Here’s a couple videos from the series, some of the more odd things I’ve posted. The first is a response to a topic of inspiration posed by Andy Moore. I try to get out for walks as often as I can, and I bring with me a camera phone… here’s what I see: Next was something from this past weekend. I picked up an iCade, which is an arcade controller for an iPad, and I got it working with something NOT an iPad....
I recently purchased a new laptop (Lenovo X220) and made some upgrades (160 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM) making it a great little development machine. I like it so much, that I want to use it even for my Linux needs. I like to do a post or series of posts whenever I do a notable Linux install, often because there are so many nuances you need to deal with that are easy to forget....
I’ve been making games for a really long time now, but one thing I’ve found myself rather resilient to was letting myself use Middleware. By Middleware, I mean 3rd party libraries. It’s funny since I always highly recommend that people use it (to save RIDICULOUS amounts of time), but I myself am just a really slow adopter of it. SDL is one of few long-time 3rd party libraries I use. It lets me write my game code against the PC, Mac, Linux, and a few mobiles including Palm/HP’s webOS and Nokia’s Maemo....
2011 is here! The IGF finalists have been announced, CES is upon us, and GDC is less than 2 months away. I always have a hard time following up epic posts like the last one. So with this, my third attempt (ahem), I’m going to try to be more to the point: My plans for the year. First, the Mac App Store launches on Thursday… I wonder if Mike did something for that?...
Added a toggle button for Windowed and Fullscreen today, and made it actually work. I also did some tweaking of the icons around the edge of the screen (pushed them higher, made the outlines more consistent). One of these days I need to align the outside UI stuffs to the edge of the screen The About/Credits screen icon is now a speech bubble (was a “?”, so not to confuse it with the help menu)....
I am a regular twitter user. I run a client (twhirl) in the corner of my right monitor, so for me it works like a weird combination of an IM client and RSS reader. A couple days ago, I caught glance of this request from Noel Llopis (developer of Flower Garden, Dr. Seuss’ Lorax Garden, and the upcoming Casey’s Contraptions). That’s a good question. As far as I know there’s no real “standard” achievement sound (unless you want to rip-off Microsoft)....
Alright, time to get back in to the routine. It’s been two weeks since the last post. Last week became an impromptu holiday for me — I am a Canadian living in Canada, but I deal mostly with US companies, so American Thanksgiving seemed safe. The week prior was busy though. I sent off the initial version of Smiles HD for the Mac App Store. It still sits in the approval queue, but I’m there....
So I spent the evening getting Smiles working in 64bit Linux (Ubuntu 10.10) as well as the Mac. Here are the results: Smiles HD, 64bit binary running on ‘The Zotac’ – Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop And the Mac again: Smiles HD on the Mac again, this time in 64 bits And a closeup of the processes section: A zoom of the process, showing 64bit mode. The CPU usage is due to it being a debug build....
Before I get to the meat of this post, last night I finished my “early” Mac App Store TODO list. I *COULD* submit it now, but there’s a bug with submissions. My iPad version is called Smiles HD, and so will be the Mac App Store version. Right now the names conflict, so I have to wait until this is fixed. For now it’s “done”. I sent the binary to some friends to double-check compatibility....
Not much to say or show, just that the performance problem was due to the textures being larger than the texture cache. Under 10% CPU usage, much better As it is now, on my Mac mini the game runs at under 8% CPU usage in the menus and Zen, and under 10% in Drop. The largest texture is 1024×1024, DXT5 compressed (4:1, or 1 MB). Before it was 1024×1024 uncompressed 32bit RGBA (1:1, or 4 MB)....