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[KibaBase] Twitter Updates for 2009-07-03

• Starting work on rubytet #
• high score tracking complete #
• working on the automatic generation of files #
• rubytet will generate score files if they do not already exist #
• start work on bioworld #

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by admin at July 03, 2009 07:39 PM

[Free Gamer - open source games] Berusky, Overgod, and Allegro

Berusky is a "free logic game". It's a puzzle game of Sokoban-like gameplay with a few extra twists. You have control of up to 5 bugs, and you must collect 5 silver keys on each level before you can exit it. You can push explosives into barrels, and destroy boulders with pick axes that you collect. Throw in one-way gates, coloured gates and coloured keys, and gates for specific colour bugs and there's a lot of potential obstacles and some wickedly tricky levels.

The graphics are nice. There's no music. The game has not been fully translated into English, so some of the level hints (well, most of them) are appearing in Czech(?). And it's bloody hard. As hard as Fish Fillets (Free Gamer review), if not harder. (Interestingly, Fish Fillets is also Czech produced.) I couldn't work out how to beat *the first level on intermediate or the 3rd level on easy. The interface outside of the game isn't that great - using passwords for levels which are easy to forget to note down - it could really do with a Fish Fillets style map.

Update: Ok the first level on intermediate wasn't that hard, I was just being a bit daft... I was looking for a complex solution when (if you look at the screenshot) there was a simple way to finish the level.

Gondola looks curious. A PyWeek game, "Gondola is the ultimate shipping, shape sorting, barge unloading game of all time. Get the right shapes to the right places to score. But be warned: there are only a limited number of islands to build on and longer cables are expensive! Sort wisely to minimize loss." It sounds intriguing and original but I couldn't run it due to some idiotic Linux issues.

The other day I stumbled across a game I'd previously enjoyed but forgotten, Overgod. It's a good, solid shoot 'em up which plays well and has polished albeit simple abtract graphics.

Digging a bit, I see that Overgod (2008) is an evolution of Lacewing (2006), which features similar gameplay but the enemies and levels tend to be a bit more basic and is not quite as polished.

Linley Henzell, the author of Overgod and Lacewing, has been busy. Other games include White Butterfly and Garden of Coloured Lights which both looked good although are currently only working on Windows.

Another Linley Henzell game which looks intriguing - but is DOS only! - is Captain Pork's Revenge, a Leiro/Teeworlds style 2D deathmatch game.

The Allegro Depot has a lot more entries than I would have thought, including Open Sonic and Worminator 3.

There's Zelda Classic which is a clone of the original Zelda, as well as a platform for building Zelda-like games.

Worms for Linux! is one that I should add to the Open Source Artillery/Worms Clones article.

by charles.goodwin@gmail.com (Charlie) at July 03, 2009 12:35 PM

[KibaBase] Twitter Updates for 2009-07-02

• been too distracted lately…working on bioworld for the second hour #
• wasted too many hours…this time…I am going to hack #
• opps, I went ahead add a loop without a screen. Even though I already made a way to quit, it ain't possible on the command prompt #
• Time ran out but I coded anyway to finish a part of the dynamic loader system #
• #rubyweekend rails session. Lerning mode #
• Hmm #
• got distracted #
• that's bad #
• Argh. Try again tommorow. #

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by admin at July 02, 2009 07:39 PM

[Battle for Wesnoth] Wesnoth Summer Art Scholarship

In response to the generosity of our community, Wesnoth has set aside donated funds to create an art scholarship. Our intent is patterned after Google's "Summer of Code"; it allows a student to spend their summer in an internship, creating art for Wesnoth, rather than a typical summer job which has little to do with their academic interests. Not only is this an aid to ourselves and the participating students, but we hope that it will serve as an inspirational example to the FLOSS gaming community at large.
We solicited applications from our community, and are now happy to announce the two winning candidates for our Scholarship. The winning proposals were submitted by Kathrin "kitty" Polikeit, and Phil "thespaceinvader" Barber. We would like to extend our thanks to everyone who submitted proposals.
To read more, visit this page in our wiki, or this thread in our forum.

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July 02, 2009 07:15 PM

OpenGameArt.org Pixel Art Contest Reminder

OpenGameArt.org is currently hosting a pixel art contest, which ends on August 1, 2009! We are looking for hair, faces, clothes, accessories, and other modifications to our base sprite sets. The entries don't need to be extensive, just cool. Here are the sprites you'll be working with:

By: Migel Angel Hijo de Pedro

By: Mandi Paugh

Note: These are not the full sprite sets -- they're just previews! The full sets can be found on the contest rules page.

The winner of the contest will receive US $100, with a second prize of US $50 also available. Interested? Stop by and read the rules, then submit an entry!

by bart at July 01, 2009 08:22 PM

[KibaBase] Twitter Updates for 2009-07-01

• Hanged out with my friend. Brought the Head First Rails book so I can do RubyWeekend project. Also discovered a hidden theater with unbe … #
• Working on rubytet's score tracking #
• score tracking coming along nicely. Added UI element and finish most of the process that goes into checking and comparing score #
• Gottach clean up dishes and go exercise #
• Finish these things #
• resume hacking of rubytet #
• Finish an hour of hacking #
• Learning rails #
• http://bit.ly/1azOcD created ability to create contest. no user login and a lot of stuff either but it is a start! #
• I am done for the night for rubyweekend. Time to rest my brain for tommorow hacking session. #
• Just woke up #
• I wonder why random people follows my twitter account anyway o_O #
• maybe they're spammy account? #
• Going to work on bioworld today #
• Hmm..gottach practice driving with my dad..so no go for bioworld for now #
• Back from driving practice. #
• Starting work on Bioworld #

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by admin at July 01, 2009 07:39 PM

[KibaBase] Twitter Updates for 2009-06-30

• working on a logo for #RubyWeekend since no one volunteer. Don't blame me when it is ugly and stuff. #
• Meh…I decided to work on the #Rubyweekend site instad. I can do the logo later #
• Got in a problem with rake db:create #
• #RubyWeekend seem to have major permission problem #
• also, http://rubyweekend.org is registered by me if you didn't heard. #
• Going to work on bioworld while waiting for experts to hopefully answer my query #
• Got an idea for the lib directory. going to create an event handling system and a module loading system #
• Defintely going to use this in my rubytet project #
• back on track #
• Hmm…this is brothersome…can't upload the site to the webpage. Would like to update it everyday. #
• well #
• time to cleanup the house…before continuing hacking #
• deployment a pain #
• Also, this deployment will be nothing fancy #
• you can't do anything..just a big title that say "RubyWeekend: A Game Programming Contest in Ruby!" #
• Tried heroku. Crazy easy to do, which is fricking awesome. #
• But I got to sleep soon! #
• hmm..deployment work . I can add the rubyweekend domain later #
• RubyWeekend bare bone rails application with nothing to do at http://bit.ly/2uLxi but it just the start of the project! #

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by admin at June 30, 2009 07:39 PM

[Battle for Wesnoth] Wesnoth 1.7.1: Development Release

A new Development release is ready. This is the second release in the rather new 1.7.x tree. Since you don't read what I write here anyway, better have a look at this forum thread if you want to learn something about the new 1.7.1 release.
As with the last releases, we continue to offer two versions of changelogs: a rather nice to read players changelog that only includes changes every player will probably notice and the (rather) complete changelog with (almost) all the details, which is likely to cause a serious headache...
At the moment the Windows package and the MacOSX packages are ready. You can find them at the download page. Once the others are done you can find them at the download page, too. Please keep in mind that it is a development release which might include quite many bugs. If you find one, report it.

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June 30, 2009 01:15 AM

[KibaBase] Twitter Updates for 2009-06-29

• woke up an hour ago. Last night I started work on the rubyweekend site. Need to decide how to much to allocate energy to projects. #
• Ya hear? #Rubyweekend will have a real site like Pyweek! #

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by admin at June 29, 2009 07:39 PM

[Development Blog] "STK w/Irrlicht": Previews in the menu

Hi fellow SuperTuxKart fans, time for another update on the current development version. Don't get too excited yet; the developers are working on some cool new features, but most of the features of earlier versions needs to be rewritten as well.
And I'm not covering everything that happens on the development side.
But I'm starting off with one well-known feature.

Kart preview

Tux is spinning around in a smooth animation, showing off his great kart, like in 0.6 and earlier. The other karts aren't ready for this yet, but it looks promising. BTW, the black rectangle behind the kart isn't supposed to be there; just a bug showing up on my computer only as far as I know.
As you can see here as well, the old background picture (the checkerboard background) is now replaced by the one made by elisee.

Track preview

This pops up when selecting a track, showing a proof of concept. "High Scores & Track Info" will obviously be replaced with... guess what: high scores and track info.
"Track 1" will be replaced with the actual name of the track.

I was asked to mention that "there is now support for deciding which edges are smooth and which are not, allowing for better shading". Not completely sure what that means, but modelers wanting to create for 0.7 should bear this in mind when they are making models.

Most places in the world have mid-summer now, and vacation, so that might impact somewhat on the speed of STK development. Whether it'll be in a positive way or not, time will tell, but it might turn both ways. Personally, I'll be away for a couple of weeks now, but as I'm not a developer, just a "reporter", it'll only mean that you might not see another update here in a while.

"Sun is shining,
weather is sweet.
Makes you wanna move
your dancing feet."

Happy summer to everyone! :D

---------------

Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.1a) of SuperTuxKart.

by Arthur (noreply@blogger.com) at June 28, 2009 10:46 PM

[Blobs in Games] Noise in game art

If you look at the artwork in old 2D 8-bit games, you see a lot of noise and dithering in the hand-drawn bitmap art. For an example, take a look at the grass or concrete in this Transport Tycoon screenshot:

When the gaming world moved to 3D 32-bit vector art, we lost some of that level of detail. We got lots of smooth areas. Eventually we mostly got the detail back by applying textures to the polgons. However, it often looks worse to me than the old hand-drawn art.

With my Flash experiments, I've been playing with 2D procedural vector art, and I've been trying to figure out how to make it look nicer without drawing textures by hand. The simplest thing I found has been to apply noise to the art. On the left is some terrain without noise and on the right is some with noise:

I like the noisy version much better.

The noise layer is fairly easy to apply; I use BitmapData.noise() to generate it, and then use BlendMode.ADD to add it to the original layer.

  var noiseTexture:BitmapData = new BitmapData(128, 128);
  noiseTexture.noise(Math.round(Math.random()*65536), 0, 8, 7, true);
  var noise:Shape = new Shape();
  noise.graphics.beginBitmapFill(noiseTexture);
  noise.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, size, size);
  noise.graphics.endFill();
  layer.draw(noise, null, null, BlendMode.ADD);
  noiseTexture.dispose();

It's nice in that it inherits the color already there; the noise doesn't impose its own colors. However, this only works nicely on my background terrain, and it feels somewhat slow on my low-end machine.

For foreground sprites, the noise layer doesn't move when those sprites move or rotate. An alternative would be to draw the noise on top of my sprites, using Graphics.beginBitmapFill(), but that would require that I have a way to compute the outline of my procedural art, so that I can draw the noise on top as a polygon. Another alternative would be to use bitmap fills for every polygon, but that requires that I have a noise bitmap for each color. And yet another alternative is to draw every polygon twice, once for the color and once for the noise.

With Flash 10 I had hoped that the pixel shaders would allow me to apply noise to anything. I played around with them a bit. The shader receives the output coordinates in a function outCoord(), and can compute a color for that location. It can optionally include parameters (like a noise bitmap). The big problem is that the output coordinates are in screen space. This means that when the sprite moves or rotates, or if you zoom in, the noise would stay fixed relative to the screen. I tried both using shaders for fills and shaders for filters, and neither gave me what I wanted.

That's a serious problem for my use. To address this problem, I can pass in additional parameters like rotation and offset. However, I have to re-fill the shape every time I change the shader parameters. Even worse, the pixel shader is recompiled every time you fill.

So it looks like pixel shaders in Flash 10 just don't do what I want. I want a way to get the pixel's location in the sprite's coordinate system, after transforms are applied, but instead I only get the screen's coordinate system.

I think my best bet for performance is to not apply noise to vector backgrounds (applying noise to a bitmap won't impact performance). This will make me sad but smoothness matters a great deal. I should also try using tiles to see if that is any faster. For foreground objects, it's probably not too bad to draw everything twice, but I'll have to test this. It may not matter if I switch to bitmap sprites eventually; they'd let me draw a lot more details.

by Amit (noreply@blogger.com) at June 28, 2009 07:08 PM

[Syntensity] Autoturrets Video

This is done using the Projectiles.js library, which is now mature enough to be put in the standard library. Note that like all other libraries, it's entirely optional, and work on it cannot affect the stability of the engine or the core API (which is why it was added during feature freeze).

Some details:

• The automatic turrets are controlled by the server, with projectiles managed on both server and clients for responsiveness
• The turret model was kindly contributed by Gregor Koch under a creative commons license, and consists of a base that turns left and right and a barrel that turns up and down (the commands to render the separate parts are done by a script). Edit: For a closeup, see here.
  
• Notice the reflections of the shots in the water
• Music: The intro to "You Can Take The World" by Predator, from their album Sick Society
  

by kripken (noreply@blogger.com) at June 27, 2009 08:15 AM