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Another year has gone by, not quite what I was expecting developing wise, like putting another game out there, but things never turned out as planned. Still over the last year I’ve gradually saw out little Different Pixel brand reaching more and more places which can be very helpful in the future and sure hell is nice to see work recognized. From the top of my head I recall Kotaku article on the Xbox360 release, we finally managed to release the Xbox360 version, which was the first one we made. Being a semi-finalist on Dream.Build.Play 2011 and the coverage on Destructoid. ...

I discovered code swarm a while ago and decided to test on my own repositories. This is a test on Basalt, and although I’ve been working on the engine since January 2010, only in 2011 did I placed in on a repository so a bunch of stuff is added right on the beginning. This is the result.

If you use Tweetdeck you probably already know they screwed the new version (1.0) and you want to revert back. Unfortunately since they are now part of Twitter I had a hard time finding the older build and decided to share it. And that’s why you are here too probably, here it is: Tweetdeck 0.38.2. Don’t forget you need Adobe Air installed. Edit 29-12-2011 Some user have experienced a “This application cannot be installed because this installer has been mis-configured. Please contact the application author for assistance.” ...

So as I mentioned a few weeks back, since November 1st I quit my job and I’ve been mainly focusing on our next game for Different Pixel. After a month, I think so far progress has been good. I’ve been able to work almost entirely on the game itself instead of the engine because most of the stuff is stable enough since Vizati. It’s kind of rewarding now and instead of reading tons of docs of other engines each time something doesn’t work right I usually know where the problem may be and can fix it, as good as I can at least. A few glitches here and there but so far so good. ...

So being a big fan of Quake, Quake 3 Arena and Doom I was eager to get my hands on id Software latest game, Rage. Like most developers out there I’ve been impressed by John Carmack’s work and breakthroughs in gaming and computer graphics for years. When I first heard Rage was targeting 60FPS I got intrigued. Almost every game targets 30FPS and targeting twice as that leaves less time to render each frame, even more since they were promising vast wastelands, detailed characters, top notch animations and AI. ...

So I’ve been out for quite some time, and this is just a quick update. First, I have tones of unread, thus answered emails on my inbox. I haven’t managed to go through that lately. I usually scroll to see if there’s a really urgent one, I will eventually read them all. I decided to quit my current job, my last day is October 31st. I couldn’t glimpse a very promising carrier there and I practically staggered learning-wise for the past months due to the type of work we develop so yeah, that’s it. ...

So I’ve been working on my new game and I’m doing some tweaks here and there on the engine. Mainly with the rendering section, trying to squeeze as much as possible, thus maintaining an acceptable framerate. It’s not like I’m doing a heavily graphic game but I like to know that It can be used even on slower pcs and that I’m not using more cycles than necessary. This past week and after reading a bunch of stuff and keynotes from John Carmack about Rage (60FPS ftw) I decided to measure my own stuff. ...

If you are coding, no matter what it is, games, software, websites, you should be using a code revision control of some sort. Are you using? Cool. Is it Git? Smart choice, so you probably don’t need to read the rest of this post. For the rest I’m giving some help on how to start from scratch. First of all I recommend some reading on Revision Control so that you understand what I’m talking about. ...

First of all I think this is my last idevblogaday post for a while. I my math doesn’t fail me this is my 10th post and it’s time for someone to take turn. Actually it’s just the 9th. I hope my words have somehow enriched your knowledge, in case you want to stick around just bookmark my feeds. I keep this fairly updated. Also since I’ve been working on a new game there’s probably news to share in the next 2-3 months. ...

For sound I use OpenAL, it’s free, cross-platform, I’ve managed to get it working on iPhone, Windows and Mac. Setting up OpenAL to play a sound is pretty straight forward, a bit like OpenGL. First you need to create a context. ALCcontext *context; ALCdevice *device; device = alcOpenDevice(NULL, ALC_DEFAULT_DEVICE_SPECIFIER); if (device == NULL) { // Handle Exception } //Create a context context=alcCreateContext(device,NULL); //Set active context alcMakeContextCurrent(context); // Clear Error Code alGetError(); Now for the second part, loading a wav file. You have to open a file, fill buffers with data and then attach it to a source. ...