Category Archives: Uncategorized

Hello everyone, Last days have been very stressful for me, when you work alone on a project, you can’t rely on someone else to make sure release is okay, that nothing was forgotten, etc… and you spend 100% of your time wondering what could have been forgotten and if the game will really please people. And I tend not to trust friends/family when we are talking about my game, not that they would lie, but they might tend to embellish things, or not be very honest/frank. So when a total stranger tells me he likes my game it really cheers me up, and I received quite a lot of comments like that lately, so even if I am stressed, I am quite happy ^^ Of course there are also people that will just be mean and say horrible things without arguing, haters are everywhere, it’s...

If like me and lots of users you are tired of the recently used files “feature” in the open/save dialogs of gtk applications, I’ve found a small work around. The problem When using a text editor such as gedit when you use the open file dialog it will default in the “Recently used” places, this could be a nice feature for some users, but it can not be changed to default to a folder, and it’s a broken feature. It’s broken because it will display all sorts of craps, for example it will display movie files, or image files, that can’t even be opened by a text editor, and furthermore in my case it will display hundreds of index.htm files, or README or things like that, and I would have to open them all one by one to find the one I want (Yes, it...

Monsters (70%) / weapons (90%) / maps (30%) / misc (40%) Total : ~ 40% Other changes: Level editor can now be launched from main menu Updated all episode 2 levels to add more monsters in hard difficulty mode Monsters now have a chance to drop items when they are killed Better performance in the level editor Changed most of the weapons, lowered their ammo capacity Lowered damage of bouncing laser, increased its ammo usage...

Here are a few screenshots of the level editor, when I was doing map e01m10 I’m pretty sure I will make it public when its done, it’s not very user friendly (you have to know all the keyboard shortcuts), but it does a good job What you can see : Exterior environment generation using perlin noise, water and external walls placement Room walls placement Floor Room details Sprites and markups And finally the properties editor (with a small, easy to use, scripting engine)...

A lot of work on the engine since last news (but less than expected, mostly because of Skyrim ), mostly improvements of existing stuffs, and a few new things : Sprites are now integrated into the physical engine (they handle gravity, can be pushed, player can jump,…) More accurate behavior, the cubes are now truly handled like small parts (a big cube is in fact 64 small cubes), this, sadly, lowers fps… which will increase minimum requirements… Sprites can now move freely pixel by pixel (instead of cube by cube), like particles Light engine In order to handle the increasing number of images to display, I had to switch from java2d Graphics object to an home made replacement. This replacement is around 50-60% quicker than java for simple blit operations (equivalent of Graphics drawImage function), of course it does less things, but at least it...

I am quite happy with my particle system, so I’ve posted a youtube video to show how it works : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biKk-cE7qdg I also wanted to test how to post videos to youtube, it’s my first video, so I might have made a few mistakes. I know the quality is poor, I’ll try to make a better video next time, or maybe I should buy fraps when I have some money. In this video I’m showing a few technical stuffs : A* pathfinding Missile, grenade behaviors Bouncing on walls, floor Snow system (emitters for slow moving particles that stops on the floor) Basic water : particles slow when entering it, and sink...

I have spent last days developing stuff for a customer (sadly we need money to live) so I couldn’t make progress for my games during this time. But finally that’s it ! Snorms development has begun ! I don’t know yet if I will release prototype versions, but I’ll try to make an alpha version quickly. Currently I made great progress on the engine to improve performance, and handle more accurately the sprites hit box. And I’ve added a few things : Mouse movement : you can control player using keys or mouse (click on the block you wanna go to) A* path finding Particle system : a particle is a simple object that has a velocity, is subjected to forces (gravity) and has a lifetime. Typically it will be used for graphical effects and bullets. Particle emitter Here’s a few screenshots of particles :...

New beta version available on snorms.com : http://www.snorms.com/kleum/?p=play What’s new ? Account creation : I respect your privacy, you just need a login name and a password (email is optional, it will be used for password recovery) Replay : replays are saved when ending a level Best time saving and replay viewer Resource loader over HTTP : the jar size has been reduced as media (levels, images, …) are downloaded when needed. Only your best time is visible, global best time will be available when first levels will be finished (I will recreate most of them)...