Basalt

After mostly a week of anxiety, for thousands and thousands of developers, Unity changed the rules again, and first glance, it’s better for the immediate problems it would cause for active and in-development games. They removed the retroactive aspect of the “pay-per-game-install”, so only for someone on Unity 2023 LTS+ (launching next year) will that apply, current projects will not be affected. Small relief, as long as we can keep using existing versions with current Terms of Service....

So this was an “eventful” week in the game dev community. Unity, one of the most well know, and used game engines out there, after years of doing mostly good for the community, pulled a reverse card and broke years of trust the community had on them. Unity announced that they are retroactively charging (for example $0.2) for each game install, after developers hit a certain yearly revenue threshold, which sounds insane....

I’ve been working on Quest of Dungeons and I’m nearing Gold. I’m attempting to release every version on the same day, which I never managed to do before but would like to do this time. I have both the iOS, Mac and Windows version very stable, the Mac and iOS apps were already accepted by the App Store, for Windows I’m still trying to wrap up the process of getting it on a digital store too....

So these past 2 weeks I’ve been adding some “bits and bytes” to the engine. Taking a rest between some more complex game mechanisms I decided to start doing a video player. After a bit research I decided to choose theora, but a bit skeptic, I’ve used it before on a game company I worked at and I remember being a tiny nightmare, specially because of YUV->RGB(A) conversion and because of video/audio sync....

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.

This week I’ve been working on replacing my current scripting system. It worked great for Vizati but I need something with a little more flexibility. Instead of explaining what I’ve managed to get working I’ve made a screenshot with some notes. I think I’m going to make this my #ScreenshotSaturday

This is my first post to http://idevblogaday.com/, I’ve been waiting since November so I’m pretty excited about writing to a broader audience =P. Even though I only have one product on the App Store I have gathered some knowledge on how stuff works to get there. I’ll start by talking a bit about how we made our PC game Vizati to iPhone. When we started, this represented our chance of making games and putting ourselves into test....

It’s little over a month since I said I wouldn’t do any more porting for Vizati. Lesson learned, don’t say never again… When I started making the engine in C++ with an OpenGL/DirectX layer, I tried to keep in mind a multi-platform environment. Keeping rendering and OS specific calls abstract from the game itself and the engine to a certain level was one of my goals. Easy to say, hard to accomplish....

If you read my recent posts you know I’ve been bringing Basalt to C++. The plan is to support both DirectX and OpenGL render API’s and OpenGLES for iOS devices. I’m tired of porting stuff so I want to make a better framework for future projects and I’ll leave the XNA branch for Xbox360 and Windows Phone 7. I really wished I had this before. Since the iPhone branch is stable I move on to making it compatible with Win32 and MacOSX....

I ran into this issue a couple hours ago working on the iPhone sdk: See the darker borders around the image? It’s a png image and that’s was supposed to be a gradient of alpha. So why am I getting this strange stuff around it? Well that’s because that alpha isn’t 0 or 1 or 0 or 255. The first thing I found out is that XCode grabs the png images and multiplies the RGB component with the alpha....

It’s been around two weeks since my last post. Basically because I’ve been busy porting my engine Basalt to iPhone/iPad. If you follow me on twitter you might have known this already since I ranted pretty much at start, moving platform and language is always painful if you are used to other conventions/shortcuts etc. So it all started with my wish to port Vizati to the iPhone, since the game is already running on PC, Xbox360 and Windows Phone 7 one can only wish for an easy and quick port since pretty much all base code is done....

Like some of you already know I’m currently out of job, the company where I worked like many out there closed due to, I don’t know, financial issues, bad management, who knows. Even worse the news got out just before Christmas and it was not the holidays I intended to have. Times have been hard, since the last pay check I got was in November. I worked there since 2006, almost 4 years, I joined the team back then in the hopes of joining something in the games industry....