Published on Sunday 30th of December, 2007 .
I’ve been working on my own game engine. Not because I think the world needs another one, but because it’s easier to understand and I learn more from a primitive one I’ve built myself then learn someone else’s. It makes me appreciate just what goes into a real one. I haven’t even got mine to bounce a ball around yet.
I already have one that does that I made a breakout clone with, but this one will be better. If I ever get it to that stage that is. I want it to use an embedded Lua interpreter for all the game logic. I also want it to use guichan for the gui. It’d be nice to be able to load the Gui from Lua scripts. That sounds pretty ambitious, so maybe I wont get that far. I definitely want to have the game logic for each level run from Lua scripts though. Some objects could have scripts attached to them that run when something happens. eg. triggers, or OnDeath scripts for various characters or whatever.
I’m thinking of the way nwscript does it or metaplace will do it. Metaplace got me motivated to experiment, since it’d be nice to learn Lua, so I can be ready to toy around in it when it hits open beta.
So far I’ve got a bare skeleton of an engine, it loads SDL and paints any game “objects” from a list. Objects so far are sprites and text.
Published on Friday 28th of December, 2007 .
Published on Friday 28th of December, 2007 .
I just finished playing the demo of the upcoming indy game Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. I don’t usually finish demos, so when the ending snuck up on me in this I was suprised. What’s better is it wasn’t one of those jarring “gah, an ad screen” telling me my time was up. It was more like the end of a chapter in a book that leaves you wondering what happens next. I think I definitely buy it when it’s out. I highly recommend the demo if you want a couple of hours of sass, wit and fiesty teenage rebellion played out on a mock old school board game.
It’s really really fun and funny.
Published on Friday 28th of December, 2007 .
A while back I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10. It went so smoothly that I didn’t even think to mention it.
There are significant improvements though, the graphics effects work really well straight out. They look great and aren’t over the top. Things seems snappier. The support for non-free binary drivers is improving. Plus support for non-free formats like mp3s, etc is smoother again. It really is Linux for everyone is that respect. One of the less mentioned and most useful improvements is the inclusion of the complete ntfs-3g drivers. So now if you’re dual booting an ntfs drive with winxp or vista (probably most people choose to do this), then you don’t have to worry about how to transfer data across the drives. It use to be that you could read the ntfs drive but not write to it. Obviously windows doesn’t even know about the ext3 linux partition. Now linux can safely and flawless write to the ntfs drive.
If you’re installing from scratch this will probably be setup by default, but if you’ve upgraded from 7.04 and you’ve previously setup the ntfs partition to be mounted you just need to edit your /etc/fstab file and change the filesystem from ntfs to ntfs-3g.
I use the options: defaults,locale=en_US.utf8
Published on Wednesday 26th of December, 2007 .
I think Portal 2 would have some really high expectations to fill. It might even be better if they give it a different title, and just set it around Aperture Science, or Chell.
*spoilers for Portal follow*
It would be lovely to know more about Chell, but what really makes Portal is GlaDOS. Personally I’d really like to find out more about when GlaDOS first flooded the enrichment centre with toxic case. The time when the red phone’s cord was cut (the commentary says the phone was to be used if GlaDOS became too aware, in which case she’d be shut off or something).
Something that would be cool, is finding out more about Aperture Science’s relationship to Black Mesa. I’d like to play out some sort of conflict between them, a lovely twist would be having GlaDOS helping you throughout, yet somehow you realise at the end that you’ve provided her with the trigger for her awareness and subsequent madness.
If aperturescience.com is to be taken as canon Aperture Science started off making shower curtains for the military (not sure which military), then the man in charge left 3 directives for the future of the company. The first 2 were absurd nutty things, the 3rd was to make a bio artificial intelligence lifeform operating system or something, which was really an aside as he hadn’t put much thought into it. Obviously the 3rd ended up being GlaDOS.
No matter what Valve does, Portal will be a hard act to follow.
They absolutely much keep the same voice actress for GlaDOS, she’s wonderful.
Just another 3-4 hours puzzle game would be fabulous too though.
Published on Monday 24th of December, 2007 .
This is just another version of my take on Portal. Ported from a comment thread.
Continue reading ‘More on Portal.’
