Blog Archive 2006

Sick new year *cough*

Sunday, December 31, 2006, 10:34 PM

End of the year ahead and I'm going to bed
I got a cold two days ago and still feel terrible. So this is going to be one of the most quiet new year's evenings for me...think I will go to bed after a cup of tea instead of wine or champagne. I remember last year when I had my "happy new year" single malt at 4 am
Stop moaning, Tommy, you can have a drink in a few days.

So, a happy new year to all of you! May only the best things happen to you and all your wishes come true
See you all next year!

Oh, in case you are already drunk or asleep or just blind - I changed the theme because it's so simple to do

Still alive...

Sunday, December 17, 2006, 9:14 PM

Do you realize that Christmas is ahead? I surely do!

There are so many things going on, I sometimes get the impression I'm missing whole days in my memory:

  • christmas parties,
  • kindergarden christmas party,
  • school events, all christmas related,
  • ordering, buying, organizing christmas presents for my kids and my wife,
  • buying a christmas tree,
  • christmas traffic on weekends (do all those people need to do their shopping at once?).

I am completely exhausted by this. Coding is nearly down to zero. And if I can bear the PC at night I stop coding after 15 minutes and start to play a game (Fate for example is a terrific time waster ).
So much for my SpiderTrap progress...

Later,
Tommy

Work and games and family and the rest

Saturday, November 25, 2006, 9:55 PM

Work is pretty exhausting the last few days. I'm involved in some new project which eats up a lot of time, I need to learn a lot of new stuff and I am one of the technical leads...
So I am tired at night. My little progess on SpiderTrap using Slick can be read here.

Change is constant, change is opportunity!

Wednesday, November 22, 2006, 10:34 PM

A phrase of a former boss of me.
The last two weeks were pretty busy at work.
On the game dev side I got tempted. Tempted so much that I will go back to Java! "Huh?" you might ask.
Slick hit me like a hammer!
You know, there is this guy, Kevin Glass, owner of the website http://www.cokeandcode.com/. He can code faster than other people take off their shoes!
And two or three weeks ago this genius decides to start a 2D lib for simple game creation based on LWJGL. LWJGL has been my favorite OpenGL wrapper library for Java for years. The only problem was I couldn't jump the OpenGL train. Seems low level OpenGL is too complicated for me. So I patiently waited until someone decided to create a nice 2D wrapper lib to get me started.

The time has come!

And because I want to give Slick a good test run I decided to port SpiderTrap over to Slick!

You can watch my progress on the SpiderTrap page.

Just one week gone by...

Wednesday, November 08, 2006, 11:07 PM

...and here I am with more unimportant news for you
My family is getting better - switching to a simple cold now...but not me.
I worked a bit on SpiderTrap and downloaded the new version of Anim8or, a free 3D modeling tool. I will look at it a bit (as usual ) and see if it's easy enough to get some models and/or animations done.
I also spent some time to look for a pixel graphics tool which allows me to work on sprite sheets (say 10 by 10 rows of sprites where each sprite is 32 by 32 pixels) with layers, gradients, different paint tools and so on.
TileStudio does not support layers, Graphics Gale is not good at supporting sprite sheets (only for animation) and overall there's nothing satisfying which goes for free (I'm low on budget and not willing to pay any money right now!).
Any suggestions?

What? Me again?

Wednesday, November 01, 2006, 11:48 PM

Yeah, just wanted to add a bit of info at my SpiderTrap progress.
The rest of life (read the real life) is pretty hectic as usual. One kid sick (kidney infection, second time in 4 weeks, hello antibiotics), halloween with lots of kids at the door and me and my little boy walking through the cold and rainy streets and my wife got migraine. Great.
Okay, before you all commit suicide due to reader's depression jump over to the SpiderTrap page. Now.

Homm....

Sunday, October 29, 2006, 7:41 PM

Yes. HOMM V to be precise. Or "Heroes Of Might & Magic V". I bought it two weeks ago, played one long night with my daughter and now I'm addicted again.
"Just one more day, until beginning of next week, only this enemy, only until this mission is done..." - HOMM players know what I'm talking about.
I am currently enjoying the campaign and will sooner than later play some more coop team map with my daughter to beat off the AI

Other things going on? Yes, today is the last day of my one week vacation. Did not very much in front of the computer but quite some stuff with my kids and my wife. Exhausting days as usual

I did some bits for SpiderTrap - just go looky looky if you can't resist.
While (again) thinking about using a 3D modeler to create the game graphics I browsed to my favorite (kiddie) modeler Cosmic Blobs. And what did I see?
They have a new product in the making: CB Model Pro! This will become the professional version of Cosmic Blobs for the grownup modelers.
You can currently download the beta version for free and register yourself to use it until the final version will be released!

Til next time!

Is there a pattern?

Thursday, October 19, 2006, 11:25 PM

Sigh. Again two weeks since the last update of my blog.
What did I do?
I was pretty busy with real life: kids were sick, my wife was sick (root of a tooth was infected), house was sick; it needed a complete new gas heating - the old one was leaking gas! Panic mode on!

SpiderTrap is progressing but more about it on it's own page.

Last weekend I had lot of fun joining a LAN party at a friend's house. We played Starcraft and UT2004.
I completely suck at Starcraft - one of my team mates sent masses of zergs to protect me while I was still fiddling around with a terran turret
It was a bit better with UT 2004 - but I haven't played an FPS for more than a year now...
...but Jürgen, be careful, I'm currently practising and I'll beat you next time. I just need to find out how to get a bigger aiming cursor to know where I'm targeting at

And I contacted Lauyan, the TOWeb creators and they told me they are already working on improving the blog functionality - great news! Can't wait to use it!

Autumn. Mild depression.

Thursday, October 05, 2006, 11:51 PM

No, not really. Although I miss the summer. Now I have to wait until next year's May...

Otherwise I'm fine. Still working on SpiderTrap. Looking good so far

The last few days I was thinking about adding a topic for game reviews. You know, games that I love to play, that I tested the last weeks and so on.

Should I do that? Would anyone except the few of you like to read it? Would you like to read it?

Hmmm, another thing I was thinking about is how to add reader comments to this blog.
TOWeb doesn't support it right now. But should I move my blog to something like www.blogger.com?

Maybe I ask the TOWeb support people once more

Time for bed now! Later,
Tommy

Two weeks without an update?

Friday, September 22, 2006, 9:48 PM

Unbelievable. What did I do all the time?
Job. Family. Bicycle repairing. Coding. Surfing.

Coding? Yup, currently I am coding a new game. Game Maker got me hooked. Read all about the new game SpiderTrap here.

And surfing? Sigh, surfing the web. You know, Game Maker is pretty cool with it's huge user base (did I tell you that their main page had 4,5 million hits in the last 6 months?).

A huge user base means tons of web sites dedicated to this tool and thousands and thousands of examples and demos and games to look at.
This is an advantage and disadvantage at the same time.
I got completely distracted and browsed those web sites all night long. Terrible.

Luckily it seems that I manage to reduce the duration and frequency of browsing now. As you can see on the huge update of my web site.

And I am working on SpiderTrap right now.

So go away, all you nasty web pages with all your sexy looking Game Maker games and examples - leave me alone and let me code my game

What day is it?

Thursday, September 07, 2006, 11:19 PM

Hmpf, thursday already. I must have missed a few days...
So what happened?
My 2 boys were sick and so was my wife. A cold and two virus infections (stomach pain and headache). And as school started two weeks ago it's parent-teacher conference time. Two done, one to go...

So I've been pretty busy lately and didn't find much time to code anything.

I started with my first Game Maker game and after some starting issues it's now getting better.
I will show a first version if it's a little bit playable so hang on.

What else?
I played guitar for a few nights. Nooo, not a real guitar but frets on fire

It's just a cool game and you must not miss it! Go download it and play a few riffs!

Those finnish game coders have cool ideas - remember those "bashing people down a staircase" or "drive a truck against a wall" games?
Must be the long dark winters and the vodka...

Later,
Tommy

Reading and coding

Sunday, August 27, 2006, 5:42 PM

Last saturday The Game Maker's Apprentice arrived.
It's a book about Game Maker, a game creation tool I already wrote about a few weeks ago.

I started reading and coding cause the book contains a bunch of nice example games. And that's what I did for quite some evenings this week.

I am surprised how simple it is to create games with Game Maker. Have a look at the book's website and download some of the sample games.
Of course the book contains all the graphics and sounds for the games so the reader's task is to follow the coding or dragging and dropping.
Believe me, each game you can download took only 2 to 3 hours to code!

I wished such a book would exist for PlayBasic...

I will continue with the book and finish all 9 games (4 left). Afterwards I might give it a try and create a game with Game Maker.

For a more job oriented reading: Go to www.springframework.org and have some lectures about the Spring Framework. That's pretty cool and I'm going to use it at work in a project we're starting begin of next year.

Later,
Tommy

Vacation is over...

Sunday, August 20, 2006, 10:17 PM

Too bad but our vacation is over. We spent two weeks on a farm close to the baltic sea (2 km away) without computers, radio and nearly no TV. That was a nice vacation!

After coming home we had to do clothes washing for two days! Now we're finished, the roof rack is in the garage again and school and kindergarten start tomorrow. Early wakeup time again

During this weekend I surfed for hours trying to retrieve the "most necessary" information tidbits.

Game coding looks like becoming fun again

I might also tell you that I will start part 2 of my Space Invaders tutorial and fill it step by step.

Vacation ahead!

Wednesday, August 02, 2006, 9:35 PM

Two weeks of vacation - aaahhhh. No work, no coding, just the family and relaxing

See you in round about two weeks!

Oh, I added some stuff to the Scuba Dive dev blog.

Anything happening?

Monday, July 31, 2006, 11:37 PM

Yeah, tiny bits. I continued work on Scuba Dive - the map creation isn't as easy as I thought...
I looked at FECK a little bit more - but the Java stuff will have to wait until I agreed upon a game with Christian (my designer friend).

Vacation is ahead so time is rare for coding games...

Some news

Sunday, July 23, 2006, 8:12 PM

Our house belongs to us again
Our friends left on Thursday. It were great days with lots of fun. We went to two smaller seas on two days and were in the cinema on wednesday ("Over the hedge" by Dreamworks).

My friend, who is a designer, seems to be willing to join me in creating some game where he would provide the graphics (Woohoo! Professional graphics!!!) and I would do the game coding. As he owns a Mac the game must be written in some language that runs on Windows and Mac...right, back to Java!
Looks like I would use LWJGL and some stuff from Kevin Glass named FECK.

Should be fun

Still very hot here in northern Germany, today is the first bearable day...

Later,
Tommy

Crowded house

Sunday, July 16, 2006, 9:49 PM

Our house is full! Friends are visiting us with their three kids so this makes ten of us in a small house

Of course I didn't code a single line, made no piccies, no nothing. I didn't even switch on the PC except now for a few minutes...

But I didn't miss it - a weekend full of friends and fun - just great

Later,
me

Stop!

Wednesday, July 12, 2006, 9:13 PM

I must stop participating in the Retro Remakes competition. I just don't see a way to finish Scuba Dive in time
School holidays started this week and so the kids expect me to spend more time with them, they stay awake longer in the evening and all my schedules just go pooof.
Then the vacation is ahead and then it's already end of august.
There is absolutely no chance in finishing the game in time if I have to be honest!

So to relief myself from my self made pressure I hereby declare that I won't join the Retro Remakes competition this year. But I will finish Scuba Dive! It'll just take some more time...

Oh, those temptations!

Saturday, July 08, 2006, 8:11 PM

The last few days I didn't code that much for Scuba Dive. I was stuck a bit and needed to get started with the diver code and input control and such... Instead I surfed the web and looked at other game development tools

Typical behavior, isn't it? Stuck with one tool - search for a "better" one and start all over - until you're stuck again. How many games will you get finished? Right, not a single one. Sigh.

In the end I kicked myself into my ass (how did I do that?) and fired up PlayBasic and got back to Scuba Dive. Pretty successful I must say

But while I'm here I can also tell you about the tools I looked at, right? Maybe one of them is your cup of tea...

The Torque Game Builder was the first tool I looked at. I read a lot about it in the last few weeks since the first official version.
After installation of the 30 day trial version (which is a 2.5 MB download which then starts the real download of 45 MB) I fired it up and was disappointed immediately.
It's GUI is slow. The mouse falls asleep while you are working in the TGB window. It can't go fullscreen but works with a max resolution of 1024 x 768.
I started the first tutorial and didn't even finish that but uninstalled the whole thing after 15 minutes.
What really annoyed me was the response time of the tool and its desire to constantly "phone home". TGB seems to need a permanent internet connection. I don't (want to) know what it's trying to tell garagegames...
Featurewise it sounds marvelous. It comes with a lot of tools (some of them I would love to have for PlayBasic like Particle Editor or GUI Builder) and offers multi-platform support, a physics engine and some more stuff which would also be cool to have in PlayBasic.
For 100$ you can buy the Indie standard version without source code. This means you are bound to using Torque Script which is the builtin scripting language.
Of course you can hook into tons of events for your objects, backgrounds, particle emitters, timers and such to code the game's functionality using scripts.

For 250$ you can get the Pro version including the (C++) source code of TGB which would allow you to modify the engine itself (assuming you have Visual C++ and know your C++ and can dig into the engine's code!).

Both versions of TGB come with some hundred pages of documentation including 5 complete tutorials with all resources (sounds, graphics, etc.).

So I would never dare to say the tool is bad - it just didn't feel good for me...

Most TGB forums are unfortunately private and only for customers who already bought TGB. Additionally some legal clauses seem to forbid releasing script code of your games except in those private forums.
You can argue if this is a good way to achieve customer loyalty...

The other tool I looked at was Game Maker from Mark Overmars, a dutch professor of Computer Science. I already had a first look a few weeks ago.

It is similar to TGB as it also offers some environment where you only need to add scripts to get your game going.
You can even start simple games by just using drag and drop features in some well done (and fast and highly responsive) GUI.
Game Maker only supports the Windows platform and is mainly targeted at 2D games. It offers some image editor, a great map/room editor with different layers and an OO friendly concept.
You mainly create objects (read: classes) and add functionality to events your object should react on (like creation, drawing, step = every game loop, collision).
Objects can have parent objects and they inherit all attributes and all scripts and events. Of course you can overload them in your child object. Simple and limited compared to "real OO" but absolutely sufficient.

What impressed me the most is the huge user base and the resulting code base, tutorials and examples.
They have 32000 registered users in the official forums(!) and there are hundreds of small websites with their own little forums and examples, editable games and so on.

For two days I downloaded so many cool demos and samples that I am honestly impressed! You can do a lot of stuff with Game Maker. It is limited in some areas (overall speed, sound and music format support, no compiler but only script interpreter) but it seems to be pretty powerful.

One disadvantage of the huge user base is of course the amount of newbies and the resulting amount of crappy games. This surely is one of the reasons that Game Maker has a bad reputation on some game coder websites.

But I would say the reputation is absolutely wrong. There are some marvelous games done with Game Maker where no one could tell if it was done with Game Maker or C++ or any other "real game developer's" language.

So what is my summary?
I will continue Scuba Dive with PlayBasic.
I might try to code a game with Game Maker at some later point. You'll be the first to know

Mojo is back a bit

Monday, July 03, 2006, 11:05 PM

Coded two hours today, also played around with my 3D modeler during the weekend (for half an hour)...more about it on the Scuba Dive page.

It's just too hot at night to code and think and to write blogs...

Lack of motivation

Wednesday, June 28, 2006, 9:29 PM

Currently it's very hard to motivate myself to work on my remake...I'm surfing the web to gather news, I'm looking at different tools to code games (looked at GarageGames' TGB for example), browsed graphics and music forums and such.
All absolutely nonsense. I can do everything with PlayBasic as easy as the other tools or even easier - I just need to sit down and code at least a few lines

Maybe I need a vacation...

Time...

Friday, June 23, 2006, 10:01 PM

Little progress this week, but progress. Look at my Scuba Dive page for more info on the game.

Second topic to the title: I am getting older
Tomorrow is my 42nd birthday. At least 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything. So what should I be afraid of?

Party time

Little progress

Monday, June 19, 2006, 11:01 PM

I worked on Scuba Dive a bit. Generated some simple map graphics (just blocks) to test map creation later on.
Also I started coding of the map generation algorithm.
Next thing to do is combine the world generation in PlayBasic with the generated map and the simple graphics.
But that's for next time - too tired now.
And hey, I finished my first 3D model - a simple shell.

3D Modeler

Sunday, June 11, 2006, 10:11 PM

I found a nice 3D modeling tool that I will use to create the game graphics for Scuba Dive.

I will post some images to the Scuba Dive page as soon as I have something to show.

New game in town?

Friday, June 09, 2006, 11:36 PM

That was a long pause of updating...sorry...real life strikes back...

I decided to join the RetroRemakes competition and will try to code a remake of Scuba Dive.

The most difficult thing are the graphics.

I will start something like a dev diary to show progress on the game. Watch it here.

Who's best?

Wednesday, May 31, 2006, 10:56 PM

I added highscore functionality into Astrobreak. Now the game stores the highscores (top 10) into a file, loads them on startup and you can enter your name if you made it into the highscore list.
I think I will test it a little bit more and then release a new interim version.

Someone here?

Tuesday, May 30, 2006, 11:52 PM

Had five nice days of mini vacation. Got drunk on my little sister's birthday party, had fun with my family, visited the zoo and some farm, went to the movies with my wife - not bad really

And then I'm working on some wedding newspaper I'm doing with my wife for some friends who get married in two weeks. That's just TONS of work. And guess who has to do all the computer stuff? Right.

But what about coding, you ask?
Sigh. Not as much as I wanted to get done - as usual. Still working on the highscore stuff for Astrobreak - but that's nearly done. And then it's more powerups, powerdowns and graphic effects. I need more time. Definitely. Suggestions except switching to polyphasic sleep are welcome...

Later,
Tommy

Space, the final frontier...

Tuesday, May 23, 2006, 11:19 PM

I finished my space nebula generation code.
It's not completely done but it's already doing a nice job. See here.

Now I am enjoying the first 5 days of vacation this year. To cite Duke Nukem: Aaaaah, I needed that!

High scores and plasma

Thursday, May 18, 2006, 11:13 PM

I wrote some high score table code for Astrobreak. Now I need to add highscore checking and player name entering...

I also coded a little plasma routine which looks really nice (jump here).
I will use this to dynamically create space nebulae (with some different colors of course and a bit more of black). Maybe I'll replace the starfield in Astrobreak with that.
I'll definitely use it for my next game

Now it's time for some homework - good night everybody.

Astrobreak is next!

Saturday, May 13, 2006, 11:27 PM

Okay, I made a decision. First thing to finally finish will be Astrobreak.
I already tuned the speed of the player's ship in classic mode (was a bit too fast) and am now adding highscores.

More things to come

Where is my time gone?

Friday, May 12, 2006, 8:21 PM

Tough week - no spare time.
I have a few things on my list I would love to do in the next time:

  • part 2 of the tutorial,
  • finish Astrobreak,
  • start a new game or even two.

I just can't decide what to do first :-(

  • The tutorial would help other people to improve with PlayBasic,
  • Finishing Astrobreak would help me to get some modules done that I'd need for my next game (high score stuff, better menus, better particles),
  • Starting the one new game would require some good config file format (I thought of XML but it seems that PlayBasic supports some simple format like XML named UFF. Cool!) and would take quite a while,
  • the second new game would be a simple one helping me to learn some new stuff required for the first new game.

Sigh.

Any suggestions? You are so quiet!

Tutorial part one is finished!

Wednesday, May 03, 2006, 11:24 PM

Phew! A three hours go and I'm done with the tutorial part one.
Collisions are done, score and high score is in and some increasing difficulty.

Have a read and a go here!

I think the next thing I'll do will be a little game...

Real life strikes again

Tuesday, May 02, 2006, 10:23 PM

Sigh. I wanted to have the first part of the tutorial already finished. It's not.

My wife's sick. My little boy got chickenpox. I had to take a day off today to care and do some housekeeping.

But I managed to get something done. Collision is nearly in. Which means all preparation is there - it just needs the checking. But have your own read. The zip file at the end is updated of course.
Jump to the tutorial.

Who needs votings?

Tuesday, April 25, 2006, 8:48 PM

I am disappointed - the voting script provided by "1 und 1" is useless - you can't have it as part of your web page but only as a link to a shitty tiny voting page, you can't translate the german button texts to english and it doesn't even protect against multiple votes from the same IP. Sheesh - that's crap!
Contact me if you know about free voting scripts that do work!

And TOWeb, my lovely Web publishing tool, also has a minor issue. Graphics are converted to JPGs and the filenames are automatically modified when put into a web page. So for the time being I will add a zip file with source code and images at the end of my tutorial page...

And workload during day job is big too and finally the weather is bad - starting to rain again...

I think I will switch to mild depression mode ;-)

I am Scottie...

Saturday, April 22, 2006, 9:17 PM

As you can see here I am Scotty. Find out who you are ;-)

Your results:
You are Mr. Scott

Mr. Scott
60%
James T. Kirk (Captain)
55%
Jean-Luc Picard
50%
Beverly Crusher
50%
Chekov
50%
Will Riker
45%
Data
42%
Uhura
40%
Geordi LaForge
40%
Deanna Troi
40%
Worf
40%
Spock
32%
Leonard McCoy (Bones)
30%
Mr. Sulu
20%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt)
10%
You are a fun-loving foreigner with an
amazing ability to get any job done on time.
Often described as a "Miracle Worker".
Click here to take the "Which Star Trek character are you?" quiz...

And my wife is Deanna Troi ;-)

Your results:
You are Deanna Troi

Deanna Troi
80%
Beverly Crusher
70%
Spock
69%
Will Riker
65%
Uhura
65%
Worf
60%
Data
60%
Jean-Luc Picard
50%
James T. Kirk (Captain)
50%
Geordi LaForge
45%
Mr. Scott
45%
Mr. Sulu
40%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt)
40%
Chekov
35%
Leonard McCoy (Bones)
30%
You are a caring and loving individual.
You understand people's emotions and
you are able to comfort and counsel them.
Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz

She really has a master degree in psychology ;-)
She also insists in mentioning that she is more Spock than I am Kirk...

The tutorial is progressing nicely. After some forum discussion with Kevin I think I understood the internals of the array stuff in PlayBasic. Hopefully the tutorial does reflect that.

Tutorial updated again

Friday, April 21, 2006, 10:10 PM

Worked on the dynamic arrays and the aliens a bit. Have some fun while reading here.

Happy easter and all this

Tuesday, April 18, 2006, 9:54 PM

Okay, easter holidays (4 days off, yeah!) is over - back to work and to blog.

Tutorial

The tutorial is progressing nicely so far - although I always wished I could do some fulltime days on this.

PlayBasic

PlayBasic is progressing even more - a new release with bug fixes and new features which is great. Also Kevin, mastermind of PlayBasic, is working on his Mappy library which will enable a nice map editor for the PlayBasic community.

Tutorial updated...

Thursday, April 13, 2006, 11:52 PM

I added the player movement code and explanations to the tutorial.
Aliens and Bullets are next to follow.
Easter holidays ahead, a big workload during the day job and lot of work to do at home - not the proper time for big updates. Sigh.

Hope you like the tutorial so far. Read it here.

Astrobreak interim released, tutorial started

Friday, April 07, 2006, 11:18 PM

So the interim version of Astrobreak is released, you can download it here Astrobreak.

I decided to put even the start of my Space Invaders tutorial online.
Why should people wait until I decide it's finished?
Just enjoy what I hacked down so far and learn from it ;-)
Go to the tutorial

Interim release of Astrobreak shortly

Monday, April 03, 2006, 9:10 PM

I'm nearly done with the new menu code. Most of the functionality is already there ;-)

I need to implement music and sound volume control and then I will release an interim version for people to play with the new (classic) steering mode.
Adjusting the bullet speed to the new steering mode (which works a little bit different internally) took me a while.

Next thing to tackle will be the powerups and powerdowns.

Recently I had a little look at GameMaker - a nice tool which seems to allow pretty fast prototyping of a game - but not really my cup of tea. I must bend my brain too much to fall in love with it.
It's fast to get you started as long as it's all drag and drop and click and set. But if it goes down to details you are limited and end up with some scripting language to achieve what you want to do.

I'll stay with PlayBasic ;-)

Progress on Astrobreak is slow but steady...

Thursday, March 23, 2006, 11:58 PM

Okay, the shape collision problem was a bug in Playbasic. But the bug is already fixed in the newest release.
I redid the title screen and the menu buttons.
Currently I am improving the menu code to add an Options menu with some enhanced menu items.
Menu items can now not only present a button image but also a following text (for "switch buttons") or a given amount of images all looking the same (for example for volume control). But that's still a work in progress...

Tada...

Thursday, March 16, 2006, 11:32 PM

Found the bug. Was related to the transparent color of the png file of the graphics.
Now I'm improving the collision. Circular collision of asteroids is already improved - the collision circles became smaller.
The player's ship will be checked with shape collision. The shape is already proper set - but it seems that collision is only working sometimes. Need to ask if the creation of the shape has to happen clockwise or counterclockwise or if I made another mistake again...

Things. take. time.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006, 10:33 PM

Not much progress the last few days.
Still trying to find a bug with the transparent color of my images and sprites.
Must write a tiny testcase to nail this thing...

Astrobreak and Cobian Backup

Sunday, March 12, 2006, 9:51 PM

Work on Astrobreak continues. I decided to give Wings3D another try for some 3D models for the game.
Started with Game Settings and High score table.

I found a nice program to do backups. It's called Cobian Backup and can be found here.
It backups directories and single files and can compress and encrypt them to a single archive and even allows uploading the archive via ftp to some external server. Pretty cool, I think!

Cobian Backup

Work on final version of Astrobreak started

Tuesday, March 07, 2006, 11:52 PM

Started work on Astrobreak again. I will create some "final" version to be released on underwaredesign.com.

Added "classic" steering mode to the game because the "car" steering mode was critized by some people. I will need to add an Options menu to make this selectable.

Underware Design

Web tool to create this site

Saturday, March 04, 2006, 10:32 PM

I just purchased Lauyan's TOWeb, the wonderful tool used to create this web site.
I can only highly recommend it! No HTML, no formatting of frames, no CSS, no nothing.
Just entering text in dialog fields, adding pictures (which can be manipulated inside the tool), adding links to files and media.
It's so easy that even I can deal with that ;-)
And even the site style (or template) can be randomly generated and then fine tuned.
All that for 35 Euro, so what are you waiting for? Trash all your over complex web editors and HTML syntax highlighters!

Blogging starts now!

3 March 2006, 00:35

Okay, I started. That's it.