Short and sweet

Just a quick one to say I’m not dead, just very busy!

1. I’m currently working with these guys, finishing off this.

2. I really want to get my hands on this!

(Kinda)New game added

I found PPE (stupidest name ever I know, but it’s a long, rather crude story…) whilst rooting through my old projects and thought I may as well give it an airing on the blog.  It didn’t turn out too bad for a 2 person/2 day project, if I do say so myself.

Take a look and judge for yourself!

Jump!

I’ve been messing around with flash/actionscript 3 this weekend.  The subject of my meddlings was jump mechanics, as I half implemented a platformer in DirectX that had tiles and collision but the jumping just didn’t feel right and ruined the whole thing for me.   So I thought I’d put together a little ‘jump calibration’ app to get that feeling right. It’s got mario in it, but it doesn’t really feel like mario.  Try fiddling with the values and then pressing enter to change the way he moves.  I’ve really enjoyed playing with actionscript, it’s quick and easy to code in and am looking forward to testing out some new designs with it.

Oh, here’s the link.

Titillation

Blitzing through my RSS feeds today I came across two videos for new games.

A trailer for Flower by thatgamecomany of ‘flOw’ fame and a review of Tenchu: Shadow Assassins (Semi-NSFW).

Is it sad that the former was the one that got my heart racing?

My Condolences

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last update and in that time my Xbox has completely died.  No RRoD, just a complete lack of video output which is apparently also quite common.  It’s unbelievable that such a fault prone product could actually be internationally distributed, and I’m left wondering how Microsoft is getting away with it.

Planet Panic! on the Xbox 360

The XNA Community Games is open for business

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve managed to badger and enthuse my ex-dare team mates into enough of a frenzy, that they agreed to send me cash to get ‘Planet Panic!’ set up on the newly opened Community Arcade.  

Huzzah!

Resident Evil: Identity Crisis

This little insight is a continuation of a topic that was brought up in a few chats that I had with the guys at Sony Soho.  I thought I’d ellaborate on a few of the points I made and have a general ramble.

This past week, thanks to the hacking hijinx of someone out there on the interwebs, I was able to download and play a copy of the Resident Evil 5 (JAP) demo on my Xbox 360.  After booting up the demo and gushing over the graphics, despite being slightly jarred by their seismic leap into the uncanny valley, I readied my Resident Evil gaming claw and prepared myself to run and gun some zombies.

SDL/OPENGL/FMOD/LUA COMBO!!!!

As you may be able to tell from the title I’ve been messing around with some new toys, it isn’t quite as glamorous as it sounds, but it’s been interesting.

I’ve been using SDL and OpenGL for the rendering, FMOD for my 3D audio, and I’ve literally just plugged in LUA for some quick fix scripting.

I’m working on an audio centred game design that will use sound in 3D space.  I want the audio visualised onscreen so I’m currently reading raw wav file data and rendering it in OpenGL.  I’ve just found out that FMOD has a ‘DSP get spectrum’ (called something like that) function that will return similar data, so will probably migrate to that in a bit.

Not alot to see at the moment, but here’s a vid (the audio quality is bad but you can tell it changes volume when you move) of a player moving around the 2D game space and then me altering the player’s size in a quick LUA script.

 

Dividing up land

One of the defining characteristics of Planet Panic! was its frantic gameplay.  This was established by allowing the players to fire cluster missiles frequently, cluttering the screen with numerous projectiles.  Obviously the greater the number of objects on the screen, the greater the opportunity for collision.  During our benchmark tests simply using brute force collision detection, we were able to run an adequate amount of projectiles on screen, meaning the optimisation of the games collision detection was sidelined.

However my general interest into collision detection and its optimisation led me to researching the use of quadtrees.  The idea of the tree is to reduce the number of collision checks by dividing the world space up into squares.  Only objects that lie within the square are tested for collisions against other objects in the square, thus saving collision checks with the rest of the game world.  The squares get smaller the greater the concentration of objects are in the area to keep the number of checks down.  For the implementation the tree basically uses a Computer Scientists favourite weapon – recursion.

I’ve also recently gotten round to installing the OpenGL/C++ libraries, so as an exercise in getting to know OpenGL I decided to implement an OctTree (a 3D quadtree).  

I’m still coding it at the moment, but currently it looks a bit like this:

This is just a video of the full tree rendered out using blue lines for parent nodes and red for children.  Not very impressive, but I thought it looked kinda cool.

Check back soon for a video of it updating dynamically.

TIGJam:UK 2008

This past weekend was the (first ever?) UK TIGJam.  An event for people who make games independently to come together, frolic and make some cool stuff.  The jam was only really 2 days long, and most people turned up early Saturday, meaning that time was very tight.