Wednesday 1 August 2012

Happy birthday my old friend

Yup - it seems that the Commodore 64 is now 30. Thanks for all the fun.

Now let's remind ourselves what it's capable of and why we love the damn thing so much :)






Tuesday 15 May 2012

so why even bother doing this kind of stuff?

I think a poster nailed that one right here

'It's also like asking musician's why they still create new music on acoustic instruments invented hundreds of years ago, and why people still listen to such music. Part of the reason is because acoustic instruments have a particular character and a simplicity.'

Amen to that. With the technologies and limitations comes a style. And some of us just like that and want to make more stuff  in the same or similar style.

Thursday 12 April 2012

Cheers Jack

It looks like the founder of Commodore, Jack Tramiel is no more.

It's pretty safe to say that without the C64 I wouldn't have had so much fun with games, learned to code because 'the game I wanted wasn't exactly what was there' and then kind of accidentally fell into coding as a career. Likewise my family were definitely one of the masses, not the classes, so love or hate his 'get it out the door cheap' attitude I wouldn't be where I am without it.

so cheers for everything...

Thursday 15 March 2012

Those iOS trailer videos that everyone hates doing.

There's always a question on the touch arcade developers forum from someone trying to grab gameplay video for a trailer but they don't want the frame rate fluctuations of the simulator being picked up by screen camera software, or to spend a ton of cash on a hardware solution to capture from the device.

I do most of my coding within a windows framework, and switch to OS X to do a phone build periodically to check my code work, and that helps in this case.

KKapture by Farbrausch is a great capture tool - everything looks silky smooth every time, but this comes at a price. Basically the capture software lies to your software, telling it that it is running at a rock-solid 60FPS and grabs every frame it produces to stitch together a video. Your code is only producing 20FPS? No worries - it'll run slowly but it'll get there in the end and you'll still end up with a full-framerate video. The downside to this is that playing the game at that speed is either impossible or at least looks very unnatural.

To get around this I added 2 commandlines to my Windows framework - Record and playback. In record mode vsync is enabled, locking the gamecode to a constant 60hz framestep, and all touch events are logged to a file, along with the number of the frame they occured in. The random number used to seed the random number generator is also stashed away.
In playback mode the events contained in the file are passed into the application through the framework instead of the real input, so the game can be run through exactly as you played it.

Capture this noninteractive version with kkapture et voila! Nice smooth gameplay videos.

Of course, it assumes that the game will run at 60fps solid when recording input, but on an average PC if the game starts dropping frames this is probably the least of your worries. If your game isn't too heavy and your PC is fast enough you can probably kkapture it at 60FPS whilst playing it. In fact, in the case of Reaxion it runs above 60FPS whilst being captured.

Thursday 2 February 2012

Zynga and originality.

Isn't this bloke just a class act?




Moral of the story is this: If you see a Zynga game you would like to play don't bother - just Google it, find whatever they cloned to build it and go play that instead, thereby supporting the actual creative people who did the work.

Thursday 19 January 2012

Spending a little time on modern platforms - Reaxion lives on iOS

I haven't forgotten about Reaxion for the Spectrum - but time hasn't been on my side of late, but it's worked out easier to grab the odd moment here and there to put together a bit of C++ in windows. Problem is what I actually want to do is a smartphone game.

What I now have is a small lightweight openGL-based framework running that massages windows events into a format similar to those that come from iOS, and provides just enough primitive functions to allow image loading, screen drawing and timing to be handled in a way that is abstracted from the bulk of my game code. Once I had this running under windows it was a small matter of porting this little chunk of code to IOS, merging the 2 projects into a common folder structure and this was the result:



Now I have the advantage of being able to grab the odd minute that I find in front of a PC with visual studio installed to write and debug the game code, and then I can throw it all back onto my main machine and build for iOS. There are a few sacrifices in the way I've done this - multitouch isn't supported, I need to stub out gamecentre functions in the windows build and my current code is less than optimal, but it means I can hopefully get proof of concept games stuff done much quicker.

I'm currently using 'Reaxion' as a testbed for this, but I'm still undecided about releasing it...