dowbload links

Game source code(417.3 Kb)
Additional music (download it and unpack to the game folder)(66.3 Mb)
Layout Editor(Windows)(5.9 Mb)
Layout Editor(Python sources, uses PyQt4)(5.3 Kb)

The users of Ubuntu, Debian and Mint linux distributions can use our repository:

deb http://packages.opengamestudio.org stable ogs
apt-get install ogs-mahjong

You can additionally install:

apt-get install ogs-mahjong-layout-editor
apt-get install ogs-mahjong-music-addon

Feel free to download and play the game. Leave your comments on our forum.

qbismSuper8 - Next build – colored lighting loose ends

2012-01-30T17:49:18+00:00

Network support for dynamic light color controlled by qc. glow_color or similar. Will pass red/ green/ blue components. Add colored effect for quad, etc., maybe. EF_BLUE, EF_RED, EF_GREEN(?) May not need if glow_color is supported. Try a new default palette. It might be possible to tweak it for better-looking colored lights.

qbismSuper8 - Build 53 download

2012-01-30T17:38:22+00:00

Sorry, I left an old exe build in the zip. It is fixed now. Please re-download build 53.

FLARE - 20120130

2012-01-30T15:00:40+00:00

Wyvern, perhaps To break past this EnemyBehavior code, I think the best course of action is to make a new creature that req

qbismSuper8 - Super8 build 53 screenshots

2012-01-30T03:51:58+00:00

A few shots from ID maps with MH’s lit pack. One thing I like about the effect is the variety it adds to textures. Even on large walls with repeating textures, each appears unique.

qbismSuper8 - Quake C Custom Entities (custents)

2012-01-30T03:48:55+00:00

Maybe some qc coders are new or forgetful like me and don’t know about custents, or about the QuakeC Extras previously posted. Custents provides a toolbox of qc examples and extensive documentation. download custents QC changes from the readme: New qc files ———— actors.qc * contains all the code for the actor entities apocmisc.qc * [...]

qbismSuper8 - Build 53 – with colored lights!

2012-01-30T03:48:10+00:00

Just going to drop this here for now – qbismS8_0053 This version will load .lit files, a standard for colored lighting in Quake maps. This build also features dynamic colored lighting as well. The funny thing is that it will likely run FASTER than the previous release due to the return of assembly code for [...]

OpenMW - News again.

2012-01-29T14:52:19+00:00

Hello.

So water rendering is going fine. Cell switching works with exteriors and It seems that, well We have a water rendering almost finished. Jhooks wanted to give some credit to Azathoth for helping him. Thank you very much Azathoth!

And since jhooks is free It’s time to fight with animation issues again. Performance is still not satisfying when animating bunch of npcs.

GUS is on Dialogue GUI/System task. Although GUI was already quite advance there is still much to be done to make it functional.

Yacoby is still developing terrain. Still a lot to do, for example tga/bmp textures (bmp textures are lame but are supported by MW and used in old mods like Wizards Island).

And Configuration/Path handling is progressing too, thanks to lgro. Zini wants to throw new version soon as already It took plenty of time to finish.

But that’s not real problem, It didn’t stopped work on OpenMW even for a moment.

And that’s just perfect.

OGRE - User Survey 2011 Report

2012-01-29T11:48:14+00:00

It has been quite some time since end of August the Ogre3D User Survey 2011 was closed, so we are happy to finally be able to release the survey report. The report itself does not comment or interpret the results, but is just a mere aggregated representation of the information. The discussion itself will take place at the forums.

OgreUserSurvey2011.pdf

Thanks to everyone who participated and made with survey such a success!

Your Ogre3D Team

DusteD Games - Bad luck

2012-01-29T07:50:24+00:00

Disk crashed, must spend time fixing computer instead of coding game :(

OGStudio - New tile theme

2012-01-28T19:13:47+00:00

While testing previous versions of the game, we found that our “Classic” tileset is not very comfortable to play. We have studied the issue for some time, and made a new tileset – “Neo-classic”. It utilizes the set of characters from the famous Gnome Mahjongg tileset called “Postmodern”. We’re taking the opportunity to thank the Gnome Games developers for the resources, that we have used to make this tileset.

Some screenshots of a new tileset.

We’re continuing to refine this tileset and haven’t yet decided whether it will be added to the upcoming version 0.9 or will be available later as a separate download.

Sylphis3D - The first game using Sylphis is here!

2012-01-26T09:41:38+00:00

The first ever full game to be build utilising the Sylphis3D game engine is about to be released! Find out more here:

http://kalogirou.net/2012/01/26/unveiling-pop-corny/
http://facebook.com/MrPopCorny
http://twitter.com/MrPopCorny

FLARE - 20120125

2012-01-25T15:45:47+00:00

EnemyBehavior I've been thinking about the EnemyBehavior interface and it's tricky. I'm trying to plan for several future e

DusteD Games - Wizznic! for Nokia N900/Maemo5

2012-01-25T04:29:52+00:00

Some awesome person, Aapo Rantalainen have worked on Wizznic! And ported
it to the Maemo5 platform, and in particular, the N900 phone. This looks really
promising, and there's even touchscreen support there, which will be really sweet
when I complete my work on making the whole UI pointer-aware :D

The code from Aapo will be merged into the Wizznic! master branch as soon as I
complete the UI work. :)

Here's the announcement.

The code is here, I think it was done on windows since the patches are a bit off,
which means a some manual labour for me, but never the less, this is an amazing piece of work which is greatly appreciated :)

And last and most awesome, a video of the thing running! :)

OpenGameArt - Back on my soapbox: The silver lining of the MegaUpload shutdown

2012-01-23T20:49:25+00:00

Back on my soapbox: The silver lining of the MegaUpload shutdown

bart

Monday, January 23, 2012 - 15:49

I wrote a blog entry on FreeGamer about the MegaUpload shutdown, and how we might be able to get something good out of it. It's probably preaching to the choir here on OGA, but if you're interested, have a look:

http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2012/01/silver-lining-of-megaupload-shutdo...

DusteD Games - More Wizznic :P

2012-01-23T12:33:11+00:00

Been hacking a bit more on Wizznic, finding the "angle of least change" in order
to turn the text/arrow keys based menus into something that also works with a mouse-pointer..
I made a nasty hack that I quite like, and that I suggest you think about twice before doing..
Every time I call my "txtWrite" function, that function will now update an internal variable containing the "box" size of the text..
So, right after a call to txtWrite, if I do getTxtBox, I get a pointer to this rectangle.
Thus:
txtWrite("Some text", some, position);
if ( isBoxClicked( getTxtBox() ) ) { //Box was clicked }

Hehe..
In other news, I was briefly hospitalized this thursday, and thus, wasted a weekend of coding, so wizznic release date is pushed a week, meaning there's also a slim chance my gfx guy have the time he needs to finish another theme :)

OpenMW - News!

2012-01-22T16:50:22+00:00

Journal task is finished for now (It’s very basic but We don’t need anything more than that at the moment), GUS is free to focus on the other frontiers, like dialog GUI task, or meshes orientation bug. Good. Very good! Many have fallen in the battle with GUI tasks, so developer who survived and is somewhat experienced with mygui is even more important as He can do not only tasks on his own but also support other developers.

Developers! Developers! Developers!

lgro continues his work on configuration handling. Task is not that small as It seems but It’s only one left for release and It doesn’t interact with other tasks like water or terrain rendering.

Terrain task is going well and smoothly, and that’s not surprising since Yacoby knows very well what to do. Once again experience proves to be useful.

jHooks is doing fine with water rendering as well. In interior cells it works mostly well, while work on rendering water in exterior cells had only began.

One last thing: lgro (our beloved admin) upgraded wiki and forum recently. Forum members recevied PM but I will quote It for those who are not forum members yet:

Hi,
forum and wiki upgrade is done. If you encounter any strange bugs or something, please let me know (send me e-mail or pm, or just write a post in “Discuss the site” subforum), and I will try to fix it.

OGStudio - MJEdit-0.4

2012-01-22T07:21:17+00:00

New version of OGS Mahjong Layout Editor is available.

Changes from last version

Support for kmahjongg-1.1 format. Can load, create and save kmahjongg-1.1 files.
Support for description files.
Prompting to save changes when exit.

Download links

OctaForge - Official Windows x64 support

2012-01-21T23:52:17+00:00

Announcements

Announcing official Windows x64 support. Binaries will ship next release. It's thanks to the new version of SDL and accompanying libs, that bring their dependencies up to date as well as other modifications.

That also means support for new formats, FLAC in SDL_mixer and WebP in SDL_image, respectively.

LibSIEGE - Moved across servers

2012-01-20T11:17:17+00:00

If you haven’t been able to reach the website during the last few days, it was due to DNS propagation and because I’ve been fiddling with the new server.

And by fiddling, I mean that the website has been moved to a new server, and I still had (and have) to configure some things. You’ll also notice that the theme is currently semi-broken (the title bar, for example, should have a dark background) – I’m working on that.

The good news is that SIEGE is now on a much better server than before (it’s a dedicated server), which means that I’ll be able to put up, say, a bugtracker which doesn’t use PHP (there’s a lot to choose from though).

Me::Programmer.class - Android Bitmap Idiosyncrasies

2012-01-19T11:38:00+00:00

Whilst improving my Android app Chromakey Photo Edit, I've come across a few idiosyncrasies with Android Bitmaps which I thought I'd share for reference:-

Bitmap.createScaledBitmap() always returns a bitmap of type RGB_565, regardless of the source bitmap. See http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=13038
ARGB_4444 is now depreciated, so you'll always need to use ARGB_8888 if you want to store transparency information.
When using BitmapFactory.decodeFile(), always try to pass a BitmapFactory.Options().inPreferredConfig to ensure you get a bitmap in the format you need. By default, bitmaps loaded this way are always immutable (editable), so you'll need to do a Bitmap.copy() if you need to make it mutable.
Bitmap.recycle() is not neccesarily required, but can help improve the garbage collection.

OGStudio - Testing windows installer for OGS Mahjong

2012-01-18T19:02:50+00:00

The testing version of windows installer for OGS Mehjong 0.9 is ready. Please, try it and tell us if you’ll find any problems with the game installation or removal.

~~OGS Mahjong 0.9.exe(46.8 MB)~~
Fixed installer: ogs-mahjong-0.9-windows32.exe(49.1 MB)

Crystal Space - News CS 2.0 beta2

2012-01-18T18:32:45+00:00

Crystal Space and Crystal Entity Layer 2.0 beta 2 have been released.

Check out the Download page for downloads and see what's new.

Crystal Space - News CS 2.0 beta3

2012-01-18T18:32:19+00:00

Crystal Space and Crystal Entity Layer 2.0 beta 3 have been released.

Check out the Download page for downloads and see what's new.

Crystal Space - News CS CEL and Ares future Call for help and donations

2012-01-18T18:31:14+00:00

Dear CS, CEL and Ares developers, users, supporters and all,

In the fast pace world of 3D, hardware and gaming. It is difficult to keep up and progress without the assistance and generosity of others.

CS, CEL and Ares are three core projects that now and in the future, bring you the ability to create games and other applications with a degree of ease and flexibility. Doing this though creates it's challenges. As Open Source projects, we survive on peoples generous donation of time and their passion which is so great they purchase much of the hardware to progress the projects from their own pockets.

We are reaching out to the community and wider to assist us if you can and reduce the burden from individuals and progress as we wish to. In the future we wish to:

 - Better support Apple Mac OS X

 - Add Android support

 - Add Apple iOS support

 - Add GLSL and GLES

We would also like to be able to purchase up to date versions of software for example Visual Studio for long standing developers. Other uses of any financial donations would be decided by concensus amongst the development team as they are at present.

As projects we are always looking for new people to help in all areas of the projects.

If you are able to offer your time to any of the projects please contact us via the discussion or development mailing lists.

To subscribe and mail to the list, please see:

http://www.crystalspace3d.org/docs/online/manual/Mailing-Lists.html

As projects we are in desperate need of hardware and software to bring support and features up to date then progress, and as a team of individuals we can only do this via donations in the future.

If you are able to make a donation of money or hardware. Please contact the founder of the CS, CEL and Ares projects:

Jorrit Tyberghein - Email: jorrit.tyberghein@gmail.com

Regards

Phil Wyett

Crystal Space and Crystal Entity Layer release manager.

OpenGameArt - Stop SOPA/PIPA

2012-01-18T15:06:08+00:00

Stop SOPA/PIPA

bart

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - 10:06

I'm not going to say a whole lot about this because for the most part I'm preaching to the choir here. But, if you live in the United States, before you do anything else today, you need to contact your representatives in congress about SOPA and PIPA.

If you're not familiar with these bills, reddit has a good overview.

DusteD Games - Wizznic! Touchscreens!

2012-01-16T21:27:04+00:00

So, I hacked around Wizznic a bit last night and got some pretty decent mouse/touchscreen support going, this is pretty usefull on wiz, and if there's a touchscreen on the PSP I could imagine it'd be nice there too..

Anyway, it also works on PC.. I', not done with this yet though, if you wanna try it, you'll have to compile the source from github.

DusteD Games - More Wizznic! hacking! :D

2012-01-16T21:26:33+00:00

I've been giving Wizznic some attention lately, and gotten some nice things done, I feel sharp :)
I added a little cursor inside the cursor to give the user a better feel of where the actual cursor is, it feels right :)
I fixed a long standing bug that made the cursor sometimes "jump" around when moving a brick with a brick on top of it, this happened because I have this lock mechanism, but I forgot to "unlock" the bricks after un-grabbing them :P

I also rearranged the way levels load graphics, walls are one part, "brick die" animations is one part, and the rest of the tiles are one part. This means that for example, die-animations are no longer dependant on the name of the tileset, walls are no longer dependant on the name of the tileset. This makes it possible to have several wall-sets in (or tile-sets, or die-animations or any combination hereof) in a theme.

I also solved an issue that have annoyed me for quite a while, that the "magnet/glue and one-way only" tiles were not treated as walls, even though they are basically that.. Now they are, which makes the wall-tile-selection a lot prettier to look at visually, they are also overlaid on top of the walls, making reuse easier (but optional).

I also noticed that some players had trouble detecting (yes, people are machines) the edges of the walls, making them believe that sometimes they were able to move bricks, even though there were a wall there, other times they would not move bricks to obvious places, because they believed that there was a wall (when, in fact, there was none). I have partly solved this by making the edges of the walls a little brighter. In addition, I am thinking about adding some more details to the inside of the wall tiles, tough at this moment I don't know what it would be, maybe my graphics guy have an idea and will do this? :D

And here's a little video showing those new cool things, the code is not on github yet, I still need to convert all the levels..

DusteD Games - Wizznic, Content and the big 1.0.

2012-01-16T21:26:01+00:00

qubodup of freegamer asked me about my graphics guy, so I thought I'd share a bit of that history and use that as an excuse for not being productive ;)

As the intro should show (the third credit), ViperMD did a great deal of graphics work on 0.9.9 release of wizznic, I met VMD at a LAN around 2000 and I consider him to be one of my close friends. He has a talent for computer graphics, both in 2D and 3D, and is an avid gamer. I have spend fair amounts of time hacking on wizznic on his couch, for whatever reason, we never talked about working on the project together.. So for the 0.9.9 release I suggested that we collaborate, admitting my shortcomings as an artist :) VMD did the Thor theme, which is going to be the default Wizznic theme, however, if I can convince him, Thor is not the last eyecandy you will be seeing from VMD, he have also shown interest in Wizznic3D, so expect some sweet graphics there ;)

VMD did 95%o of the work on Thor, with some (annoying, I'm certain) comments and input from me, Thor is his very first contribution to computer-games, and even without taking the technical limitations and my confusing and lacking leadership into account, it is a sweet piece of work if I have to say (which, obviously, I do, so I did).

We also worked together on condensing the ~80 existing levels down to 40 levels, which were divided into two packs. I hope this process increased the overall quality of the puzzles, but only time can tell. Of course I plan to add more levels in the future (New packs, and only slight adjustments/reordering of the existing ones).

The process of sorting the puzzles was interesting.. None of us had any real idea of how difficult individual puzzles were, so we did the following:

Rendered a screenshot of each level, and put those on a network share.
We now had 80 screenshots, but I wanted to mature the quality of the puzzles, and decided to only include 40 puzzles, divided into 2 packs of 20. So our first task was easy, we made a "Delete me" directory, and were allowed to choose the 20 levels that we thought looked "ugly" and delete them.
Now, remaining was 40 unsorted puzzles (with screenshots).
We created two directories there, "Easy" and "Hard", for "Pack 0" and "Pack 1".
We then inspected the level files visually to try to identify their difficulty, and then move their files into either one, this meant we could both work on the same task at the same time.
Once we had 2 dirs with 20 files in each, we made 4 subdirs in both of them,
we then worked on each our dir, and tried to identify the easist, medium-easy, medium-hard and hardest puzzles, and put them in their directories, this process was easier since it was now only 20 files to be sorted.
Finally, 20 directories were made inside both "easy" and "hard", the idea here was to go through the 4 subdirs, having the first "map" logically to "1,2,3,4" and the second to "5,6,7,8" and so on, this way, we would only have to worry about sorting a chunk of 4 levels at a time, which is a lot easier than to inspect 20 levels as a whole.

If that sounded confusing, don't worry, I haven't found a nice way of explaining it yet, which lead to some misunderstandings, but in the end it was a pretty easy task, and a method for sorting puzzles that I will be using again in the future, hopefully combined with the statistics I gather (from people who chose tho help me by enabling stats-upload in wizznic).

Deadline for Wizznic 1.0-rc is 29'th of January this year. That means I've got 4 weekends to work on it (I don't have much time during the week, and easily run out of steam..).
Todo for 1.0:
Updating all files to the new level format.
Optional "Unsolvable", "Out of Time" and "Reset level?" graphics (and make those for Thor).
One more theme (if VMD feels up for it), sound theme for Thor.

Once these features are completed, 1.0 is released, it's done.
Newer versions only be bugfixes and new content.

By the way, my 3D engine that I'll use for Wizznic3D. VMD modelled and textured the spaceship.

Lot's of work needed on that one..

Orx - Some new community tutorials to celebrate 2012!

2012-01-16T10:20:25+00:00

Hi everybody!

Well, first of all we wish you all a happy new year 2012, a bit late, as usual.

Now some news: we have some new interesting community tutorials, here are some details about the most recent ones.

Grey has added a much useful tutorial for those who want to compile orx from source. As you'll see it's pretty straightforward and doesn't require any real work at all. You can find this tutorial here.

I also added my first community tutorial about off-screen rendering/compositing with a simple two-pass 2D lighting example. Here it is!

And don't forget to check other very useful community tutorials made by sausage, tdomhan, newton64 and laschweinski. You can find them all here.

Finally, a big thank you to all of you who have contributed to the wiki and to the forum.

It's really nice to see the community shaping up and growing. We hope it's going to expand even more this year!

If you have any questions/comments, as usual, please let us know!

Cheers,

- iarwain

DusteD Games - I'm not dead!

2012-01-15T18:54:04+00:00

IRL have been taking it's toll on my development efforts..
I'm now both a Data-technician and AP Graduate in IT Technology and Network Engineering..
However, everyone wants a 25 year freshly educated with 30 years of experience.
So I'll be getting a lot of time to work on my games now..
I've been sifting through the Wizznic! code and made it way better at handling non-320x240 native window sizes, this should make porting to devices with screens larger than 320x240 a lot easier. I also changed the "Please allow feedback" screen to be more verbose and it can't be skipped without making a choice (yes or no to send feedback).
Now I'm wondering where to take Wizznic! next, the preview was more a tech-demo, I'm not sure I like the idea of making such radical changes to the tilesets..
I'm splitting the main levels into several packs, to make it easier to "complete" a stage of the game, a bit like the original Puzznic.
Maybe tilesets should only change per stage, and not every X levels..
Feedback is appreciated from the 1 or 2 people who'll ever read this :)

jMonkeyEngine - Beta 1 Game Contest Results

2012-01-15T18:27:06+00:00

After a month and a half of intense game development, the Beta 1 Game Contest came to a close with the end of 2011. We were ecstatic to see an incredible 30 projects come to life with more than 1100 posts in work in progress threads. In the end, 10 projects found their way to the final submissions thread for judging. Without further ado, the winners!

First Place

The Cove – @thetoucher

Score: 86%

Second Place

Monkey Mania – @ndebruyn

Score: 79%

Third Place

Pirate Hell – @ceiphren

Score: 73%

Complete reviews and scores for all of the entries can be found in the forum thread. Our winners will be receiving the prizes outlined in the prize announcement. @thetoucher can expect a free copy of the upcoming jMonkeyEngine Book in the mail as well as a free WordPress theme courtesy of our friends at WooThemes. @ndebruyn and @ceiphren will be offered substantial discounts on both the book and a WordPress theme. Thank you to all for making this contest the huge success it was; Truly a community feat!

OpenMW - Power failure? pffffffffff! That won’t stop us.

2012-01-15T16:01:58+00:00

It seems that the only task left for new release openmw is configuration/directory handling. lgro is currently on it so It looks like we will see new version on the loose soon with basic journal, properer character rendering and animations finally working (to mention the most spectacular features).

Actually work for 0.13.0 already started. Yaccoby is taken over terrain rendering task and jhooks1 is working on water rendering.

Short reminder here: yaccoby is the guy behind old terrain rendering in old openmw. It was totally custom implementation, since the current ogre3d lib did not exist at the time and available solutions sucked a bit. Currently there is no reason to write custom terrain rendering since:

new lib does the job good enough

more code in separate libs = less code in openmw = less work on code maintaining

this code should get improvements over a time from ogre3d community that we could use

And yaccoby seems to excited to work on feature that can make pretty pictures

While Yaccoby is doing element of earth jhooks1 started element of water (sadly We dropped codenames so We can’t name 0.12.0 “It moves” and 0.13.0 “ElementalWind”). No hydratex here: It requires decent hardware to run smoothly and that’s not really acceptable for openmw.

Although openmw will require better hardware than morrowind It shouldn’t need newest graphic cards to run at all. For example yaccoby wants to use shader model 2 for terrain, and although Morrowind did not require that kind of hardware today it’s unusual to find less capable PC. Even my crappy, old Geforce 7300 GT is a shader model 3.

Oh, my geforce is doing what I want and I’m not complaining at all. It’s just old. I don’t think that anyone uses older graphic card than this.

OpenMW -

2012-01-15T14:36:47+00:00

Hello,
Thursday and Friday openmw.org unavailability, as I mentioned in previous post, was caused by power loss in Ecatel datacenter in Holland which is used by Rootnode.net (our hosting), but that unfortunately was not all (Friday 13th?). There was also APC power switch and some KVMs failure which caused some problems with data on shell and web servers, so RN admins restored it from backup. I don’t have access to shell (yet) so I can’t verify if all data was restored, but main page, forum, wiki and bug tracker works, so I hope everything is OK.

Among this, RN admins planned some bigger maintenance works at Monday and Wednesday (16/17.01.2012). Maintenance status will be posted on twitter. They will add and start testing new (faster, better) web cluster which will be used for web hosting for RN users in near future. Also there will be HDD upgrades (but only on shell servers so openmw.org pages will not be affected), and some network reconfiguration. So, please be prepared for some “unexpected” things, like few minutes of web page unavailability. And there is yet another thing, there will be a dedicated machine for Java in RN (it’s currently tested) – whats this mean for us? We could setup in future Jenkins Continuous Integration server which could do for us some automatic binaries building and packaging

OGStudio - What new tile themes you would like to see in the OGS Mahjong?

2012-01-15T11:38:00+00:00

In the next version of OGS Mahjong (the one that comes after 0.9), we want to add some new tile themes. If you want to see any particular tile theme in the game – tell us in the comments to this post. We’ll try to choose some of the themes you suggested.

Crystal Space - Crystal Space 1.4.1 Released

2012-01-15T07:31:41+00:00

They say you wait ages for a bus, and then two turn up almost at the same time.

Hot on the heels of last weeks 2.0 beta 1 releases. The Crystal Space and CEL Development Teams are pleased to announce the release of Crystal Space and CEL 1.4.1.

This is a support release of the stable 1.4 series. It includes updates, fixes and other changes.

This is a supported release. However, we must note that this release will be last in the 1.4 series and efforts will now move to the upcoming 2.0 release and other future developments. More on these in the coming weeks and months.

Check out the Download page for the files and further information.

OpenMW - Power failure in datacenter

2012-01-13T12:17:43+00:00

Hi,
as you probably noticed openmw.org was off-line yesterday and today that was caused by some strange power failure in datacenter used by Rootnode.net.
More detailed info is in http://rootnodestatus.net but unfortunately it is still in Polish language only. All data was restored from backups, so there should be no loss except uptime.

I will monitor situation and write another status post on weekend.

Castle Game Engine - Development: virtual trackball, URLs, BitCoin, T3DTransform, Win64, and more

2012-01-13T12:00:00+00:00

We have a really great start this year :) A lot of work has been done in the past 2 weeks since last release. Many improvements implemented in view3dscene and the engine. In somewhat random order:

The Examine rotation with mouse was much improved: dragging the mouse near the border of the window will now cause rotation around the Z axis. (More precisely, we interpolate between rotation around Z axis and traditional XY rotation, by looking at how close the mouse position is to the middle of the window.) This makes rotations with mouse much more flexible (previously, you had to use keys for Z rotation), and also intuitive. This is called "virtual trackball", mentioned on Robert J. Funnell's "3-D viewers" page.
New view3dscene menu item "Help -> Visit view3dscene website", new castle menu item "Visit our website", and Anchor node can now open URLs in a browser (for documents that are not recognized as 3D models).
Engine contains a unit CastleOpenDocument, using code adapted from Lazarus LCL, to open URLs and documents on all platforms.
To our "Helping in the engine development" section below the forum link I added notes "For Linux distros package maintainers". Please help creating a view3dscene package for popular Linux distributions!
We accept BitCoin for donations. If you wish to donate this way, simply send some bitcoins to this address: 1FuJkCsKpHLL3E5nCQ4Y99bFprYPytd9HN

If you like view3dscene, please consider donating using any of the listed options :) Thanks!
For developers using our engine: T3DTransform class is available, to comfortably transform 3D scenes (translate, rotate around specified center, scale around specified center with specified scaleOrientation). The demo how to use it is inside castle_game_engine/examples/3d_rendering_processing/scene_manager_demos.lpr in SVN, and also in new "The Castle" sources.
Various work on simplifying "The Castle" sources, and merging the useful features into the engine core. For users, this mostly results in shadow volumes improvements on "The Castle":
- Shadow volumes are now enabled by default
- Comfortable T3D.ReceiveShadowVolumes property
- Teleport (on gate level), and spiders sliding down (on cages level) are now done by T3DTransform descendants. This means that spiders sliding down cast shadows too.
Notes about recently released FPC 2.6.0: Yes, it works perfectly fine with our engine 3.0.0.
The only small problem is FPC issue #21000, which is actually a bug in my compilation scripts. This concerns you only if you compile final programs (not just the engine), and only if you use scripts (as opposed to Lazarus) to compile. In such case, make sure you use ${CASTLE_FPC_OPTIONS:-} instead of "${CASTLE_FPC_OPTIONS:-}" (strip double quotes).
Cooperation between Anchor and other pointing-device sensors improved in constructions like
```
Anchor {
  children [
    TouchSensor { ... }
    Shape { ... }
  ]
}
```
Previously such Anchor was ignored (hidden by TouchSensor), now it's treated like sibling to TouchSensor. So it can be activated, it's description is shown etc. Compatible with at least InstantReality.
Engine works fully under 64-bit Windows (Win64, Windows on x86_64). Snapshots are build for win-x86_64 too. If there's interest (please report on forum) we may release binaries for this system on next view3dscene release. (I don't think it's terribly important, because our 32-bit Windows binaries actually work on Win64 flawlessly already.)
Tear-off menus are removed from the engine and view3dscene. This means a little functionality lost if you used view3dscene on Unix (Linux, Mac OS X). Sadly, tear-off menus are deprecated in GTK 3.1, and they are in fact already buggy in existing GTK 2 versions. See ticket #3 for links and references about this.
Obsolete CastleWindow GTK 1 backend removed. Even it's compilation was broken since a long time. We use GTK 2 since many years.

Remember that you can grab view3dscene binary from snapshots to try the new features immediately. For developers, you can download source code of engine and other programs from SVN.

OGStudio - Test builds of OGS Mahjong 0.9

2012-01-12T18:04:16+00:00

The testing builds of OGS Mahjong 0.9 are now available.

Feel free to download, play and comment.

Gear2D - 2012-01-09 - Bye bye Boost

2012-01-12T06:30:32+00:00

I am happy to announce that Gear2D just got rid of boost, and now we virtually depend only on SDL (and its addons) as an external library! Hopefully that will make installing on Windows easier and will lower compile times for each component.

Speaking of components, they got their own git repository. This will come in handy when making a better release system, which is planned for the short-term.

You can access all of them here: http://github.com/Gear2D

See you :)

_{-- Delivered by Feed43 service}

OGStudio - OGS Mahjong 0.9 (rc1) Trailer

2012-01-11T22:38:24+00:00

LibSIEGE - Threading API added

2012-01-11T19:58:21+00:00

SIEGE has just (well, actually a few days ago) received new functionality, all related to threading. The following are now available:

threads (suprise, suprise!)
thread-local storage
mutexes
semaphores

The API is cross-platform – it works both in Windows and on POSIX systems. I won’t be quoting all the functions added here because there is quite a lot of those – if you want to see all of them, check out these files: /include/siege/util/thread.h, /include/siege/util/threadkey.h, /include/siege/util/mutex.h and /include/siege/util/semaphore.h.

As you may know, SIEGE does not actually use threads – yet, so what do I need this API for? Well, I’m working on getting a separate rendering thread running in SIEGE (optional, controlled by a flag, so you don’t have to worry about locks, race conditions, etc… and just disable multithreading). Furthermore, I want to eventually make SIEGE completely event-based (again, controlled by flags) so that event handlers can run from a thread pool and use messages for communication.

DusteD Games - Hello World

2012-01-09T16:21:20+00:00

Hi all, I'm Jimmy aka DusteD, a friend of mine, Qubodup was so kind as to create this blog for my games.
So I'll try and do my best to update it and maybe even provide some interesting reading (though I doubt that).

So, well, in case you are interested in knowing my life story (as a "game developer") here it is..
Male, born in Denmark in 1986.
I've always been a computer geek and I've always been facinated by games, being able to escape reality and enter a world of wonder and magic..
I was fortunate that my parents were not especially rich, so instead of plunging headless into a world of 3D and Windows, I had the priviledge of experiencing the whole home-computing revolution in slow motion..
My first computer was an Olivetti 8086, which I my dad got me in around '92.. On that I played Pac-Man, Sopwith and AlleyCat. The next machine I got was the Atari 2600, though, not the cool one with the wood-panel, it was bought used (I must have been around 8 years old, so this was in '94), and on this box-o-magic, I played Phoenix (still one of my favorite games), Jungle Hunt and Midnight Magic..
After this I used all my pocket money to buy a used C64 (still have it), and on this I played a lot around with all the many disks and tapes with games. It was also my first introduction to programming, however, being 11 years or so, I didn't have the english skills needed to understand the manual..
Finally, around 96 I got a PC, a Pentium 100 MHz with 16 MiB of RAM and 812 MiB of harddisk (when formatted with FAT32).. It ran Windows 95 and I played a lot of Red Alert, Doom, Duke3D, Quake and (after getting a 3dfx card) Quake2, and finally Aq2. On the 100 Mhz box I learnt myself to make maps for Duke3D using the map editor that came with the game, and I convinced myself that I wanted to be a "Mapper", all was fine untill I met WorldCraft and cut my teeth on 3D mapping, I made a few maps for AQ2 and decided that mapping was not for me.

Okay, long story short, I've played a lot of crappy old games, and I've learnt to love them :)
That's what got me interested in making games.. Old crappy games that were simple enough to understand, and simple enough that a few people in a basement could do them.. Only one problem, i haden't the slightest idea how to "make the computer machine do stuff", and with no internet it'd be a few years before I'd be able to learn it.

My life as a programmer started when I was around 15, with PHP (I had done a crude version of Tic Tac Toe in Qbasic two years earlier but that was more a bunch of Ifs than a game).
Nothing much happened, except for a few attempts at C that didn't go too well. That was, until 2007 after having learnt a bit of C for AVR 8bits in school, I decided to try and see if I could maybe make a simple game.. So I played around with C, SDL and OpenGL, and made Simplevaders, my first C program on the PC and also the first SDL and the first OpenGL program I wrote.. or copy-pasted together, more or less ;)
At this point, I'd been a GNU/Linux user for a few years, and had converted my dad to the OS aswell.. Only trouble with him running GNU/Linux was that his favorite game, DX-Ball didn't run well in Wine, and he didn't like lbreakout2, so I set out to make a replacement of DX-Ball for him.
After a few months of writing and learning, i had the first version of SDL-Ball, the code is crude and there are lots of design-flaws, memory leaks and bugs in it, but that's how I got started.

Sorry about the long wall of boring text, I'll try and make my next posts shorter and more organized.

In the future, expect my blog posts to be about ideas, thoughts and progreess on current projects (right now, that's wizznic).

DusteD Games - Halp plz!

2012-01-09T16:19:08+00:00

If you're the self-loathing type (like me) who play games to find out what's wrong with them, read on! If you prefer the shiney, finished, polished product: nothing to see here, move along people! ;)

Anyway, since I've done most of the levels for Wizznic, I have a hard time figuring out which (if any) of my puzzles are "hard", so I'd love for you to help me out here!

Here's what I'd love for you to do!
Download the feedback pack, extract it and put in your wizznic/packs directory (you'll need to download wizznic if you don't allready have it), then play through the levels..
They're all set to 16 minutes, so if you get stuck, just use the restart level function as many times as you want.
Upon completing each level, and this is the important part:
write down the following stats from the stats screen, so it looks like this in a text-file:
levelnum moves time
If you can't complete a level, write down which one.

You're very welcome to add critique (positive aswell as negative) too :)

When you're as far as you can get, please send the text to me, so I can get an impression of how wrong I've got the level-order.
You can send it to my E-Mail at dusted at dusted dot dk, or, if you prefer, as a comment on this post, or as a ticket on sourceforce.
Please fill the subject as: Level Feedback

You're awesome! :)

DusteD Games - Wizznic! 0.9.9 Released

2012-01-09T16:18:22+00:00

Finally, after so much time, and so little work.. I am very proud to present yet another version of my little hobby project, Wizznic!
Thanks goes out to ViperMD who have helped me a lot during the preparation of this release, especially his awesome graphics skills and providing a windows box for building, also for putting up with my ranting ;)

The actual Wiz version will be out in a couple of days, also the PSP version will come out later.

Get it here: http://sf.net/projects/wizznic

Changes since last release:
0.9.9
Reordered levels
Corrected some misaligned text
Changed level file naming from levelX.wzp to levelXXX.wzp (level0.wzp is now level000.wzp and level10.wzp is level010.wzp).
Time that it takes for a brick to "die" affects the framerate of the expl-animation, this value can now be set from each level.
Particle systems have a layer associated, either PSYS_LAYER_TOP, PSYS_LAYER_UNDERDEATHANIM or PSYS_LAYER_UNDERBRICK.
"Thor" theme by ViperMD.
Tiles 0-17 can be animated from files TILEBASE-tile#.png, animation runs at 12 fps, one row of images, number of frames abritary.
Clocked wiz up to 600 mhz since the pixel plotting function became a bit heavier.
OpenGL support is enabled by default, compile with WITH_OPENGL=false to disable. See readme[1.0.4] for more information.

0.9.2-preview2
Made more changes to code to better allow for non-320x240 screensizes, fixed some related
bugs. The highscore onscreen keyboard for one.
Changed the "Please enable feedback" screen to be more obvious.
Applied PSP patch from Riviera71, this patch makes some code prettier and also more
portable for devices with non 320x240, by defining display size for device in defs.h
0.9.2-preview
Several new graphical themes added to main package.
Cut down number of background music to 9.
Prefixed wizznic pack-names with 000_ to to make sorting more sane.
Highscores are now properly saved when entering them after selecting "Exit Game".
Fixed bug that made wiz-version "hang" on first run if no settings.ini present.
This bug was hackily fixed in 0.9.1 by having settings.ini be present in the zip.
Added option to compile with MAME keyboard layout for use in an arcade cabinet.
Reworked the "Enter Highscore" screen with an onscreen keyboard instead of the
"up/down/menu" thing, which didn't seem nearly as intuitive.
Solved random-letterss/segfault in highscore entry.
Playlist functionality (overrides music= setting in levelfiles with a playlist entry)
this is done to make it easier to put music on packs. The entries are placed in
packname/info.ini and have the format mus=ff-tt,music file.ogg where ff is from
level and tt is to level. mus=00-03,music/song2.ogg will play packname/music/song2.ogg
in levels 0,1,2,3. And mus=23-23,music/song3.ogg will play packname/music/song3.ogg
in level 23.

0.9.1
Changed Wiz default clock to 500 mhz instead of 400 to improve performance.
When completing a pack, PACKNAME/finished.png is loaded and shown instead of wall-o-text.
However, another wall-o-text is shown if there is no finished.png in the pack.
Moved some levels around, removed some levels. 80 levels total.
Added optional WxH argument to tools/updatelevelpreviews.sh to generate images of given size,
while not useful in the game, they are useful for sorting levels (using an image-viewing app to browse them)
"Commercial" for the pack function. in the start of some levels.
Level editor now reads and writes all level properties, including optional ones.
Updated readme.
Updated data/empty.wzp so it contains all level properties, and comments explaining their function and usage.
Added another intro level to teleports, added intro-images to those levels.
Updated the cursor in the NES pack.
Removed "template" pack, it does nothing that the main pack does not show allready.
Fixed music changing in intermediate screens ("Level Stats" and "Entering Level").
Fixed crash that could happen when entering highscores.
Updated ports list (gee, someone ported it to a phone, neat..)
Updated changelog and decided to use X.Y.Z versioning.
Program now calls SDL_Quit() on exit (resets screen-resolution if in fullscreen)
tools/releaser.sh now generates the src package witout src-graphics, instead it generates a srcgfx tarball seperately.
moved the unused theme graphics into src graphics..

DusteD Games - Wizznic 0.8 Final released.

2012-01-09T16:16:19+00:00

I've been hardly working, on Wizznic, been doing a lot of levels (that you're not getting yet *evil grin*)
There have been a lot of polish, some of which will only benifit me, but well..
Corrected a couple of bugs along the way, and I think I have a version that's pretty solid..

So anyway, this version is mostly to wrap up the coding part, so I can concentrate more on content-creation, 0.9 will include several techno/trance/house tracks, over 60 new levels, and more graphics, so there's something to look forward to there :)

Because most of the changes are to do with the linux port, I've decided that a windows release can wait for 0.9.

Anyway, here's more or less what's changed:
0.8:
Final 0.8. Next will be 0.9.
Fixed a bug in the level-preview-dump function that made a black image if no start/stop image found.
Thumbnailer works again (on levels that refer to themes that are installed)
Added instructions for using the thumbnailer in the install.txt
No longer blink [MORE] in the level-editor list.
Removed an error message that were printed even though there was no error.
Pack-List is now sorted.
Added Puzznic! Stage 09 pack by KML
Script to make releasing for Linux (Source package) and Wiz automated. This will be extented to windows when I learn to cross compile.
Pre3
More linux-friendly (thanks to PVince81 for patch which was used as inspiration)
Linux specific Makefile based on contribution from PVince81.
Renamed Makefile to Makefile.wiz (to avoid confuzion with the linux Makefile which is called Makefile.linux)
Linux version can be compiled so it saves user files (player & editorlevels) to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or $HOME (like most *nix apps)
Read more about this in doc/install.txt
Level-Editor menu screen is made a bit less cluttered.
Clone level function (create a new level, with the contents from another level, so it is easier to make variations of existing levels)
Pre2
Player was not asked to enter highscore after "completed game" screen was shown.
Added Silver pack.
Teleports added
Greeter/Credits added to welcome screen
Added a "template" pack (essentially just a copy of the wizznic pack, without the levels/music),
can be used by content creators as a starting point for creating a pack.
Tweaked the ingame interface a bit.
Lots of minor changes.
Changed readme a bit, it's still not accurate though.
Fixed a crashbug due to improper memory access.
Fixed all compiler warnings.

So, 0.9 is going to be interesting, since this was not ;)

FLARE - 20120109

2012-01-09T15:30:33+00:00

Code Diagram I drew up a quick diagram of how Flare's code is structured. This mainly shows parent/child/sibling relationsh

jMonkeyEngine - Mercator chart projection

2012-01-09T12:45:07+00:00

Hello, my name is Benjamin Jakobus and I have been working on a navigation and mercator chart projection module for jME (based on my FYP under the supervision of Cormac Gebruers and Dr. Sabin Tabirca). The module works within the context of the Clarke spheroid of 1880 which has an equatorial radius of 6,378,249.145 meters, a polar radius of 6,356,514.870 meters and an inverse flattening of 293.465 meters. The projection module itself has an accuracy of up to 6 meters.

Now that the documentation is finally complete (thanks to Ian Mayo from PlanetMayo Ltd for funding this article), we’d love to have some more monkeys try it out.

qbismSuper8 - Build 46

2012-01-09T03:05:33+00:00

A bugfix for an error that might occur with 1000+ models and minor tweaks. The big news is a DOS port! So far it’s only been tested on DOSBOX. Will discuss more at some point, and get up some new screenshots, but wanted to get this update out. DOWNLOAD qbismS8_0046

qbismSuper8 - Super8 DOS port screenshots

2012-01-09T02:29:19+00:00

Screenshots of the DOS port of Super8, from the DOSBOX emulator. The maps are Venividifuzi (SPARTUS10.BSP), Quoth E1M1 and E1M2 remakes, and “Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties” (APSP2.BSP). Veni is about the largest map I’ve been able to load off-hand based on a 64Mb memory limitation. APSP2 is also big, and additionally runs with the Quoth [...]

Gear2D - 2011-12-24 - Ongoing things

2012-01-09T00:15:36+00:00

Big time without any update, but there's big things going on. The API have the same looks but a lot of code has changed and there are new interfaces. For instance, a wrapper class that can ease access and sharing of parameters was created and can be used at setup time of every component. Hopefully that will ease component creation. Instead of writing write("x", 10.0f); or float x = read("x"); one would do

 link x("x"); x = 10.0f; cout  "x="  x; /* would print "10.0" */

There's also two very important new components done, almost in release state: A path finder component that can find a path between two points and a lua proxy component, that can load components made in lua. Yes, thats right, now you can use lua to create components for Gear2D!

Along with those components, next release will also contain more detailed documentation, examples and a skeleton project to help starters. Also, a new game is almost ready too, and will be released soon.

You can follow development in our Git repository, at github.

One last thing, SBGames 2011 was a success to Gear2D, our article won the best short paper prize and we're writing again for another academic conference to happen in the next year.

Speaking of next year, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone :D
See you!
Leonardo.

_{-- Delivered by Feed43 service}

OpenMW - this week…

2012-01-08T16:44:42+00:00

Hardware skinning was forced to work with openmw, but since we had few problems with it jhooks1 decided that He will leave it now and try to implement later. It would be great to have it working since It gives huge performance boost on a capable hardware.

Besides of that, animations are the long stride, but the finish is not that far.

I hate when guys do not report progress and do not upload code to git. And this is what happens right now. *sigh*

OGStudio - New forum

2012-01-03T21:24:52+00:00

It’s no secret that our forum has never suffered from an excess of activity. This is partly due to the highly non-trivial interface and very strange ergonomics.
As an experiment, we decided to try using a different forum, it is much more simple and intuitive. Here you will find almost nothing superfluous, but there is everything you need.
For some time the old forum will remain available for reading, but it has no valuable information that we may want to keep forever.
So welcome to our new forum!

OGStudio - Site upgrade, OpenID and spam-fighting

2012-01-03T12:48:21+00:00

The site software was updated to the latest version.
In addition, we’re returning the OpenID login and closing the site registration.
While the registration was open, the site was inhabited with several hundreds of spambots.
We have deleted a lot of these accounts, but unfortunately, some good accounts may have been deleted as well.
We’re very sorry for that.

OpenGameArt - Orange Engine progress

2012-01-03T00:42:57+00:00

Orange Engine progress

bart

Monday, January 2, 2012 - 19:42

I've made some progress on the Orange Engine, my 2D RPG engine+editor. You can read about how to download and compile it here (as well as see a couple Youtube videos of it in action):

https://gitorious.org/orange-engine/pages/Home

If you're running Windows, you can download a pre-built copy here:

http://opengameart.org/content/orange-engine-pre-alpha-for-windows

I'm currently looking for people who would be willing to contribute code and/or content, so if that appeals to you, please let me know in a reply or catch my on IRC.