World of Goo available for linux!

hoohay!

one of the coolest games I’ve ever seen seem to be available for Linux!

my first chance to try it!

a review is due to the next days!

NativeClient?

Google’s new plataform sure looks interesting.But Im still facing some ugly issues on linking. But Im happy to announce that BZK does compile well (besides not having sound enabled) and Its very near to happen as a 3D Web Gaming game engine. Hold on for more details later!

playing with FSM and guns

It is possible to implement some good games with simple FSM and a good load of creativity.

To show you this, a simple exemple: using the actor FSM and a second FSM for the frames (I know, I should use only one FSM, but hey, one step at the time), I could reproduce a ROTT-like double gun effect:

the original:

my version (SVG guns):

riddler video footage

this video shows Riddler running on a Maemo device, N770:

you will have to wait a while before I do the final adjustments before I release a Maemo version of the game.

wanna try? http://rapidshare.com/files/156567784/testmaemo_riddler.zip.html

(put the “storage” directory on /media/mmc1)

Angstron paper toy 1

The first to come!

my next model will probably be the biker itself!

instructions:

- fold everything with a black line in it

- gently apply glue on the red marks and use it as sticky-tabs

finished model

all prototypes and finished version

just print, cut and assemble

Indie game development using ubuntu desktop Linux

In the past years, indie game development went from sitting on dark basement, staring a black and white screen, fiddling cryptic messages to decode the VGA registers in order to achieve the maximum performance to sitting on a dark basement while staring to gorgeous GNOME or KDE screen while tossing the maximum perfomance from your GPU with no sweat. (Of course , some of us still love that darn pretty black screen)

From this dark ages to current days, linux game developement went from an adventure to some serious play, as the tools matured and CG companies took linux more seriously as a development plataform.

This article intends to present the reader with some good options on linux game development, while analysing the reasons of this linux-gamedevelopment-takeoff.

the dark ages
Picture this: You have a prety console screen on your machine. Whats your gaming options? None, you might answer. You cant be more wrong that this.

Before XServers were commonplace, there were already a struggling game development community. Most of them came from the existant BSD community and saw a good potential with that “fast and lightweight UNIX” that linux was (today, both Linux and BSD seen to be in the same level) and then we got our share of console games, like dopewars and other console classics.

Needless to say, developing this games was more challeging than playing them, as they didnt have the tools available today. But these dark ages wouldnt last long.

The golden age of unix graphics evolution
Since the start of the modern computing industry, UNIX was the standard defacto for serious applications and before the macintosh take-over, UNIX was the absolute king for computer graphics.

Then it came. The graphical revolution for the UNIX workstation. First, it was a indutry or office thing only, but then, we gradually , got a XServer running on our machines.

But still, coding a game is XLib can lead to a suicide. How we got such great games like Planet Penguin Racer or Super Tux?

The main reason should be two invetions here:
OpenGL and SDL.

OpenGL opened a new world in computer graphics. Being mostly a Silicon Graphics thing, it was for sure a UNIX-friedly thing. Of course, after passing the hurdles of getting a X window with OpenGL content. With OpenGL we could finally get our Quake after a hard work day.

And while OpenGL did great things for 3D graphics, It carried unessessary weight to 2D Game Development. And the developer had two options: use the unacelerated but closer to other 2D APIs XLib or to go with the (sometimes) acelerated but unatural OpenGL; Some of them ran to GTK and other toolkits, but most got lost on this. And then came this man, Sam Lantinga unify our battlecries.

Sam Lantinga had to port a Macintosh emulator to windows and linux…But hey, coding a graphical system for every Operating System sounds a crazy thing. And it is. He had a simple but dauting ideia: write a abstraction layer, called SDL, and the rest is history : He got Doom ported to SDL is 3 days!

Now we can use SDL in a huge variety of plataforms, ranging from mobile devices (more about this below), Video Game Consoles , and lots of mainstream and obscure operating systems.

With SDL, developers could actually go through the “create window for OpenGL” novella in less than 10 lines of code.And binding for other languages spring every month or so. I bet he didnt saw that coming.
The Java monster

The hearts of millions of programmers (those include even John Carmack) were touched with this promisse: “Now we can write or own AAA game for all plataforms”. Unfortunatly , it took somewhat for the idea to catch on for real. What the java applets really were able to do was a little below that. But still, as Sun released their JDK for Linux, it was quickly possible to write java applets on a linux box and see them running on Macs and windows boxes.

Basically , this was a time for small arcade clones and advergames. And for several startups funded for advergames, the linux +  java applets were the killer combo. Most of the technical staff of those came from those tech geeks using linux since college.

But still, the premier time for smooth java game development was yet to come, and we will return to this later.

Take it in your pocket
If mobile is the name of the game, you’re lucky. Mobile development under UNIX have been strong since the beginning , with J2ME mostly, and now, more recently, with Linux Mobile.

With J2ME , there are plenty of possibilities -Some more mature, like NetBeans and sun WTK, and some brand new, like Nokia’s WidSet. Linux is being taken seriously by the big players, as most inovations in terms of design comes from freedom fighters, like us. The only possible downside of the approach might be the plethora of proprietary protocols mobile phones use to comunicate with a computer through the data cables. Be sure to take a phone that speaks “Mass Storage Device” to the computer.

Recently , we have seen some companies going with linux for their mobile OSes. We all gain with that: this mobile linux is not that diferent from our desktop machine and most SDKs use technologies broadly available. Its like playing with your childhood friend’s child.

One Common point when dealing with mobile game development is the use of Simple DirectMedia Layer. Most mobile distros allow SDL apps to run with privileged speeds. The biggest distros here are: QTopia, from Trolltech (the guys that gave  us libqt), EZX (QTopia based), from Motorola (some warnings apply here, as it doesnt run native applications right out-of-the-box), and mostly Maemo (the one yours humble writer like the most to code on its day-to-day), from Nokia and finally OpenMoko, that is a joint effort to produce a distro for mobile phones.

Also worth mentioning that Ubuntu Mobile is to become a great mobile OS, incorporating the UI from Maemo. Looks very promissing.

The dawn of the desktop

As Linux evolved from the last decade, we could stop worrying about or desktop and could concentrate on producing something. This is a byproduct of projects like Ubuntu, that aims to bring more focus to the developers, putting them to do their best were they excel.

There are also smaller efforts on some countries, like Brazil, to use Linux as a medium of knowledge broadcast, creating social projects that called for more average-joe-friendly desktops. Those are fertile field for Linux gaming.

Also, there are other companies using linux for notebooks (but this distinguish from mobile linux, as there is a full linux machine experience), like ASUSTEK with its EeePC and OLPC (the last one making big bets on educational gaming),each being too big use case to cover here.

Name your monster

Now that you cant wait more to get yout hands dirty, I will show you some good options to develop your own games.

Desktop:
emacs (or your favorite text editor) & g++ :
Thats right! chances are that the exact machine your are using to read this text is capable of game development. Althrough the experience can be somewhat spartan, its perfectly possible. Except for a few moments I ran for some better tools, I went this way to develop my own 3D mobile game engine (www.sf.net/projects/bzk).

Mobile:
If you’re going for java, make sure you take NetBeans, as it have a very strong mobile support. Dont forget your “mobility pack” for the chosen mobile device proile.

If not, you’re gearing towards linux mobile, good and bad news:
The good: most of your existent desktop code will work out of the box.
the bad: you will, probably (as most mobile devices use ARM processors, incompatible with our x86 machines) need to recompile it with some exoteric SDK. And this will depend on the target plataform. Some are easy, some are not. Make sure to also research whats the best settings for your workstation – sometimes, virtualization can be a viable option.

One good advice might be using SDL. I can attest this, as  I do most of my development on my desktop enviroment and when I feel the need, I just switch to the mobile SDK (in my case, Maemo SDK under Scratchbox), recompile, generate a debian ARM package and test it on device (Nokia N770). This can save you valuable debugging time.

Art:
With the arts departament, the best tools (but now the only ones) to use is Gimp and Blender for graphics (with the advantage of running also on Windows, for that goofy friend of yours that still uses Windows) and Audacity for sound (GNU Sound being another viable option). Rose Garden got some fame to be good, if you can get over the JACK nightmare, when producing music (if you cant use Rose Garden, just invite that friend of yours to play their songs, but make sure to turn of the vocal’s mic )

Conclusion:
With so many options, anyone would wonder why are you still reading this instead of producing your next Quake 5. Now , GET BUSY!

SVG updates

billboards

wall texture.

wall textures

I didnt expected SVG to be such a savior for BZK, but it is becoming one. After implementing it, I got it working first for 2D images (useful for scalable menus) and then for 3D (first as billboards – useful for effects. Every actor now has one) and after that, I made a hack so we can have it as wall texture (only walls, no floors – this will be fixed very soon, or not.) , and then I finally extended the GEO format (and of course , updated conbed) so it allows a texture to be specified.

It is now perfect, there are some memory leaks here and there and there is a lot of waste in terms of allocation. Im not re-using allocations when I actually could. I will create a resource manager in the next few days.

The most surprising effect I got with curves. I dont render curves,instead, I draw a strainght line between the points (curves are not very suitable for mobile 3D applications – a good designer knows how to use polygons instead). But if you draw “free-hand” on inkscape, it will create lots of very small curves that when rendered as straight lines, show the same effect as the curves! Dont belive me? just look at the pictures!

PS: Why is it getting so hard to handle pictures in wordpress?

Go grab some popcorn

MonoBED tutorial – running on Vista!

Thats what happens when two guys have nothing better to do and a palm zire 72s to film stuff…

And this wasnt the first time. ’bout a year ago, I recorded with my cellphone this piece of a BZK meeting with Carlos (Banshee) and Marcos (Thanatos/Planeta):

BZK brainstorming

quite old meeting. august-2006

Crappy Siemens C72 camera