Planet Freegamedev

[KibaBase] Twitter Updates for 2009-07-03

2009-07-03T19:39:00+00:00

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

2009-07-03T12:35:00+00:00

Berusky Berusky - Stuck!

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.

Overgod

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.

[KibaBase] Twitter Updates for 2009-07-02

2009-07-02T19:39:00+00:00

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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[Battle for Wesnoth] Wesnoth Summer Art Scholarship

2009-07-02T19:15:20+00:00

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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OpenGameArt.org Pixel Art Contest Reminder

2009-07-01T20:22:29+00:00

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!

Tags:

Site News

[KibaBase] Twitter Updates for 2009-07-01

2009-07-01T19:39:00+00:00

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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[KibaBase] Twitter Updates for 2009-06-30

2009-06-30T19:39:00+00:00

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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[Battle for Wesnoth] Wesnoth 1.7.1: Development Release

2009-06-30T01:15:18+00:00

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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[KibaBase] Twitter Updates for 2009-06-29

2009-06-29T19:39:00+00:00

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

2009-06-28T22:46:19+00:00

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.

[Blobs in Games] Noise in game art

2009-06-28T19:08:36+00:00

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.

[Syntensity] Autoturrets Video

2009-06-27T08:15:18+00:00

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

[Syntensity] Article on Maxping

2009-06-26T05:50:25+00:00

Here.

[KibaBase] RubyWeekend Log #1

2009-06-26T03:46:44+00:00

First commit on the game bioworld for the RubyWeekend #3 contest.

It will features computer generated graphics along with extensive random generation of terrain and creatures.

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[Game::Programming.class] Another "Almost" Game

2009-06-26T01:57:07+00:00

I had another idea for a game which I've started and now stopped for the usual reason. Originally, I was going to write a 3D FPS that doesn't use models, since it is a massive ball-ache trying to find appropriate models on t'internet. Instead, I thought about just using basic shapes or something, but because they are basic I can make them more animated: moving platforms, floors that go up and down, walkways that extends and then retract, you get the idea. Actually, writing about it now makes it seem like a great idea, so maybe I'll come back to this one. I'm thinking something like Mirrors Edge with a constantly changing environment.

Anyway, the idea then transmogrified - the kind of games that already use this "simple shape" theory are all the old classics - Breakout, Pac-Man, Tetris. Their graphics were nothing special but they were good games. So how about a game set inside another game? Maybe this screenshot will give a better idea of what I mean:

Those blocks are supposed to be the blocks in a game of Breakout. I intend to have a bouncing ball and maybe the puck. The player would walk around in an FPS-stylee, and maybe shoot all the blocks while avoiding the puck or something.

I even got as far as starting a Pac Man level:

I think it was this level that started eroding my enthusiasm. I realised that this game is going to take a lot of time to create all the 3D models for each level/game. Then there's the AI for all the unique enemies, the level design etc etc...

So I decided to (maybe temporarily) abandon it in favour of another game idea; an idea that uses simple graphics, no advanced AI, and is incredibly addictive. As soon as I have this idea, I'll let you know. Meanwhile, it's back to the Spectrum Arcade for inpiration.

[Game::Programming.class] Metal Glove Solid: Released at Last!

2009-06-26T01:39:30+00:00

After being given a proverbial kick up the bum, I can now announce that I've sprinted the last straight and have got Metal Glove into a releasable state, and released it!

Needless to say, all the usual disclaimers apply: it's the first version, it's very sparse, probably has bugs etc.. etc..

Anyway, it's available here.

[Free Gamer - open source games] Some Puzzle Games

2009-06-25T03:00:00+00:00

FreeTumble is yet another "destroy adjacent same-color bricks" puzzle game but one of the better-looking and -sounding ones. Three modes of gameplay are provided, they can be seen as variation of the same game for different types of puzzle players or different hardness modes.

FreeTumble - I much like that there is a credits screen

Biniax-2 is an original puzzle game in which colors also play a role and which also is stronger on the visual side than your typical open source Tetris clone. It features a turn-based and continuous mode. The latter can be played with two players in a versus-game.

Biniax-2 (no sound)

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection will help you if you're bored at the office or similar.

CreepSmash is a java-based multiplayer tower defense game. Have some videos of it too!

26 June 06:09 UTC PS: RubyWeekend #3 with the theme "A Tiny World" started a few hours ago. It's a 3-day open source ruby game programming competition.

[Wormux Blog] Wormux.org for one more year

2009-06-24T21:08:54+00:00

Wormux.org domain name and hosting has been recently renewed for one year by Lami, the initiator of the Wormux project! He is not active on the project anymore but without him, Wormux may have never exist!!

Big thanks to Lami!

[Battle for Wesnoth] Wesnoth 1.6.3: Maintenance Release

2009-06-24T02:15:20+00:00

Wesnoth 1.6.3 has been released. This is a bugfix release for the stable 1.6 branch. Translations were updated, bugs were fixed and stability was improved. Feel free to celebrate the new release with us in this forum thread.
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, the MacOSX as well as the Debian and Gentoo 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. If you find a bug, please report it.

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[Post-Apocalyptic RPG blog] The walls of Jericho

2009-06-23T16:41:14+00:00

Heya and welcome to yet another weekly PARPG news update! This time the nature of the update is a bit different to what you’re used to get here. The main reason is that we recently had our first official developer meeting at the IRC channel of the project. So this news update contains far more plans for our next steps while the older updates often purely focused on reporting the progress of the last week(s). Such a change comes with certains advantages and potential drawbacks.

One main advantage is that we can give the community an idea where the project is hopefully moving to; on the other side there is the risk of promising but not being able to deliver later. So take the plans outlined today with a grain of salt But enough of the disclaimer stuff, let’s get to actual news reporting!

Audio department

Composer Dave Matney is currently working on a remix of the first ingame audio track that was produced by MeinMartini. Dave currently records some guitars and percussion and the remix aims to deliver a more Falloutesque atmosphere. We’re all looking forward to the final version and as soon as it’s available, you’ll read about it here.

Programming department

Looks like our recruitment efforts work out pretty well in terms of finding programmers for the project. tZee discovered PARPG recently and decided to get involved right away by submitting a first patch to improve the mapchange handling.

With the influx of quite a bunch of new programmers over the course of the last weeks, it seems to become more and more important to refine the workflow of the department to cope with the new situation and ensure collaboration and coordination. Therefore tZee opened a thread at the forums to discuss how the future class design could look like.

Last but most important news in the field of programming: we’re planning to ship a first official public release of PARPG, simply called “Techdemo 1″ around late August if things go well. If you’re interested in any details, check out the specific milestone page at our Trac repository. Not much information there yet, but it will hopefully get fleshed in more detail over the course of the next week.

On a related note: Maximinus decided to not just talk about junior staff development but to actually implement the concept! Congratulations go to the new proud mom and dad

Graphics department

There are good and somewhat bad news as far as the graphics department is concerned. Let’s start with the good ones Zimble recently wrote a guide how to create tiled walls in Blender; check it out at our wiki.

As you might have already noticed: there is a lack of graphics-related updates lately. Unfortunately the vast majority of the graphics department is inactive at this point. We recently discussed possible reasons at our IRC meeting and it turned out that our current lack of an agreed upon story really hinders the graphics artists on the team as well. We’ve started a roll call at the forums; this thread is meant to discover structural problems that affect the work of the department so we can try resolve them as next step.

Game mechanics department

We had some plans for a so called “game mechanics playground” application; basically a text-based testbed for the game mechanics department where they could play around with the mechanics and tweak them. We’ve decided at the IRC meeting yesterday than instead of going for an external testbed, the game mechanics testing could and should be done ingame as well. As FIFE comes with out of the box support of a console, it should be pretty easy to use it for these kind of testing purposes as well.

Once the programming department has agreed upon a basic game structure, implementation and ingame testing of Zenbitz’ mechanics proposals can start.

Writing department

Unfortunately quite a bunch of tries to really get things started in the writing department did not work out in the end. Fortunately new programmer on the team tZee got a writing background as well and volunteered to help with providing structure and guidance. His proposals can be found at the forums.

This said: there has been quite some activity in the writing department lately. Writer NineOfHearts started to flesh out a draft of the game’s story with some help of composer Dave Matney. Hopefully the draft finds its way to the wiki soon, so we can use it as basis for further discussion as well as source of source of inspiration especially for the graphics department that vastly rely on the writing department in this regard.

Project management department

A couple of good news in the project management department: former FIFE developer Stefan a.k.a. MuteX kindly accepted our plea for hosting the PARPG code documentation. The docs reside on the same server as the FIFE documentation that is hosted by him as well. The PARPG docs are updated daily, so feel free to check them out: PARPG epydoc code documentation

Community members who didn’t have an IRC client installed yet could visit the project’s channel via the browser-based mibbit client. Unfortunately our chosen IRC network irc.freenode.net banned mibbit clients lately. No need to worry though: they fortunately offer a new browser-based client that can be accessed via irc.parpg.net now.

Last and prolly most important: we held our first official IRC developer meeting yesterday. I won’t report the results in detail here because the most news-worthy ones have been already covered and you can check out the remaining ones at the wiki. For the ones who can’t get enough of all this stuff and want to find out how such a meeting actually works in detail, feel free to check out the log of the whole meeting as well as the applied meeting workflow.

And as we were pretty satisfied with the outcome of the first meeting, more project as well as department-specific meetings are planned for the future. Check out the new meeting board at the forums for all details and ongoing discussions.

That’s all for today. See you next Monday

[Game::Programming.class] Someone has used one of my ideas!

2009-06-23T02:02:21+00:00

It was surely only a matter of time, since I have so many great ideas. However, to quote from this very blog from July 19th 2006, where I described a time-travel game device: "To give you a more concrete example, imagine Command and Conquor with time travel".

Lo and below, fast forward to 2009 and what has happened? Achron: "a real-time strategy game where players and units can jump to and play at different times simultaneously and independently".

I assume the cheque is on the post.

[Game::Programming.class] New Game! "Xenogeddon"

2009-06-23T01:52:00+00:00

It's been a bit quiet on this blog lately. I got a bit bored of writing games that no-one wants to play. However, I've got a new burst of niavity and/or optimism, so I've knocked up something new in the vain hope that someone else might find it interesting.

Todays effort is an FPS by the name of Xenogeddon. It's basically Space Hulk by another name. You walk around an "abandoned" (read: not completely abandoned) and shoot stuff that looks like it might want to kill you.

True to form, it's not actually finished, but is certainly playable.

[Syntensity] Intensity Engine 0.9.5 Release

2009-06-22T08:15:37+00:00

More screenshots can be seen here.

Since 0.9, a month and a half ago, a lot of work has gone into the 0.9.5 release which is out today (rev. 324). This release is still not considered stable, but is a significant step towards that (in fact it may be the last release before 1.0). Two main areas of focus in this release are:

Allowing people to run their own infrastructure - master server, asset servers, and server instances - without any connection to Syntensity. This allows both federation (separate independent servers, with loose connections - like the WWW) and makes it easier to customize the Intensity Engine for non-standard uses.
Improving content creation and collaboration. This is now in a good enough state to allow focusing on content creation, which is one of the main tasks remaining before the Intensity Engine 1.0 release and public launch of Syntensity.

In more detail, here are some of the changes:

'clientSet' state variables, which are applied first on the client, allowing better responsiveness in an easy way
Initial login to server instances made faster
AreaTriggers made significantly faster, and now work correctly on server
Allow maps to extend the position protocol messages, for faster updates of map-relevant information like custom animation settings
Allow rendering models (including players) from map scripts, for more flexibility in visuals
Added almost-finished Stromar character model
Update of server-side NPC/bot system to current API
Various API extensions (e.g., allowing gravity to be changed)
Various minor GUI and usability improvements
Full support for building on Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 9.04, Windows XP and Windows Vista
Plenty of bug fixes

Binary builds aren't planned for this release, as things are still moving quite fast.

Towards 1.0

The Intensity Engine is now in feature freeze. Only bugs in existing features will be fixed for the 1.0 release, which is dependent upon

a decent level of stability and polish, and
a reasonable amount of working content that can be distributed with the engine or at least used to demo it

[FreeCol News] Improvements to upgrade and downgrade elements

2009-06-21T05:30:00+00:00

In response to a user request, the upgrades and downgrades of unit types have been improved by the addition of...

[Crown and Cutlass Blog] Introducing Broad Shoulder Development

2009-06-20T21:20:45+00:00

We are excited to announce a new project of ours, Broad Shoulder Development. Our initial focus is to publish iPhone games. We have a pretty complete 2D engine, and are hoping to get a simple game published soon. You can follow our progress using twitter @BroadShoulder. Eventually, we would like to publish a version of Crown and Cutlass for the iPhone but we want to get a feel for the platform first.

Now, this raises questions about what is going on with Crown and Cutlass and how Broad Shoulder Development will relate to the Crown and Cutlass project. We don’t have all the details ironed out, but really this is just a way for us to focus our development efforts. None of the Crown and Cutlass source will be closed, none of the artwork licenses will change. Unfortunately, in order to recover the cost of Apple’s developer program and other business expenses, we are planning to charge for the iPhone games we develop. We will have to see exactly how this works out, but we’d like to do something along the lines of Ogre’s dual-license (perhaps GPL?) with commercial support.

Our current 2D iPhone engine is really a port of the work we did for Protocce, our new Crown and Cutlass engine. We have simplified a lot due to the hardware restrictions, but I’m hoping that we can use the experience we gain actually using the engine on the iPhone to improve Crown and Cutlass itself. As I said, we would love to get a version of Crown and Cutlass running on the iPhone too. While the gameplay might have to be rethought a little, I think that would be very doable and really fun to play! Anyway, all that is to say, we are branching out and trying some new stuff, but don’t worry Crown and Cutlass isn’t going away.

[Blobs in Games] Switching to Flash 10

2009-06-20T18:23:09+00:00

On this blog you can see some of the experiments I've been playing with. In 2004, I started looking at Flash, mostly because I'd be able to share my experiments on the web. But at the time, Flash wasn't as free or accessible, and I switched to Java. Dissatisfied with Java, I took a look at Flash again, and started writing Flash 8 code. Two years ago I switched from Flash 8 to Flash 9. Flash 9's language (Actionscript 3) is much nicer than Flash 8's language (Actionscript 2). It's a modern programming language, with classes, objects, closures, recursion, XML, JSON, etc., and was tracking ECMAscript until the Javascript folk changed direction. Flash 9's graphics libraries are nicer than Flash 8's. It supports a tree of layers, each with its own rotation, scaling, alpha transparency, shadows, and other effects.

Flash 10 uses the same language as Flash 9. Its libraries have lots more features, especially in the graphics system. There's now a low-level graphics API that offers partial 3D, higher performance, and pixel shaders. I was slow to move to Flash 9 in part because the adoption of Flash 9 was slow. It looks like Flash now has auto-updating, and Flash 10 is being installed much more widely. I'm switching all my current projects to Flash 10.

For Flash 10 I'm using the free Flex 3.3 SDK and the Flex 3.3 docs (online or download). The SDK comes with a command line compiler, mxmlc, that I run with mxmlc -target-player 10 on the “main” program, and that will also compile anything else that is used by the main class. If you want a tutorial for using mxmlc, see senoular's mxmlc beginner guide.

Flex also comes with a compilation shell, fcsh, that lets you keep the compiler in memory to avoid the 2 seconds to start it up every time you want to recompile. I wrote a wrapper around this so that whenever I save something in Emacs, it automatically recompiles. That way, my development cycle is: edit, save, and reload in the browser. It's quite nice to have a fast cycle.

I haven't played much with the Flash 10 library additions, but the first thing I used was the bitmap line support. I'm using it to draw dashed lines as striped lane dividers. I plan to read about the new library features, but not try them until I find a possible use for them in my projects.

[Free Gamer - open source games] Turn up the juice!

2009-06-18T14:07:00+00:00

Go Ollie

An open source platformer I missed yesterday is Go Ollie. It's easy to overlook, I mean, worms are not exactly a glamorous topic. Whilst I'm not sure about the license (somebody care to check? I'm busy!) the game itself is polished and fun. The controls are different to your typical platformer, where instead of moving and jumping your character directly, you select where he moves to with the mouse. Places that can be reached are highlighted, so it's about picking the right path and having the reflexes to do it quickly enough, which can be tricky on scrolling levels.

It seems to be a gift to the Linux community from game makers Tweeler. The graphics and presentation look professional. It's a great game for kids as well as a fun time waster for adults.

<update> Actually Go Ollie is by Charlie Dog Games, but Tweeler acts as a download host for the Mac/Linux version. Also, it is definitely open source - code is GPLv3 and artwork CC-by-sa with exceptions for logos. </update>

VDrift

There's a new release of VDrift, the open source drift racing game. Version 2009-06-15 is a significant release for the project which sees it re-emerge from a massive refactor as a better game than before the refactoring began. Here's a list of the major changes since the last release, which was after the refactored code stabilized:

cars collide with each other in Single Race mode now
AI is capable of much faster driving now, so added a difficulty slider
off-road tire spin sound support (thanks to slowdan!)
support for H-gate shifters
improved performance
lots of huge bugs fixed, especially car physics bugs

TORCS

In other racing game news, the TORCS Endurance World Championship 2009 was recently held. The full report found on a participants blog. From what I can gather, it's a long distance race (500km) where people enter their own robot drivers to see how they fare.

Base Command is a fully finished OGRE mini-game. It's a straightforward 3D protect-your-base game, where you shoot down incoming planes. What is interesting is the author has provided an analysis of the game code which would help people who are learning how to program.

Scourge map

My favourite Free software game Scourge enjoys continued progress. There's now an artistic map of the large island that is the game world. There's more information to be found in the 28th "Scourge Weekly" that tracks major developers on an almost-weekly basis. They are still looking for contributors.

There's also more juicy updates on PARPG progress. That project is looking very promising and they are working their way towards their first demo release. Given the coordination and generally high activity of that project, I'm optimistic there'll be something solidly playable before the end of the year. Our own Q put together a video showing where they are currently up to:

Other interesting updates are:

Lips of Suna's second release, version 0.0.2, which introduces destructible voxel terrain. Lips of Suna aims to be an innovative 3D online dungeon crawl.
The first beta of Leges Motus, a kind of gravityless 2D multiplayer shoot-em-up.
A new Palomino release, a lovely looking 3D flight simulator - see this Free Gamer article for more flight sims.

There's probably more... feel free to add updates in the comments below!

[VDrift] VDrift 2009-06-15 Release, Linux source, Windows, OSX

2009-06-18T01:15:05+00:00

VDrift 2009-06-15 has been released for Windows and Linux (source) UPDATE: and OSX. Download links are available on the main ...

[Radakan Forums - Development blog] Looking for art(ists)

2009-06-17T16:43:35+00:00

It has been a while again since the last news update. That doesn't mean that no progress has been made, but rather that there have been to many improvements to list them all here. The biggest change has been the switch of our data format: from JSON and SQLite to self-generated python code. I must say it's working out well. It's now much easier to extend things or to add cyclic references, when that's necessary.

On the writing side, Artifice has been working hard on the races and new quests and characters.

Both Mikeman and Tariqwalji are working on the 3D interface now. Soon they'll need additional 3D models though, so we're now looking for new concept artists, modelers, and animators. To contribute, join our IRC channel, make a post on the forums or send [url=http://www.ra...

[Paul's Music Liberation Experiment] [s.c.o.u.r.g.e] Tears of Victory - outro

2009-06-16T16:09:51+00:00

Next one I'd like to share with you is called Tears of Victory - it's the outro for s.c.o.u.r.g.e, playing after the final mission. It's like a 'new, peaceful day has come' thing, featuring orchestral elements along with the choir.

Check it here: Link.

[Post-Apocalyptic RPG blog] The doors of perception

2009-06-15T19:51:44+00:00

Heya and welcome to yet another weekly PARPG news update! Let’s get started right away

Audio department

We’re proud to report that new fellow composer on the team MeinMartini created his first ingame music track for the project. Although it can be found in our Subversion repository as well, it’s far more fun to listen to it in the game itself. It’s amazing what a single audio track can add to the atmosphere of a game that is largely still in early concept stages.

Programming department

Before you could listen to the new ingame music, somebody had to implement some audio playback functionality. Team veteran maximinus volunteered and brought this kind of functionality to the game recently.

Furthermore we’re glad to introduce a new programmer on the team: meggie. She’s been hardworking in her first two weeks of her involvement and already implemented some simple random NPC movement as well as switching from one map to another. Maximinus decided to use his mapmaking skills and created a little building interior map to test the new feature.

Outside view:

Building interior:

If that wouldn’t be enough, maximinus was on a real PARPG working spree over the course of the last week. He wrote down his personal proposal for features of a first official PARPG release and furthermore also documented all existing code that is in place via the Epydoc annotation system. The docs can be found in our Subversion repository but they need to be downloaded via an SVN client to be viewed at this point. We’re considering to offer auto-updated docs (updated daily) that can be viewed online as well, similar to the existing FIFE documentation project.

Graphics department

PARPG artist Zimble recently extended the tile creation tutorial at the wiki. The latest version features some extra information about the proper rendering size of tiles in case you’re using an alternative sampling filter.

And now it’s time for our weekly “positions on the team that we would like to fill” annoucement As you might guess from the lack of picture-heavy updates in the last two weeks: we’re short of active 2d & 3d artists at the moment. The majority of the already involved artists on the team are currently rather busy either with real life in general and especially job or university assignments in particular. So in case you got some 2d or 3d creation skills and would like to lend us a hand, please get in contact with us!

Project management

And a last announcement for today: we’ve agreed upon a date for the first official PARPG IRC developer meeting. The meeting will take place next Monday, 5-7PM GMT. In case you’re confused about the whole timezone aspect: here is a great website to look it up: http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/.

The meeting will take place at the project’s IRC channel and we appreciate the participation of interested community members in the meeting. In case you got no IRC client installed on your system yet, you can connect to the channel via your normal webbrowser by clicking on the following link: irc.parpg.net

The plan for the first meeting is to discuss the roadmap that was proposed by maximinus and to coordinate the efforts of the different departments towards this goal. It turned out pretty hard to find a common date for a meeting considering that we got active developers from North America (USA & Canada), Europe and Asia (China). Therefore we’ll try to rather have two kinds of meetings in the future:

Department meetings, that members of a specific department (e.g. the graphics department) try to attend.
Project meetings, where at least one member of each department should be around to coordinate the efforts between the departments.

I’ll create a section for the project meetings at the wiki until the weekend so we have a plan what topics to discuss at Monday.

That’s all for today. See you next Tuesday I guess; seems to be better to deliver the news update after the meeting has taken place.

Female base sprite now available!

2009-06-15T15:28:41+00:00

Just wanted to let everyone know that the exclusive female base sprite has been posted. You can find it here.

Tags:

Site News

[SourceForge.net: Project lipsofsuna] Version 0.0.2

2009-06-15T10:03:02+00:00

Version 0.0.2

A new pre-alpha build is available from the project website. The highlights of the release include destructible voxel terrain, a user interface revamp, an inventory system, better controls, graphical improvements, and lots more. Regrettably, there appear to be some issues with certain SourceForge mirrors currently. If your download fails, try downloading from a different mirror.

As for the current state and future plans of the project, the game isn’t playable yet, but I hope to address some of that in the near future. The new terrain system is still pretty broken so fixing it is a priority for the next release cycle. After that, the focus will move to scripts and gameplay features. I want to add features such as combat arts, different weapon scripts, better monsters, and lootable treasure chests.

Many of the planned features still lack proper design. New graphics and sound effects are also required by them so there’s a wide variety of different tasks to work on. Getting all the pieces fit together looks like an interesting challenge akin to trying to rearrange one’s limbs. I hope something cool eventually comes out of it.

[VDrift] Website Upgrade

2009-06-15T01:15:05+00:00

The VDrift website is undergoing an upgrade. Many links or features may not work initially. Please bear with us....

[Tiki RSS feed for articles] S.C.O.U.R.G.E. Weekly Vol. 28

2009-06-14T17:51:00+00:00

Hello and welcome to the 28th edition of our quasi-weekly column! There are many news.

Timong finished the chapter, intro/outro and battle music. He also composed a new Scourge main theme. He is now working on generic dungeon and outdoors music. Gabor continued work on the outdoor world, re-added NPCs and the underground part of the headquarters and fixed loads of bugs. I didn't code much but I'm planning on spicing up the minimap quite a bit. Depending on situation, it will show the immediate surroundings, the part of the world where you currently are, or both. In order to prepare this feature, I created an artistic travel map using nothing but Gimp.

Depicted here is the first ingame appearance of the new map (creating a new outdoor region in the map editor):

I also created a more varied set of outdoor ground textures so the landscape doesn't look too boring. Two examples:

Plains of Garmoskod (subtropical)

Geinaror Ridge (alpine)

Today is my 31st birthday, and a present I would really like would be more contributors. No really, we urgently need more contributors. By implementing a massive outdoor world, we have created room for more storytelling, lots of scripted side missions, great eye candy features we would like to try, sharply increased bug and bloat potential and so on. We virtually need more personnel in all areas: Coding, bugfixing, artwork (including handpainted backgrounds and portraits), scripting (Squirrel, C++-like), gameflow, dialogue writing, cutscene direction, playtesting etc.

If you are interested in contributing on an as-time-allows basis or just want to get in touch with the team, you are invited to hang out on our friendly IRC channel (#scourge on freenode).

So, see you on IRC or otherwise, until next week! :-)

[Paul's Music Liberation Experiment] [s.c.o.u.r.g.e] Infernal Dance - battle

2009-06-14T03:25:32+00:00

So here is the final showdown music! I won't give you spoilers regarding the game, but I can tell you that it shows that the final act is containing great powers that are not in favor of the player! :)

This piece is constituted of four different parts, the introduction, the quick confrontation 'dance-like' part, a part for the hope of victory and one for the uncertainty, doubts and fears! It's going through most of the orchestral sections, contains a powerful drumkit and symphonic choirs too. It's rather long, as the final act takes a rather long time to accomplish as well.

So here it is: Link.

Interested project: S.C.O.U.R.G.E

Donated so far: $0.

[Free Gamer - open source games] Platformer roundup

2009-06-13T17:47:00+00:00

I thought I'd check out how Super Tux development is going. I grabbed the lastest svn, compiled, and performance was so abominable that it took me a minute just to quit. It didn't help that it was placed half-off the screen (probably because I have a dual screen setup) Super Tux used to run fine. I'll hold my hands up and say I'm using an nvidia chipset and the open source driver without any significant OpenGL Acceleration, but it's a 2D game. I hope they work on some kind of OpenGL-less fallback.

Mole Invasion

One little-known but very promising platformer is Mole Invasion. The website is mainly in French, but there is a dedicated English page. The game language defaults to English. The current release is version 0.4, and the first thing you notice is the Mario-like logo; obviously the inspiration for the gameplay. The second thing you notice is the performance - it runs great. It's really smooth, the animations are good, the characters move well, and there's plenty of variation. A lot of the levels are obviously made with testing in mind, and some of the graphics are still a bit raw, but otherwise it was a fun experience.

Mole Invasion feels like it is headed in the direction that Super Tux should have been. I can't help but feel that Super Tux development has significantly lost it's way. The first few post-GotM releases of Super Tux were very promising, and very well received. That was now several years ago, and little has changed for the better, some questionable decisions (move to OpenGL), and new milestones seem on the other end of a development void.

The Legend of Edgar

There's a new Parallel Realities game out. The Legend of Edgar is a platform game with a fantasy setting. I had a go with 0.1, which is playable with a single player storyline. For me, it suffers from the same issues I have with Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid - the movement is just way too slow. It takes many minutes to navigate levels to the point that exploring a level is just tedious as you wait for your character to amble his way around.

Remember Frogatto is a old-style platformer starring an anthropomorphic frog, championed by the lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth? It celebrates pixels and thrives on cute blocky graphics. There are updated Frogatto builds for Windows and Mac from the weekend, although pious Linux users must compile from source. I couldn't compile it. I had previously, and it was looking promising! Anybody else managed to compile it on Fedora?

Widelands

The next version of Widelands - based on the classic RTS gameplay of Settlers II - is fast approaching. "Build 14" will come with GGZ support, making it much easier to find multiplayer opponents. Map auto-generation, lots of other small enhancements, more campaigns and a better beta testing phase should make this the Widelands release well worth playing.

[Grumbel's Random Thoughts] More faces

2009-06-13T15:57:11+00:00

Created some more faces, don't really have any clear use for them, just relaxing do to them while listening to a podcast. Overview picture of all faces can be found here. If anybody needs some for his or her game, this offer still stands.

git clone http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/vegastrike.git/

[Development Blog] "STK w/Irrlicht": Racing

2009-06-13T01:52:15+00:00

Hi, and welcome to another update on the Irrlicht branch of SuperTuxKart.
While screenshots of the menu is interesting, most of the time you'll probably be racing in STK 0.7. So this time I'll show you a couple of in-race screenshots.

Racing at the beach

As you can see, AI karts have been reimplemented, and work has been started on the new driveline system as well. The screenshot above is unfortunately quite skewed due to lagging; the computer I'm using isn't the best. But you get the general idea. ;)
Btw, the kart I'm driving (the closest one) is the improved version of Nolok.

"Street" burning by the lighthouse

Work is underway for different particles for different terrain. Here, the sand/grass texture shows smoke when skidding on it. It's just a proof of concept; in the end skidding here will most likely show sand or grass particles, while the smoke will be used when skidding on the road. Splash effect when driving into water is among the goodies this feature will bring.
Btw, the kart I'm driving here, is Pidgin, the replacement for Penny. Penny will probably end up as an add-on.

Another thing I want to mention, is that compiling the Irrlicht version is somewhat tricky, and driving around is currently very unstable. So if you don't plan to contribute and/or you're not comfortable with compiling on your system, it's strongly recommended to wait until things have settled more down. One of the developers compared the current development version with a building site, where the materials are slowly being put together, forming a larger and better building than the previous. Continuing the analogy: if you are going into the building site, expect some falling objects and unsafe areas. But if you have some knowledge, it can work as a safety helmet, protecting you from the worst disasters. And... um... what was I talking about again? Better get some sleep....

[Some of us cannot be wrong] ATI graphics fixes

2009-06-12T15:27:59+00:00

The last month saw both the release of Ember 0.5.6 and the start of the Google Summer of Code.
The Ember release included the really nice addition of real time shadows, thanks to the work done by Alexey. It also included some really nifty area editing tools for world authors, as well as the usual slew of polish and bug fixes.
After the release was done Alexey and me did some additional work on the shadow system, to fix some of the bugs and artifacts that existed in the release. Amongs them was some issues with shadow texture fidelity at certain distances and a bug where lights that were created in the world never disappeared. Another issue we found was that lights which were attached to entities which a character was wielding did't get updated as the character moved. The prime example here was the torch, which in turn had a "fire" child entity.
All of these issues has now however been fixed in git master.
I've also added a new nifty snap-to-move feature. It's activated when you move an entity in the world, and allows you to easily make it snap to another entity. The snapping is done by matching the bounding boxes of the entities. This is really useful when building fences or walls, since each wall section then can snap into the other.

However, the bulk of my time the last couple of weeks has been spent on graphic glitches, mainly those found on ATI cards. We've known for a little while that there are a couple of artifacts on ATI cards, but since none of the main developers use ATI cards (we use Nvidia, since at least historically their Linux support has been orders of magnitudes better than ATI) we haven't really known how bad these artifacts are.
After upgrading to Mandriva 2009.1 I began to run into X server segfaults when running OpenGL applications. I therefore had to abandon my Nvidia card until the issue has been fixed, and it just so happened that I was able to borrow an ATI cards from work.
Turns out there were all kinds of issues with ATI cards, amongs them the issue with random segfaults within the OpenGL driver. Just this issue had me spend more than a week trying to track down. Intially it wasn't clear that the crashes were random, since they seemed to occur near certain materials. However, after disabling more and more features it became apparent that they were indeed completely random. Thanks to cdleonard, developer of the Caelum environment system, we concluded that the issue was that using hardware generated mipmapping on ATI cards, as supplied by the SGIS_generate_mipmap extension, resulted in random memory corruption withing the (closed source) GL stack. Yep, pretty much the worst possible kind of bug to track down. Once we did track it down it down and disabled the crashes went away.
There are however still some artifacts on ATI cards. The paged geometry has some issues, since it in places mixes vertex shaders with fixed function fragment processing. And the high detail glsl shaders doesn't produce any output, so when running Ember in high detail level all meshes are hidden when viewed up close. But all of these issues are easily fixable and it shouldn't take long until we can do a new release, which will work much better on ATI cards.

The Summer of Code is also progressing nicely. Manuel reports on the progress over at the wiki. We're now mainly in the discovery stage, where we're identifying where in the code base it would be suitable to add threading support. Nonetheless Manuel has already submitted a series of patches for various code cleanup issues which I've merged into Ember trunk. Git is truly a wonderful tool!

[Syntensity] Roadmap Changes

2009-06-12T00:08:36+00:00

I've made some decisions regarding the roadmap for the next few months:

The Intensity Engine has been made completely independent of Syntensity, and will continue that way. My original intention was that I would focus on Syntensity, and through that promote the Intensity Engine (the Intensity Engine being an open source project utilized by Syntensity), and later on get around to making the Intensity Engine more compelling as a separate project. But several people (for various reasons) have already expressed an interest in the Intensity Engine by itself, and I have also been hearing some very good arguments for completely open sourcing the Syntensity master server. Because of that, I've started to add to the Intensity Engine the functionality it needs to be usable without the Syntensity master server, namely, an example master server was committed a few days ago, and better documentation on running the various server components as well. Furthermore, improved master and asset servers should be appearing soon.
The Intensity Engine 1.0 release is still planned for later this summer. Bugfixing is progressing well, and no major features are planned at this point, just minor stuff. Recent decisions like including a master server as mentioned above should not be a cause of delay.
Syntensity will remain in 'closed' alpha, and later 'closed' beta. I say 'closed' with scare quotes, because the source code is open, and I'll give an invite to Syntensity to anyone that asks, so 'closed' here is kind of a silly term. But what I mean is that I won't make an effort to promote Syntensity, and probably not provide pre-built binaries either. The reason is that I think opening up to a wider audience should wait for better content, and it looks like getting that content will take less time than I originally thought, so why not wait.
The Syntensity public launch might be delayed somewhat. Basically I will delay it until I feel the content is good enough, probably not by very much, but there is no reason to have a rushed release.

[OpenTH Development Blog] We’re back!

2009-06-11T16:27:11+00:00

Hello everyone! You will have noticed the project has been dead for a while. This is because we’ve all had exams. But now they are over! At least for Paul and I. Hopefully we will get to do some more programming soon on the project. Other developers also have various commitments but hopefully will come back into [...]

[torcs] TRB racing season has started

2009-06-10T23:15:27+00:00

The first race of the TORCS Endurance World Championship 2009 is done, you can read a nice roundup in Gabor Kmetykos blog. Thank you for the nice report, Gabor. Bernhard

[www.allacrost.org] Seven months

2009-06-10T04:01:40+00:00

Wow, its been nearly seven months since our last post. I bet some of you were starting to think this project was dead, weren't you? I grow tired of continuing to say this, but "no, we are not dead". Why the long period with no news posted on the site? The answer is quite simply, there was no news to share. The entire team kind of fell apart for a while and there wasn't a lot of motivation on our part to work on the game. We all had our own reasons. Some just needed a break while others were busy with other things in their lives. We did get some work done though. We're on the verge of having full internationalization (multiple language) support in the game and just have a few kinks left to work out.

One of the reasons why we fell into this state is that we lacked manpower in both our programming and art departments. If you recall from the last news post, we were trying really hard to attract new programmers. And we did attract quite a few. The problem is that nearly every person we brought aboard and trained turned out to produce nothing or very little work. Personally this pisses me off whenever this happens (and it has happened quite frequently in the last year or two) because it actually does take us some time to get people set and mentor them during their first couple of weeks with the team. So when someone joins but doesn't produce anything it actually hurts our progress, which is not cool at all. We do still need programmers and artists on this team though so if you are interested please apply. But do so only if you're actually willing to commit yourself and do some work because you're just going to hurt this game otherwise.

Now then, the good news is that the team is fired up again. We've picked up where we left off and have been working aggressively on implementing the features for the next release that we have planned. Yes, we haven't changed the plans for our next release. However because we fell behind so much from our long hiatus and our team size remains small, we've decided to cut some of the less essential features we had originally planned. One such feature that we decided to cut is surface sounds, which is the ability to play different sounds depending upon the type of surface a sprite is walking on. To be clear, we haven't decided to cut these features from the game entirely. We only decided to put them off until a later release milestone.

The highlight of this next release is going to be all the changes you will see in the game's battles. I guarantee that the battle system will be significantly better than any of our past release. You'll see improvements across the entire game of course, but battles are really what we are focusing on in this next release. Maybe in a future post I'll elaborate more on exactly what you can expect to see in our next release. Until then, thanks for being patient with us and hopefully we can deliver something to you before the end of this year. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that this project is now just over 5 years old. At least we're persistent, right? :)

[Post-Apocalyptic RPG blog] Through the looking glass

2009-06-08T21:19:31+00:00

Heya and welcome to yet another weekly PARPG news update! This time I had to struggle a bit to make it in time so I hope you don’t mind the newsflash style of coverage again. I ran out of time to flesh out all the details and I didn’t want to delay the update for a day or two.

Audio department

We’re glad to announce that PARPG developer Dave Matney has been promoted to the lead audio guy on the team. Dave has been following the project for over a month and started to spend more and more time on it in the last weeks. He’s the person to talk to when it comes to audio-related demands from now on. That does not mean he’ll act as exclusive contributor to the department but that he feels comfortable coordinating the audio efforts. We’re of course still looking for additional developers, either composers or audio effect engineers. But with Dave stepping up, there is finally somebody who can act as a competent contact person for new interested contributors in the field.

Programming department

Our programmers spent quite some time on improving PARPG since the last week’s update. Bretzel added an ingame options menu to the game where you can change a couple of options, including resolution, display mode and the renderer to use. Furthermore he also added to quickslots to the inventory that can be accessed rather fast without opening your backpack:

Maximinus’ figured out how to split larger object into several tile-width pieces to work around z-ordering issues. His Python script can be found in our SVN repository. Furthermore he also implemented a way to display text description above ingame objects and added highlighting of these objects when you hover over them with the mouse as well:

I totally forgot to mention it in one of the last news updates, but PARPG contributor Bhayden was the one who implemented the screenshot feature recently. We were puzzled why the feature itself worked fine on Linux but refused service on Windows systems. It took us some time until FIFE developer Cheesesucker figured out that “:” is not a valid character for filenames / paths on Win32 The fixed code resides in SVN now and screenshots are finally working for the Windows version of PARPG.

Graphics department

The graphics department has taken a well-deserved rest after the massive and image-heavy update last week. Nevertheless concept artist Gaspard overhauled the GUI design article at the wiki. Loyal contributor qubodup compiled a concept art gallery there as well; so it’s easy to find all the pieces in one central place now

Project management

After the last week’s annoucement that we’re looking to set up a developer meeting at our IRC channel, zenbitz proposed to create a doodle for it. If you have never heard about doddle: it’s a pretty nice way to arrange meetings online. If you’re a PARPG developer who hasn’t filled out the doodle yet, please do so until Saturday evening. We would like to hold the first bi-weekly meeting next week if nothing goes wrong and therefore would like to announce the date of the meeting in the news update next at Monday. In case we end up with Monday or Tuesday, the meeting will not take place at the 15th or 16th but one week later, at the 22th or 23th of June as we would like to annouce the meeting at least two full days before it actually takes place.

FIFE news

If you want to create a game, you usually need a tool to build levels for with it. While FIFE already featured a map editor tool, it was not really a convenient helper and felt often awkward to use. Fortuntelay FIFE developer Cheesesucker stepped up and decided to rewrite large parts of it and I need to say that the new version of it is definately a _huge_ improvement. So why do I feature FIFE-related news in a PARPG update? For two reasons:

The new editor tool will make the life of our levels designers much easier so PARPG will benefit from it to a large degree.
Self-adulation: I take credit for digging up the new editor interface icons. They were taken from the excellent SVG icons project, that released their work under the GPL.

And as this update is not as eye candy heavy as some of the ones before, we thought that it would be a good idea to show you at least a screenshot of our PARPG map loaded into the new editor. The new ice tiles have been created by Blender artist Zimble:

That’s all for today. See you next Monday

[Blobs in Games] Road representation

2009-06-08T17:00:04+00:00

Playing Transport Tycoon, I've recently been setting up multimodal transport, where a bus will transport passengers from the bus stop in the middle of town to the train station outside of town (because once the towns in Transport Tycoon get big, it's hard to buy up enough land to build a train station or airport). The trains then take people to the nearby airport, which is even farther away from town for noise and space reasons. It would be fun to design those airports yourself, but Transport Tycoon gives you only a few rectangular predesigned airports.

The real trouble with playing Transport Tycoon is that it makes me want to write a transportation game. I'm too busy to work on a full game right now, but I want to experiment with small pieces of games. I thought it'd be fun to design container ports that mix truck, train, and ship traffic. While trying to break that down into smaller problems, I decided to work on roads: representing them, simulating vehicle movement, and drawing them. Someone asked me: why use grids? I love grids. I think a lot about grids. Even when I used splines for roads, the endpoints were on grid edges. I recently updated my A* pages about non-grid maps, and it seems like this project would be a good fit for a non-grid representation.

As I mentioned in the last post, I'm trying things quickly and am happy to throw them away if they don't work out. I'm now on the fourth design, which uses a two-level graph structure. The first graph is used by the player to edit the world. You'll place nodes and then connect them with edges. The second graph is used by pathfinding for vehicles to move along lanes. Each connection point generates one node per lane. Intersections export edges corresponding to all the ways a truck can go straight or turn, and roads export edges for going straight and for changing lanes. The rough plan is to have three kinds of objects:

“Anchor” objects like intersections and truck stops export connection points. The anchors act like nodes in the first graph and generate edges in the second graph. For example, a 4-way intersection will export 4 connection points.
Connection points have a position, orientation, and lane configuration. They don't show up in the first graph but generate nodes in the second graph. The lane configuration is the number of lanes in each direction. For example, a connection point might specify 2 lanes going one way and 1 lane going the other way.
Roads are attached to existing connection points and can follow a spline curve. Roads do not export their own connection points, but only can attach to anchor objects. They act as edges in the first graph and generate edges in the second graph.

Unlike the previous three designs, in which I quickly ran into trouble, this design has held up for a few weeks, so that's a good sign. The subproblems are:

How do I represent connection points? I decided to keep the position, orientation, and the number of lanes going into and coming out of the anchor object. It's a very simple struct and it'll be easy to change.
How do I represent intersections? I've limited myself to 4-way straight intersections (90 degree turns). Each side can have its own in/out lane configuration.
How do I draw intersections? For roads, there's a double yellow line in the center, a dashed white line between lanes going the same direction, and a solid white line on the side. There's a stop line where vehicles come to a stop. If there are right-only and left-only turn lanes, then there will be solid white lines separating those (not implemented yet). There may be arrows drawn to show which ways a vehicle can turn (not implemented yet). The size of the intersection itself is a rectangle as small as possible (not implemented yet).

(Try the demo!)
How do I represent roads? I'd normally say cubic splines. However, since Flash supports drawing quadratic Bezier curves, it'd be nice if I could draw the roads using Flash instead of implementing my own curve rendering, so I'm going to use a spline with quadratic Beziers. There are ways to approximate cubics with quadratics but I'll see how far I get with quadratics alone. The lane configuration at the ends of the roads is determine by the anchor points, and the road handles the change in configuration. It might even be useful to have a lane configuration at each spline handle.
How do I draw roads? The roads again have the same yellow and white stripes as in intersections. However, this is where I ran into some trouble. I want the lane stripes to be parallel. This is done by taking the original curve and constructing an “offset curve”. Unfortunately, offsets of Bezier curves are not Bezier!

This could be a major problem. The more I dug into this problem, the more papers I found. It turns out that it affects various industries use Bezier curves (not only quadratic) for representing curves, and they use approximations for offset curves. I found papers mentioning circular arcs, Pythagorean hodograph curves, Hausdorff distance, and a few other things, but in the end I decided that what mattered was not whether the curve is exactly correct but whether it looks reasonable.

I drew the Bezier curve and the constructed somewhat-parallel Bezier curves, and it turns out it looks okay at low curvatures but not high curvatures:

(Try this demo.)

I think it'll be reasonable to restrict the curvature of the road, and then I can use Flash for drawing the roads and lane markers. A new problem arose: although Flash 10 allows bitmap line drawing (this is how I draw the “dashed” lane divider lines), the bitmap orientation is fixed and does not curve as the line does. I'm not yet sure how much of a problem this will be.
How do I move along roads? With Bezier curves, the movement isn't uniform; I need to adjust for arc length. Most likely I'll turn each lane path into a series of points, and then move linearly between them. If that doesn't look good then I'll try something else.

One thing I'm considering is using circular arcs instead of Bezier curves. Arcs are fairly easy to understand and have simple movement. Offset curves from circular arcs are also arcs. Also, arcs are commonly used in real roads. Arcs can be approximated with Bezier curves.
How do I handle collisions? Open Transport Tycoon's “path based signals” have vehicles reserve the path ahead of them. Grids make this easier because you can reserve grid spaces (although OTTD is a little smarter than this and can allocate half-grids). Without grids, I could either precompute all intersecting road segments and mark them all occupied whenever one of them is reserved, or I could use polygon intersection to watch for vehicles colliding. The first approach uses planning; the second is purely reactive. I think a reactive system would lead to traffic jams.

Road representation turns out to be a fun problem. As the code stabilizes, I'm pushing it out to github and I'll put demos into the wiki. It's all under the MIT license so feel free to use it for anything. My next step is to determine how the roads and anchors connect to each other. That problem may help me decide on Bezier curves vs. arcs.

Pixel Art Contest - $100 First Prize!

2009-06-07T02:38:01+00:00

OpenGameArt.org is running a pixel art contest! We're seeking hair, accessories, and other modifications to our male and female (to be released shortly) sprite bases, for a cash prize of US$100, or US$50 for second place! Read the rules and submit your entry today! All entries are due by August 1st, with winners to be announced on August 9th.

Sorry to duplicate this entry, but I had to blog it so it hits the RSS feed.

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[schattenkind.net Development Blog] new Iris2 stable release (build 3021)

2009-06-06T11:28:47+00:00

# ChangeLog 05/19/09 17:58:22

GUI/UI
-2D : fixed FONT/GUI - Zoom/Ortho/Pixelexactness issues
-Spellcast-progressbar Plugin activated for 3D Mode
-disabled desktop-system:opening of containers on login, opened too many, and Doubleclicking more than one causes you-must-wait message anyway
-HudGFX generalized to allow rise text on mob in 3D Mode, e.g. “don’t have spell” when casting etc…
-old 3D DisplayTextOverHead disabled (because 2d works)
-shop hook, tooltip coloring for blessed and slayer,
-mainmenu acclist : skill display rounded to one decimal digit
-close healthbar when mobile dies
-map compass icon

Bugfixes
-win : avoid crash at shutdown
-win: fixed mouse offset
-serversend close gump
-popen problem solved
-lugre path changes
-file-exists checks
-error message if config dir not writable, if block around
-added profiler section for BodyGfxStep
-container update batch, lootplugin internal redesign
-cached file not found to prevent unnecessary disk access
-installdeps.ubuntu.sh , a apostroph in echo broke the syntax
-char select always used first char
-packetlogging format changed to razor-packetlog-format for easier comparison
-maparea check after login ( custom skybox + fogcolor ) , small debug utils

Scripting
-new macros : MacroCmd_JobWaitForShop , MacroCmd_UseRuneBookPostAOS
-Walk_GetTimeUntilNextStep, kMapIndex_Felucca constants for current
-small imrpovements to loot plugin
-small improvements for lootplugin and moblist
-loot plugin redesign to consider serverside minwait better, improved
-updated shard configs
-party pos update only sent when not alone in party

[Syntensity] Code Quality Improvements

2009-06-05T05:10:30+00:00

The Intensity Engine's stability has significantly improved over the past two weeks. In fact, it's been a few days since I ran into a bug. But, the bugs you don't know about are just as bad, so I spent a few days doing various code quality procedures, including running valgrind and doing more serious cross-platform testing.

Valgrind is an excellent Linux-only tool for detecting memory errors at runtime (and a lot of other stuff). For memory errors, valgrind basically checks every memory allocation, read and write to see that it's valid. This is quite an intensive process, making the program run 10 times slower or worse, but one of the nice things with Cube 2 is that it's so fast that, actually, you can run it in valgrind at a decent speed and perform actual tests. And I'm talking about the client, not the server (which can also be done, but is a much less impressive feat).

Even so, running valgrind is a time-consuming task, as it takes a lot of repeat runs to get useful results (as you fine tune the 'suppressions file', the list of warnings that it can safely ignore). This took a few days, during which the following came to light:

Several minor issues with Cube 2 itself, including accessing uninitialized values and a mismatched new/delete. I reported them and eihrul committed appropriate fixes (which I then ported to the Intensity Engine). I am somewhat surprised none of these led to noticeable issues in practice, but I guess most compilers initialize enough stuff by default to prevent it. (Perhaps compilers should have an option to not initialize values, for testing purposes?)
One serious issue with Cube 2, concerning bone processing in the skeletal animation system: When bones were 'unused' (not appearing in actual blend weights, etc.), that led to a read at index -1 in a C array. As with the previous issues, I reported this and eihrul committed a one-line fix.
One minor issue with how the Intensity Engine uses Cube 2: I assumed a value was initialized by default, but it wasn't (not sure why it isn't, it somewhat goes against the conventions elsewhere, but regardless the fix was trivial).
One serious issue with, of all things, the Intensity Engine's logging system: An incorrect reuse of a function receiving a variable number of arguments by functions passing it only one (it got confused in some cases and looked for arguments that didn't exist). The fix was trivial.

This actually went better than I expected: Given the 65,000 lines of Cube 2 code, some of which I modified, +30,000 lines of Intensity Engine code that I wrote, I would have expected more issues, or at least more serious ones. Only one serious issue in each of Cube 2 and the Intensity Engine is not that bad.

As a side issue, the trickiest part with running valgrind turned out to be Google V8. Valgrind reports a lot of issues in V8, presumably because V8 dynamically generates machine code from JavaScript, and furthermore modifies that machine code on the fly. In other words, the issues valgrind finds aren't problems with V8 itself, but with the dynamically generated code. And generating an appropriate suppressions file for such stuff isn't easy (not sure it's even 100% possible).

The second thing I did was finally get around to some serious testing on Windows, as during the last few months I only found time for some partial testing myself now and then, and some very useful community contributions. So, the time was right to make sure this worked, and after several hours the client was running fine (there remains an issue with the server, something minor about how linking is done, which I'll fix later on). Interestingly, as always cross-platform testing uncovered some stuff:

The serious issue mentioned above with the Intensity Engine logging system led to actual crashes on Windows (while on Linux no errors occurred in practice). So, interestingly, this problem could have been discovered by either valgrind or by cross-platform testing.
An issue with reading files using the C API: What I wrote worked fine on Linux, but not on Windows, apparently due to underlying platform differences. The fix was trivial, and even shortened and improved the code: To use Python's file reading system, which is already tested for cross-platform compatibility.

Overall, writing in C++ definitely has its downsides, as the issues mentioned above will attest, and that's why big parts of the Intensity Engine are written in Python or JavaScript: No memory leaks (for the most part), no invalid memory accesses, fewer cross-platform compatibility issues, etc. But with game engines and virtual worlds platforms, the core speed/memory-intensive part really has no choice but to be written in C++. It's not easy nor always fun, but it is manageable.

[Free Gamer - open source games] What planet are you on?

2009-06-04T11:44:00+00:00

Wesnoth Knight

Battle for Wesnoth continues to get stupendously good art contributions such as this series of Loyalist portraits.

Hot on the heels of Extreme Tux Racer 0.5beta, contributor and original Tux Racer developer Erin has introduced his rewrite to the world. Tentatively named Bunny Hill, the rewrite has a better design resulting in better performance, nicer graphics (in some ways, lesser in others) and more features. It looks like it will probably become ETR 0.6 once the dust has settled.

PARPG Weapons

PARPG is back from the dead. 3 weeks not blogging being 'dead' apparently. The project itself is thriving, with plenty of graphical creativeness whilst the coders assess their options for developing the game.

Unknown Horizons will have a new release very soon!

Widelands is getting randomly generated maps.

Simutrans Subways

It looks like Simutrans is getting subways, at least pak96.comic is anyway. Subterranean!

There'll be loads more updates to your favourite Free games but I don't have my finger on the pulse as much as I used to, so...

...so...

...post them in the comments!

Update: the FreeOrion project released version 0.3.13 and it has a huge changelog.

Thanks to all who donated!

2009-06-02T22:20:33+00:00

Greets!

I'm sure some people might be interested in where the site donations are going. The May/June donations of $150 will go toward making sets of clothing and hair for the RPG sprites. This is in addition to the creation of the female sprite (which is finished and will be up within a week) that I am paying for out of pocket.

Thanks a lot for the help!

Note: If you'd like to donate, don't let the "100% complete" bar stop you. Any and all further donations will go toward commissioning additional artwork.

Thanks!

Bart

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[Post-Apocalyptic RPG blog] Back from the dead

2009-06-02T20:08:32+00:00

Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update. Three full weeks have passed since the last one and I’m truly sorry for the lack of updates lately. I’ve been really busy with university and although I know a lot more about the reconstruction of the failed state Liberia with the help of the UN now, I rather would have liked to post an update or two in the meantime instead of investing so much time into a presentation I had to give last Friday. Anyways, now that I’m done with it, I got some free time on my hands this week so here’s your promised dose of PARPG news. This time it’s more a newsflash than anything else. While I’ve been busy with real life, the others – especially the graphics department – has been hardworking and there’s simply too much to report to do so in detail. Feel free to browse the forums to read about all the details.

Programming department newsflash

Maximinus had to wrestle with some of FIFE’s quirks lately. Frustration grew and we were actively looking for possible alternatives to FIFE just to be not stuck with it as only possible engine. It seems while FIFE comes with a bunch of quirks indeed, it’s still the best option for the game that we have in mind. A more detailed explanation is provided at the forums.

Python programmer Bretzel continued to work on the inventory code. After we covered his standalone version of it in the last news update, we’re proud to present a screenshot of its new ingame version:

Furthermore: we’re still looking for a Mac-based C++ programmer to help us with getting FIFE running on Macintosh systems. While it does work in theory, building FIFE on Macs is incredibly complicated; therefore our Mac-based developers would really appreciate a helping hand. If you’re comfortable programming on Mac and got some solid C++ background as well as Linux experience, please get in contact with us at the forums.

Game design newsflash

Zenbitz has been hardworking as every week and continued to flesh out his thoughts on wounding.

Graphics department

Ohh boy, these artists don’t seem to be sleeping. While this update contains a whole bunch of images, there are about a dozen more at the forums. To save myself some time I’ll simply show some of their latest work and link to a recent thread with more pictures. Enjoy

Shrew81

Warehouse render (WIP version posted in the last news update):

Slegdehammer:

More weapon renders by Shrew81:
http://forums.parpg.net/index.php?topic=213.0

Zimble

Building interieur:

More renders by Zimble:
http://forums.parpg.net/index.php?topic=214.0

Zeli

Zeli is one of the new concept artists on the team.

Reindeer panorama:

Improvised weapons:

Sirren

Sirren worked on a bunch of inorganic & organic models for PARPG lately.

Valmet RK 62:

Animated reindeer:

More renders by Sirren:
http://forums.parpg.net/index.php?topic=190.15

Project management newsflash

We’re currently trying to establish developer meetings at our IRC channel on a regular basis; preferably at least twice a month. In case you’re interested to take part, head over to the forums and let us know which day of the week would be best suited for such a meeting.

That’s all for today. See you next week Hopefully with less topics to cover that I can therefore flesh out in more detail.

[M64's Games Blog] Preproductions in the style of Philip K. Dick

2009-06-02T13:49:16+00:00

As an aspiring FOSS game creator I stand before some dilemmas and questions that I think may be common to other creators. One is that I have many game ideas - much more than I think I am able to turn into full game projects. Therefore I have to make some tough choices, which is hard without any other input than my gut feeling. Second, I feel there is a sort of unspoken premise of developing FOSS games - that you will be able to attract some contributors and make your games bigger then what you could ever do by yourself. But it is wiser to create small games, as big project require large initial investment before you will have a working product to show off and without that it is difficult to find contributors. Third, is the question of how to perform preproductions - without them it is rather hard to get the gameplay right, but they lengthen the project and move away the moment when you have something playable to show. I write about those questions today because I think I have found a possible answer and I would like to discuss it.

Let me elaborate a bit more on the preproductions. What exactly is the preproduction and why is it so important? It is the experimenting stage of game production, when you try to figure out whether your game ideas are technically possible and how to make them entertaining. In commercial studios that stage typically consists of creating many proof of concept levels to check various features in isolation, as well as a “slice of gameplay” - an actual level taken from the middle of the game, that shows how all the features mix together and what will the final art, level design and plot look like. It is worth mentioning that during the preproduction game design can change drastically - one well known XBox 360 3rd person shooter, which title I shall not utter here for the fear of NDA, was initially supposed to be focused on vehicle combat but ended up focused on chest height walls. Nice makeover, eh?

How do the preproductions look like in the FOSS gamedev? If the game is a clone of a commercial product, than that product serves as a sort of a preproduction - it is typically a good game, so if it is copied faithfully enough, the clone will be good to. If the game is a “liberated” one, than it probably went through preproduction when it was still closed. But when it comes to original ideas being developed as FOSS from the ground up, I am afraid that frequently they just do not have any preproduction at all. For various reasons it is difficult to perform a preproduction within a FOSS project. For one thing, it requires throwing out or remaking features that do not fit in and this may be hard considering the constant shortage of manpower and the risk of offending contributors. Other problem is that a preproduction may give the impression of the project spinning in circles and make it more difficult to find them in the first place. But skipping the preproduction has serious consequences - the game will not be as fun as the commercial counterparts and it may be difficult to keep the project heading in the right direction, because that direction has not been established through experimentation in the first place.

Having described the problems, let me tell you now about Mister Philip K. Dick, because he might have known an answer to them. Since high school, he was one of my favorite writers and definitely the favorite SF writer. I own most of his books that have been published in Poland in the last decade - both novels and story collections. One interesting thing I have learned about Dick (pun not intended but inevitable) because of this collector-like passion is that most of the ideas that he has used in his novels have been first “test driven” in the form of stories. I do not know whether he has done it because he literally wanted to first test the them, or perhaps early in his carrier he had problems finding publishers for novels so he wrote the stories instead. Whatever the reason, that practice gave me an idea applicable to FOSS game development. A lone creator or a small team could, instead of trying to create a big game, create many small ones - one or two levels long, based on a single idea, with just enough story to set the mood, without tutorials, savegames and so on. Those would be the short stories and gameplay slices of the ideas. Some of them are not going to work out good, but that is expected and nothing to worry about. Some will and the players will let you know about it - those ideas you can refine and package into bigger games. Those would be the novels.

Such approach gives creators several advantages:

they can try out much more ideas then they could when focusing on big productions only and still retain the option to turn the good ones into full scale projects;
they will quickly gain “street cred” for delivering actually finished, albeit small, games;
they get more objective judgment of the ideas then “gut feeling” can give;
they may get feedback about how to improve the underperforming ideas;
once they decide to put some ideas into a full blown game, the small games will fill the role of proofs of concept and gameplay slices, therefore becoming the preproduction stage;
if they want to acquire donations or contributions it will be easier to find both if there are already many people who have played the “short story” version;
they will have something to show off right from the beginning that will help to keep the project heading in the right direction.

I had a lot of difficulties fitting small games (that is smaller than episodic) into my view of how should the FOSS games be developed. Adopting the technique used by Philip K. Dick gives me the possibility to use them in a way that solves several other problems of FOSS game development. I hope others will find that aproach useful too.

And what do you think?

[Blobs in Games] Following multiple paths in RPGs

2009-05-31T21:20:32+00:00

Last year at GDC I was talking to the Wild Shadow Studios guys about traditional classes in fantasy RPGs (ranger, wizard, barbarian, cleric, etc.). Some of our complaints about classes in many multiplayer RPGs:

Classes come with roles such as “tank”, “healer”, “ranged”, “melee”, “crowd control”, etc. If you want to join a group that needs a tank, but your class is about melee damage, you can't join the group.
The beginning of the game is a bad time to choose a class, which impacts you for the entire game. It's too early in the game to know what style of play you might like or what kind of roles are needed/useful. By the time you can make this decision it's too late; you've already invested lots of time into the game. Either you throw all that away or you keep playing the class that's not best for you.
Every class's play style can be considered “content”, and by choosing just one the player is missing out on other styles of play. As a game developer, if you have 5 classes, and players only play one of these on average, you're spending a lot of money on “content” that most players won't see, especially if armor/weapons are written for just a few classes in mind.

In Diablo 2, you picked a class but you could also customize that class by choosing skills as you level up. For example, Barbarians could choose skills such as Taunt or Double Swing. The skills had level requirements and prerequisites; for example, Double Swing was only available if you already had Bash. The trees were divided into three specialties per class; each of these effectively acts as a sub-class, so you had 15 styles of play instead of just 5 classes. The skills available to you were fairly limited at the beginning of the game, so you're not overwhelmed, and you don't have to make your choices at the beginning. This partially addresses complaint #2.

In Guild Wars and Titan Quest, you get to pick two classes. Multiclassing has been around since the D&D days, but these two games makes two classes the default and one class an option. Multiple classes can help with complaint #1, since everyone has two roles. It also helps with complaint #3, by adding lots of variety without having to create new content around it.

In Silverfall, World of Warcraft, and Titan Quest, I can change my skills later in the game, but not my class. WoW also has hybrid classes such as druid and shaman that can perform multiple roles. This also helps slightly with complaint #1, but it's quite a hassle. (Recently, WoW introduced “dual specs”, which help quite a bit by letting you set up two sets of skills that can be swapped with one button.) Being able to change my skills later greatly increased my desire to experiment. In Diablo 2, I would pick skills based on the recommendations of others. Decisions you can't change are more likely to be conservative. But in WoW, I am much more willing to try out new things, because I can undo them.

In Dungeon Siege II, there are skill trees but no classes. You essentially define your class by choosing skills along the way, but you don't have to decide anything at the beginning of the game. Titan Quest also delays the decision-making of your first and second classes. Either approach addresses complaint #2.

Another way to address all three complaints is to have more than one character, each one trying out a different class and play style. But when playing these characters, you start over from scratch.

What I'd like is (a) delaying decisions about classes/skills, and (b) allowing trying out other choices after I'm “finished” with my current class. So here's the idea: as you progress in the game, you are given choices of specialties. If you later master multiple specialties, you can become a generalist. Here's a diagram:

After you've played for a short time, you get to choose weaponry or magic. I choose weaponry. After playing more and leveling up with weaponry skills, I am able to specialize again, and I learn melee. After learning all the melee skills, I specialize in swords. After a few more levels, I am now fully specialized by mastering swords, and there's no more for me to learn. This is the equivalent of “level 80” in WoW.

At this point, it's time to try the branches I hadn't tried. This could either be by starting over with a new character at the novice level; or it could be by restoring a previous savegame where I was still at weaponry (playing a “clone” in a scifi setting), and choosing the ranged path instead; or it could be by using my current character to go back and learn ranged attacks. I don't know which of those approaches would be best for a game. In any case, I'm now trying out other play styles, just as with current RPGs.

Where this design differs is that there's something gained in-game by learning multiple specialties. This is the lower half of the diagram. If I master both the sword and axe, that unlocks the halberd. If I master both ice and death magic, it unlocks wizardry skills. By playing and mastering all types of characters, I become a Master.

An open question is how you handle the huge number of skills once you've pursued multiple paths. Titan Quest and Guild Wars limit your classes to two, so that it's not too bad. WoW lets you have two sets of skills, and you can swap back and forth at any time. Guild Wars further gives you a fixed number of skills at any time, and you can swap these out when you're in a major city. In a scifi setting, such as a robot or spaceship based game, you could assign the skills to the robot/vehicle you're in, and then jump into a different robot/vehicle to swap skills (Wild Shadow Studios is working on a tank-based MMO that does this). Choosing sets of skills before you go into combat seems like a reasonable way to limit the complexity, and also encourage planning ahead.

This skill graph addresses complaint #2: you don't have to make permanent choices at all, and the choices you make come after you've been playing the game for a bit. It also addresses #3: there's a path for the player to experience all the “content” the developers create. It partially addresses #1, by allowing you to play different roles at different times. Novice players can follow a recommended path to specialize in just one “class”, whereas experienced players can experiment more and try out new combinations. I think it could be fun to play with such a system, but I'm not planning to write an RPG any time soon.

[KibaBase] A RubyTet Release

2009-05-31T03:42:16+00:00

Once again, I made a new release of RubyTet some time ago. RubyTet is now in its 4th release. I am very happy to say that we’re seeing the next generation of RubyTet taking shape by the addition of new gameplay element, the yellow gem.

This yellow gem impedes people from being able to complete a line, thus denying the ability to rack up point. The higher up the gem, the more dangerous the gem is.

More in this release is a new shape called deadly. Its odd placement prove deadly to players accustomed to only the regular tetris shape found in more faithful games. It also uniformize the shape color.

The internal structure of the codebase undergoes changes to accomondates ability to design and add your own shape to the game.

As for next release, we’re going to see more structural change to the codebase. Already, I renovated the system that deal with the modification of blocks. Next is to write a resource management system that deal with all the file based data. This will begin the advent of the module system in which people will be able to customized the look and feel of RubyTet game. The last major structural change for the next version will make the game entirely all entirely event driven.

RubyTet Release and Future Directions Rubytet 0.
Redesigning RubyTet : Competition vs. Cooperation Some time

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[VDrift] Model conversion

2009-05-29T04:15:14+00:00

In SVN R2475, I added a command line utility called "modelconvert" in the VDrift/tools folder. At the moment, it allows conversion betwe...

[Development Blog] Another update on "STK w/Irrlicht"

2009-05-28T08:51:05+00:00

Some days have passed, and it's about time to let you know we're still alive.
New, visible features are of course most exciting, so that's what I'll cover this time as well - sorry devs, we all know you have to do lots of boring work too, but it's not that easy to take screenshots of solved bugs. ;)

The kart selection screen

What "works":
Everything as far as I've seen. Some of the karts have been revamped, for example Nolok. It looks a lot better; he got a cooler looking kart more in style with his nature. :)

'About'/'Credits' screen

I was thinking of writing 'What "works:"' here as well when I realized there isn't much to do in here.
Nonetheless, you can lean back and enjoy a nice animation showing if not all, then most of the contributors to STK. The animation is simple but smooth; I've proposed adding an option to stop and/or change back and forth the different "pages". It's on an internal ToDo list, but obviously it's not top priority - if you want to help out with this or anything else, you are very welcome to do so. Just be sure to contact the developers first - preferrably via the mailing list - in order to avoid duplicating work and to get some coordination.

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

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.

[SourceForge.net: Project lipsofsuna] Destructible terrain

2009-05-26T22:45:30+00:00

After two weeks of designing and prototyping, I finally got the basics of a new terrain system up and running. It’s still horribly ugly, bugged, and limited, but I’m quite excited about it regardless. Why? Because of mining. You can create and destroy terrain on the fly with it, freely in all three dimensions, so things like mining, terrain-destroying explosions, and collaborative map editing are all doable.

How will this make the game fun, you may as. True to the traditions of roguelikes, we could hide gems, crafting materials, and secret rooms here and there in the terrain for players to find. Some monsters could be made able dig so that they could attack from below or drop from the ceiling unexpectedly. Players could dig pits and moats to defend towns against attacking quest monsters. Even voxel-based water and lava streams might be possible.

The most valuable feature of the new terrain system, however, is that editing the map is much more intuitive than it was before. Instead of having to create and align tons of wall or corridor pieces just to create a few rooms, you can simply choose a material and paint the walls and corridors with the new system. When it’s all implemented, I’m hoping that map editing will finally be easy enough for almost anyone to do.

An ugly screenshot is unfortunately all that I can showcase for now. The code only exists in my local repository because it breaks too many existing features and, honestly, there has basically been zero interest for the project so far. However, it shouldn’t take long for the code to stabilize enough to be pushed to the central Git repository. Furthermore, I think I’m going to make this the last feature for 0.0.2 so expect a new release in a month or two if everything goes well.

By the way, if someone actually read this post, or at least glanced at it, be aware that no one has suffered a painful death or anything yet for contacting me. I’m a nice and calm guy, after all. Point-blank. The lack of casualties has absolutely nothing to do with you being the first one to ever try so feel free to give commenting or email feedback a shot.

Donations now open

2009-05-26T19:56:06+00:00

OpenGameArt.org is now accepting donations. I won't go into great detail about it here, as the relevant information is all available on the donation page. I would, however, like to reiterate a couple of things:

* Donations will be put toward art commissions.
* There is no expectation that a user should donate, nor is there any special benefit for doing so, apart from recognition.
* I have enough personal funding to keep this site going regardless of donations, but any extra funds will bring in more commissions, which means more art for the community.

If you have any questions (including ones about site costs and whatnot), please ask them here. I'd like to keep things as open as possible.

Thanks!

Bart

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[Tiki RSS feed for articles] S.C.O.U.R.G.E. Weekly Vol. 27

2009-05-26T17:38:00+00:00

Welcome to the 27th edition of the weekly column!

This week saw the implementation of two important milestone features: tree generation and multiple ground textures for the outdoor world. The land generator creates appropriate vegetation now according to the climate and vegetation world data. Work on climate specific ground textures is near-complete. If you are running SVN, take note that region transitions are currently sort of broken and may trigger asserts we tactically placed in the code for debugging purposes.

Timong composed an awesome, outstandingly epic music track for use in the final battle. I'm really impressed by his work, and the rest of the Scourge theme surely too, and I'm glad we have him here helping out with the game.

Besides of all that, most of us hung out on the IRC channel, discussing the impact of elven dairy products on tactical warfare and other similarly interesting stuff. We also have an annoying chatter-/dicebot there for added role playing geekness.

That said, stay tuned and until next week!