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

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

Take a look and judge for yourself!

Oh, here’s the link.

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?

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. I’m devastated to say the least, as technically it isn’t eligible for free repair under warranty.  This means I’ll probably have to buy a new console, and quite frankly this is the excuse I needed to buy a PS3, which is in my eyes equal to the Xbox in terms of features, with the exception of a Blue Ray Player and a longer life expectancy!  However it’s a real shame I probably won’t have an Xbox any longer as I have a nice collection of games for it (some of which I still haven’t had time to complete that I really wanted to, GTA4 I’m looking at you…) and was really enjoying the XNA development on it.  The Xbox really sets itself apart from the competition with this feature in my eyes, as not only is XNA a dream to code with, it’s fully supported and publicised by Microsoft unlike the PS3 alternatives.  To rub more salt in the wounds, I was just testing an update for ‘Planet Panic!’ before it bit the dust, so unfortunately until it’s repaired the Planet Panic! update will have to wait.  Not good.  There isn’t really a conclusion to this rant, I just hope I can get my Xbox fixed at some point (by hook or by crook) and I’ll definitely be eyeing up a PS3 if any of the rumored price drops roll out.

So to all those who have lost an Xbox, my condolences, I feel your pain.

Anywhoo I’ve been real busy since New Year and have got a few other posts I want to ramble on about when I get a chance, so watch out for them in the coming weeks.

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!

So to get it going I finished the optimisations and ported the code to XNA 3.0, of which the latter was pretty seamless, and we are now waiting to be reviewed by our peers.  Once this review has been completed and we have been deemed suitable, ‘Planet Panic!’ will be on its way to an Xbox 360 near you!

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.

Almost immediately as I began my ceremonial new game control test, my brain began to twinge as my character lurched and twitched in ways that weren’t my choosing.  OK I thought, I can strafe and move around, that’s a positive addition to the cumbersome movement that dogs the series, but everything else just feels, well, weird.  All of my Resident Evil 4 muscle memory skills were useless as the face buttons had been completely remapped, but it also didn’t feel like many third person shooters I’d played before either (besides the strafing) , so I was further lost for a point of reference there too.  I’ve never had to use an alternate control scheme for a Resident Evil game before, moreover the default controls for pretty much 90% of games (bar PC based FPSs) are normally adequate for me too, so I was quite surprised to find myself seraching the Options screen looking for an alternative.

Looking through the alternate control schemes didn’t fill me with hope either, with the “Traditional Resident Evil 4″ control scheme most notably having X and A mapped the wrong way round, it sounds trivial but across all the iterations of the Resident Evil series up until4, even across multiple gaming platforms, they have all kept this basic firing control scheme intact*.  

And the difference of one button for a player who has a certain history with the game, can really make a difference, just ask a Pro Evo player to play a game of Fifa  The “Traditional controls” were tantaliasingly close to what I was used to but not quite close enough, and they didn’t take advantage of the new strafing mechanism that was part of the default control setup, so this was a further set back for me.  The other control schemes either promoted the the 3rd person shooter control scheme or were a hybrid of the 3rd person and “Traditional Resident Evil 4″ control schemes and just didn’t seem to gel.  So in sumamry I was faced with a choice of a cheekily off point “Traditional Resident Evil” control scheme or a slightly off  generic 3rd person control scheme.  I was certainly not averse to learning a new way of playing the game, it’s just none of the options presented were very attractive.

Now don’t get me wrong, it didn’t make the game unplayable, I did enjoy and manage to complete the demo eventually, however it just ‘didn’t feel right’.   Moreover having played the Dead Space: Dismemberment demo  before which 110% DID feel right, this feeling was further compounded.  In Dead Space, as soon as I picked up the pad I was in almost complete control of the character.  Even using the default controls, movement felt fluid, instinctive and free, furthermore the game was still very intense.  It achieved this without me wrestling with the controls to escape a situation or having my chacter rooted to the spot when aiming, but due to relentless fast paced hordes of creatures continually attacking the character and me having instant instinctive control.

The Resident Evil series has undertaken a much needed metamorphosis as of late into something new and fresh, however as I think is quite apparent from the disjointed control scheme, it’s method of doing so has come from taking the antiquated Resident Evil mechanics and then forcing them through a mill to catch up with todays 3rd Person shooters.  Resident Evil in its current state doesn’t know what it wants to be, it sits on an awkward fence between it’s old Resident Evil predecessors, Silent Hill brethren, and it’s new action bound Gears of War comrades.  The new aesthetic and arcadey quick time events is a far cry from the lonely claustraphobic mansions of old, and promises fast paced escape-in-the-nick-of-time romps.  Yet to create this tension it still relies heavily on the antiquated Resident Evil premise of a cumbersome control scheme to create suspense.

To truly progress the series a dissolution of this design ethos needs to be fully applied.  Giving the player full control of the character by allowing strafing while aiming, instinctive controls for melees and close quarter combat maneouvres that aren’t triggered by QTEs, are just as a few examples of how this could be achieved.  This would ensure that the player was suitably equipped to take on 28 Days Later style infected that run full pelt at the player with out stopping.  These were the behaviours of enemies inferred to be in place in the fifth installment of the series by the E3 trailers and it was welcomed by many.  Yet having played the demo, it’s clear that the AI in place still insists on running up to within 10ft of the player, meandering round them, and then inbetween picking the bits of flesh out of their teeth, occasionally taking a swipe at the character.  It was for me a little underwhelming, when there is a potential for so much more.

Needless to say I have only played the demo of the game and although it is unlikely the controls and much more could change in this time, so this is all conjecture up until the game is officially released, but I guess conjecture is the whole point of blogging!

*(There are obvious notable exceptions that include Gameboy series and the critically award winning** light gun series to name a few….)

**(I kid, I kid)

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.

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.

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.  

However the weekend didn’t dissapoint, it was pretty intense when everyone’s projects got up and running, but was great to see what everyone was working on.  I was lucky enough to collaborate with JimBob who carried out the pixel art and generally shouted over my shoulder as I was coding, and we came up with PPE.  It’s multiplayer realtime homage to ‘Deadly Rooms of Death’ with the use of dual analogue sticks to swing the sword.  It needs some cleaning up, but at the moment looks like this:

Not bad considering the time constraint, if I do say so myself.  All in all it was  great weekend, I met a load of really nice people and had a blast.  Thanks to the guys at beatnik games (Robin and Alex) as well as corpus for arranging it all.