Small side-note first, Vizati is now available for the Super Nintendo, more info. For my third idevblogaday post I’m going to talk about Game Center. Game Center was released only a couple months ago (September or so) but already tons of applications are using it and even more, players ask for it. It’s a way to track achievements, leader boards etc. Unfortunately It’s only available from iOS 4.1+, so some compatibility check has to be done. ...
This week I’ve been working on replacing my current scripting system. It worked great for Vizati but I need something with a little more flexibility. Instead of explaining what I’ve managed to get working I’ve made a screenshot with some notes. I think I’m going to make this my #ScreenshotSaturday
So you can’t make a game without images, right? Well, actually you can but that’s another story. But how can you load a jpg or a png and use then on OpenGLES? First let’s make a simple class Texture2D class Texture2D { public: Texture2D(int id, int width, int height) { _textureId = id; _width = width; _height = height; } virtual ~Texture2D(void) { // Delete Texture from HGL Memory glDeleteTextures(1, ((GLuint*)&_textureId)); } int getTextureId() {return _textureId; } protected: int _textureId; // The reference ID of the texture in OpenGL memory int _width; int _height; }; Now for the code to actually load the image ...
This is my first post to http://idevblogaday.com/, I’ve been waiting since November so I’m pretty excited about writing to a broader audience =P. Even though I only have one product on the App Store I have gathered some knowledge on how stuff works to get there. I’ll start by talking a bit about how we made our PC game Vizati to iPhone. When we started, this represented our chance of making games and putting ourselves into test. Without any pre determined rules and/or a major company dictating what to do we were able to have full creative control to try and do something a bit different. ...
Something that has always been scary (well, it’ still is) before launching Vizati is tech support. No matter how much you tested your game, it’s bound to have bugs. Also what I’ve realized is that I don’t spend enough time testing the game, oh and you too, yes YOU (I’m assuming you’re a developer of course). The past year I gather around a few friends who never played it to test the game for 2 days. 6 people played it the first day, 4 played it on the second day. We gathered around all complaints and issues and addressed them. After that there was more play-testing but not as aggressive. There were 3 or 4 persons testing it regularly. ...
It’s little over a month since I said I wouldn’t do any more porting for Vizati. Lesson learned, don’t say never again… When I started making the engine in C++ with an OpenGL/DirectX layer, I tried to keep in mind a multi-platform environment. Keeping rendering and OS specific calls abstract from the game itself and the engine to a certain level was one of my goals. Easy to say, hard to accomplish. Anyway the engine already supports Windows, iPhone and iPad. ...
It’s been awhile since my last post. Regular visitors know that for the last months I’ve been working mainly on Vizati, bringing it first from the Xbox360 (never released, no xblig here) to a PC digital release, followed by a complete rewrite of the engine to C++/OpenGL for a iPhone port, next there was the Windows Phone 7 version. I had the iPad on a backburner since I don’t own a device and optimizing code without seeing the result is crappy but about 2 weeks ago it went gold and it’s finished. ...
I’ve been playing with polygons and collisions lately so I decided to share some stuff. Using rectangles to detect if the mouse is inside is handy for Buttons and rectangular shaped objects, but what about other irregular shaped objects? Taking this into account I decided to create a Polygon class that basically has a List of Vector3 points. Although I’m just covering 2D collision you should use Vector3 for a more generic class. ...
For my current project I’ve been working with A* as a path-finding solution. Basically it’s a way to get from point A to point B. This is used for AI in games mostly on tiled based games, It’s very simple to understand and implement. As A* traverses the graph, it follows a path of the lowest known cost, keeping a sorted priority queue of alternate path segments along the way. If, at any point, a segment of the path being traversed has a higher cost than another encountered path segment, it abandons the higher-cost path segment and traverses the lower-cost path segment instead. This process continues until the goal is reached. ...
If you read my recent posts you know I’ve been bringing Basalt to C++. The plan is to support both DirectX and OpenGL render API’s and OpenGLES for iOS devices. I’m tired of porting stuff so I want to make a better framework for future projects and I’ll leave the XNA branch for Xbox360 and Windows Phone 7. I really wished I had this before. Since the iPhone branch is stable I move on to making it compatible with Win32 and MacOSX. ...