Links for Thought

It’s been busy, busy, busy as of late. We’re in full swing trying to get Tilt to Live HD ready for the iPad. It’s looking amazing thus far and plays a lot better than just the 2x mode for the original Tilt to Live. Frostbite mode just went out the door a few days ago, and the response has been positive so far. We’ve been getting some responses from users saying the game has become too easy in the other modes....

August 2, 2010 · Alex

Issues Loading Assets On Separate Threads

I’ve had a rather productive weekend! Implemented a handful of new art assets from Adam, finished some more gameplay code, optimized a bit, and even released a new build to testers tonight. It wasn’t a smooth process, but when is it ever? I was having an issue with loading the assets of the game at app launch and it caused the game to crash if it ever took more than 20 seconds to load the assets....

October 5, 2009 · Alex

GUI Design and Easing Functions

When it comes to gui coding I don’t typically find it the most glamorous things to do. Particularly when dealing with games. You are left with writing a lot of boiler plate GUI code that is tightly integrated with your rendering pipeline. And even when I do find gui libraries for games they tend to try to emulate the OS in look and feel. When you want something lightweight and very interactive/animated you typically have to write it and integrate it yourself....

September 13, 2009 · Alex

Low Hanging Fruit and Project Motivation

Some days it takes a herculean effort to force myself to sit down and work on my game. Some weeks it can be destructive to my entire schedule, while others its a complete non-issue. Overtime I’ve found prioritizing my tasks wasn’t enough to really Get Things Done. I needed a way to organize my daily tasks in such a way that would maximize my motivation to actually work that day, particularly after coming home from my day job....

July 31, 2009 · Alex

Farseer.BMX Update (v 1.1)

I was made aware of a serious issue with detecting collisions between TGeom’s recently. While it did not affect anyone who was using the engine and letting the TPhysicsSimulator run and manage collisions and dynamics, anyone who wished to use Farseer.BMX’s collision routines separately by calling TGeom.CollideWithGeometry() ran into issues. The code has since been fixed and updated. Please update your Farseer.BMX module so you can continue using it without this annoying bug....

October 14, 2008 · Alex

How to create concave polygons

Yes, yes I know the documentation is lacking at the moment for Farseer.BMX. I’m still working on it on a few fronts. First, I’m trying to do api documentation (bbdoc mostly). Secondly, I’m trying to write tutorials/guides that help show how to use some of farseer’s features. I had hoped that releasing the demo application source code would’ve covered this aspect as the demos cover pretty much each feature, but I guess since the demo source is a bit more complex in design (handling a lot of graphics related mumbo jumbo), the actual ‘needed content’ wasn’t particularly easy to find....

June 29, 2008 · Alex

Farseer.BMX 1.0 Released

And there was much rejoicing! It does feel great to finally ‘finish’ something. I started out this project as something to give me a foundation to code my own game project on, and now after 110+ hours of coding there is a 2D physics library for Blitzmax :)! I hope it proves useful to those that end up using it. While the engine hasn’t been tested for ‘real-world’ use it I think the demos do a good job of putting it through its paces....

June 1, 2008 · Alex

More Farseer.BMX

I was hoping to have an update a little earlier than this, but decided to hold off and throw together at least a bit of content with the update. I’ve added a slew of joints and controllers into the Farseer engine for Blitzmax (which I think I’ll just start referring to as just Farseer.BMX to save my poor little fingers). Below is a list of stuff I’ve added since the initial post:...

May 28, 2008 · Alex

Farseer Physics in Blitzmax Demo

Hurray! Finially got to a stable stopping point in porting over Farseer Physics from C# on XNA to Blitzmax! Farseer Physics Engine is a 2D physics engine originally written by Jeff Weber who develops XNA/Silverlight games over at Farseer Games. Much thanks to him for creating a great physics engine and for allowing me to move it to another language, which once done, I hope will help others create fun physics games in Blitzmax....

May 17, 2008 · Alex