kevin's blog

Progress Report #1232

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:17:44 +0000

At work I have to provide a progress report. It details what I've achieved and what I'm going to do. Seems to help keep me moving (I dread the idea of filing a progress report that says this week I've mostly achieved nothing) so I thought I'd try it here.

All past game attempts are currently on the cutting room floor. I need to make some cash so I'm gonna try my hand at money making games for a bit. Current plan includes and is probably ordered in priority:

Finish reviewing 4K games for the contest. These need to be done by next week and I'm only about a third of the way through.
Do the Slick bug run. I know I know, there are lots of bugs outstanding and I will be getting to them ASAP.
Start porting some of my mobile creations to Flash with a view to selling them on. Hopefully this will be reasonably easy using Flex and FlashDevelop
Facebook games, I have a few ideas here and I think I'd like to give them a go. It seems like a place you can make an impact pretty quickly if you get it right and looking around some other indies I can see some extensions to existing ideas that might fit the facebook platform pretty well.
Finally the circle art game. I have this art farty idea about a game with circles. Thats about all I have but there will be lots of circles. Possibly in different colours. I'm sure it's going to be great :)

Importand step in Android for Games

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:53:37 +0000

Just read on the google blog that a new release of the NDK (release 3) has been made available. The NDK really hasn't been getting the press it deserves but this latest release should be of great interest to games developers.

The new NDK release includes native access to the OpenGL stack for applications targeting Android 2.0 or greater. While you might be forgiven for stepping pass this, because we've had access to OpenGL via Java APIs all along this really is an important step.

One of the problems we've seen with OpenGL and Java in the past is how noisy the API is (lots of calls) and how slow the native interface is. This native layer finally gives Android developers the chance to write high level scene graph APIs to expose to the Java API and then write tight C OpenGL code underneath. This hopefully gives us all the ability to build games that really utilise the hardware on these new android platforms.

Is the iPhone really Smart?

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:01:35 +0000

Smartphones heh? Apparantly there is a sudden surge in the market and we're all going to be rich! Great. But, um, what exactly is a "Smart" Phone and does everything we currently call Smart Phone really fit the term?

Smartphones.. what have we got?.... we've got 3 serious contenders and a whole lot of cheap but crap alternatives. Blackberry, Android and the ever popular iPhone. So what makes them smart? Outside of the normal "it can do interweb see" and "hey, I can pick up my mail" I think there are a few really SMART things:

1) Applications

One major feature that all the smart phones share, the ability to extend their functionality through 3rd party applications. For quantity of application the clear winner here is iPhone. Astounding! Unfortunately due to Apple's rather draconian approval process it takes a long time from a new web technology becoming provailant to an application actually being available. Android and Blackberry have significant application numbers and their model seems set to make them more desireable platforms in the long run.

Applications are cool, cute and fun. But smart? Not very.

2) Integration

Integrated applications. Now, thats smart. I add one application to my phone and I get one feature. Install another, and I get another feature. Ha! Brilliant. What if when I installed those two applications together they knew about each other, or at least each others features. Maybe they could work together to get me yet more feature(s)!

Integration is key to future technologies. One application builds on another on another. We have a chaotic growth of feature set in which we should be constantly surprised by what our smart phones can do for us!

Unfortunately this isn't really the case for iPhone. The platform doesn't lend itself well to this. Nor does the programming environment. The applications are locked down, intentionally for ease of use but this limits the future possibilities pretty horribly.

3) Aggregation

We have integrated applications, what about integarated data? My mail needs to feed my calendar. Ok, thats basic, and I think phones have been doing that for years before smart phones came along. What about twitter and facebook and . Each new technology/network/fad is going to produce a new set of data. I want the smarts on my phone to aggregate all the incoming data and feed it into my other applications.

I want location based twitters which enter stuff into my calendar and then remind me and the other participants via email, prompting me to take a video of it which will automatically be fed back into the facebook event. Aggregate my inputs phone! Aggregate my outputs! I want it all to work together.

It's all possible, and with the right framework.. well thought out and secure, it's all going to be possible. Unfortunately a locked down platform with the tight constraints isn't going to lend itself that way (read iPhone)

So, what makes your phone smart? What is it doing above and beyond exactly what you told it to? How is it using it's smarts to make your life easier? Does the iPhone really stack up here? Seems more like an mobile gaming and gimmick platform to me? Give me Android! Give me Blackberry! Hell, give me Maemo! Give me a really smart phone!

Gym Again...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:51:31 +0000

Many moons ago when I started this blog one of my earliest posts was about joining the gym. That was what, about 6 years ago? The Gym as an activity lasted a sum total of a month. I think my lack of motivation had a little to do with having no real reason to go to the gym. It just seemed like a "good idea" (tm)

A few weeks ago I decided I needed to try again. Today and signed up and took my first session. It was great, I actually feel energised and looking forward to going again. What's different this time? I'm older and have more to gain. First I now have a little girl getting heavier all the time who I have to lift regularly. Seocnd I have a wife who gets more ill every day, there are more things I have to do for her and more of the time I don't seem strong/fit enough.

Finally, I'm far far more vain than I used to be. My beer gut is getting embarrasing and not being able to keep up with a simple game of footie is just sad.

First session, 35 minutes. 5 minutes warm up walking on the tread mill. 15 cardio running. 15 minutes on the weights. Oh, and few minutes "cooling down" which for me means a few stretches, a little bit of walking it off and a hell of lot trying not to vomit.

Here's hoping I last a bit longer this time.

Lack of Time = Lack of Progress?

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:16:12 +0000

Due to work and random life events (read emotional turmoil!) the past week hasn't really had much in the way of development time for my home projects. I'm still not working on what I should be working on, the space trading game is just too appealing.

The couple of hours I did get the space trader has a new important feature for a trading game... you can trade!

Status and Navigation Screen

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:34:00 +0000

Some more progress today (lunch) and tonight. The status screen is now updated to include a customizeable avatar (built out of pieces) on the status screen:

Mostly today I've worked on the navigation screen which is you'll be travelling the galaxy. It looks like this:

I think it's just on the brink of being too complicated. Using the LCARS GUI system is nice though, it seems really obvious where things should fit together.

New Game, New Fun, Space - the Final Frontier

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:48:53 +0000

The RPG has lost momentum, it's too complicated and I just can't get it right. I'm spending so much time on other things (yesterday Slick til 2am, tonight XMLVM til 11) it's just not going anywhere.

So, I have of course started a new game. It's not much yet but hopefully should be much more simple to develop since I'm basing it on an couple of existing games. Strangely, the new one is space based, not something I ususally go for. It's definitely trading related but I'm not sure really what makes it any different to past games - probably not very much. Still, for your viewing pleasure. A quick in game screen shot showing, well, some text:

And something else I'm playing with, since there will mostly like be lots of crew members to recruit I'm going to need pictures of them.. so a quick avatar building tool with some random resources found online. Yay!

Are you noticing a theme yet? Yes, I'm a big fan.

Fingers crossed this one will get past the prototype to see if it's fun stage!

Android Resolutions and Games

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:34:19 +0000

Well, Android 2.0 is here and along with a bunch of other interesting bits and pieces it brings us multiple resolutions - previously all devices were expected to be the 320x480 resolution (G1, G2, Hero, Pulse etc). However, in the new 2.0 we have the 240x320 (HTC Tattoo) and the 480x800 (Motorola Droid). These resolutions seem great for UIs where the controls generally had plenty of space already. However, they may cause problems for games (as they did with J2ME).

First, we now have to cope with multiple resolutions. While this isn't a big problem it does mean for high quality output you need to create assets for the different variants. This can be time consuming and hence costly. The alternative is to change the game layout based on the resolution (more on this in a moment). The SDK has given us some new tools to manage different sets of drawables for different screen dimensions (which is a step better than J2ME) but this really is an overhead we didn't need in small indie game development. The interesting news is that games written for the standard resoltion are apparantly running and being scaled on the new Droid handset. This is a welcome feature (if it is indeed true) but scaled sprites don't often look great.

So, onto the next alternative, and the important one to me. I'm writing an RPG, it's dungeon based, you might have seen it spammed over everywhere I can get to. The nicest way to adapt to the higher screen resolution would be show more of the dungeon. The game requires you to touch the tiles of the dungeon to have you characters move round. This is similar to many Android games, i.e. you have to touch reasonably small areas on the screen. However, if the resolution grows but the physical screen size doesn't (or not by much) then these touched areas are going to get physically smaller. Unless your fingers are scalable, this is going to be a problem.

So.. what to do? Increase the detail on sprites for the bigger resoltions? Hope the for the best and just let it scale. I sorta wonder if this has really been thought out? The net problem seems to be:

If resolution gets higher, but physical screen size stays the same then the trigger area on the screen will get smaller - and your fingers won't.

EDIT: As a friend points out, another issue with these varying screen sizes is that they're all different aspect ratios. This will make auto-scaling pretty wierd looking. Thin tall dwarfs anyone?

Yore Map

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:37:56 +0000

Been working on a some random stuff tonight, not what I should have been working on really.. but a nice bit of relaxation. Yore is going to have an overall story line that leads the player through a non-linear list of quests, hence it'll need an overworld map. Here it is:

Normally I hell of a time generating anything that looks reasonable as a land mass. All the tools I've found in the past have been either too complicated or a pain to work with. This time, after searching again, I ran into the Greenfish Relief Map Generator. It's really a great simple tool and after a bit of GIMP editing I got basically what I was looking for.

WIP: Yore Quest

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:36:04 +0000

This is a little turn based RPG/Adventure I'm working on for Android eventually. It also runs as an Applet. At the moment there's just a bit of combat and some small scripted pieces. I've been trying to write this game for about 4 months now and this is the 5th iteration. Not sure if it's any better or worse but this is the first time it's felt slightly playable.

For this interation there's a little level designer and some XML based scripting. I'm hoping I can build the scripting into something that I can tell a nice fantasy story with. As you can tell I'm not entirely sure where I'm going but so far it's been good fun getting here.

The game is playable online as an Applet

It's also available for Android handsets (only support for 320x480 res).

I'm aware of a couple of bugs and expect a bunch of typos. However, I'd really appreciate knowing it works on various browser and/or handsets. Also ideas on how to extend and improve it. Currently the turns feel a little broken up and it's easy to get your characters in situation where they're getting pounding with no support.

Of course, any feedback is appreciated,

Meg is Three!

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:16:30 +0000

My little monkey/girl Megan is three today! It doesn't seem like that long ago we were in the states worrying about how the health care works and hoping that we'd be able to cope. She's grown into a lovely little girl with bags of energy and personality. Friday she had her birthday at Nursery, Yesterday we went to Bristol Zoo, and today is a birthday tea! Next week, off to Grandma's for another one. One very lucky little monkey:

Having a blog is a wonderful thing at times like this, especially one that existed before she did. Looking back over her life we have:

When she was just a scan
The one when she was one
Then she reached two

For those who have been reading all that time, thanks! And sorry if you're getting a bit bored by now ;) On, for another lovely year with my little star.

More evolution attempts

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:57:35 +0000

A couple more variants..

If you use just rectangles, it doesn't work out well

Mixing ellipses, rectangles and polygons gives the best results yet at only 500k generations.

Evolution, what if we used ellipses instead?

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:41:28 +0000

Shannon commented on the last post, why don't we use circles instead of polygons on the generation stuff. What a fantastic idea? I swapped Ellipses for Cirlces (to leave more room for mutation) and update the tool, results:

Original

1 million generations with Polygons (approx 4 hours)

400k generations with Ellipses (approx 2.5 hours)

How cool is that? Now I'm starting to wonder what about mixing the shapes and allowing shapes to mutate between each other? What other shapes are there to reduce data, rectangles next?

What a fantastic comment and idea!

Evolution of Polygon Images

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:07:39 +0000

I've been out of the loop again! Apparantly this very cool stuff by Roger Alsing was posted on Slashdot last year. Well I didn't see it, if I had I would have jumped to trying to implement the same thing - it's just so cool. I'm not sure there are any practical uses for it (maybe some texture compression stuff for games?) but it's just such a cool idea.

So, given that I saw it posted on JGO a few days ago, I ran at it and tried to implement the process. A few painful bugs later and I had a command line tool. Since I had the day off I spent some time tidying the whole lot into a GUI based application.

Whats happening here then? First we generate a set of polygons. Next we mutate the polygons (move them about, add some, remove some, change colours). Compare the first set and the new set of polygons to the original image. Choose the one that is closest and mutate again. Repeat. Alot.

Update: Couple more examples using 150 polygons

You can get some pretty cool results with a bit of time. The image above was captured over 2 hours. My version of the GUI tool looks like this:

The tool is available as an executable jar (i.e. you'll need java installed). The source code is also available here in an Eclipse project.

There will of course be bugs and improvements to be done. I might find some time but even if not, a very enjoyable distraction!

Software Rendering in Java with JPCT - A Racing Demo

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:51:33 +0000

Something I've been meaning to look at for a while is JPCT, a software 3D renderer written in Java thats been around for years. I've seen it around lots of times but I've never had quite enough time to sit down and have a play with it.

I found time over the last week or so to spend a few evenings hacking away with JPCT so I'd have an idea how good, fast and useful it was - and I've had a pleasant reception. The API is tidy and simple. It's not as ornate as some of the scenegraphs out there, but has some slight oddities (like having to add a node to a parent and the world). In general you'll find it easy to work with.

Productivity-wise it's astounding. I found myself having a demo up and running within a hour or so. Collision is built in and took less than an hour more to add. There's some simple model loaders (3DS, OBJ and MD2) which cover just enough to get your game playable. Since it has a software renderer demo-ing it to other people as an Applet is a piece of cake and the thought that there is a hardware renderer (either JOGL or LWJGL) is very comforting for future proofing the demo.

Support is good, I popped along to the forums to ask about performance and potentially multithreading the software rendering process (something I've always found facinating). Within a day Egon (the owner and main developer) has a version working which boosted the performance on my local machine by 66% (1 -> 2 cores). The documentation is limited, but is enough to get started. The forums seem friendly if a little quiet.

Overall.. JPCT is really rather good and sadly seems to be overlooked in favor of the more giant JME, Xith and now Ardor3D. If you're just wanting to get something running and you don't need the massively beautiful effects then JPCT is just the ticket. Thats not to say JPCT can't do the beauty but it's focus seems to primarily be on getting things done.

Ok.. and here's the demo I built while trying the library out:

Click Here