Muttley’s Blog

I just keep coming back to Devin Townsend’s new album, Ki.  I love this album.

When it first popped through the door I wasn’t really sure (crappy CD player in the kitchen accompanied by noisy kids is not a good listening environment), but since then I’ve played it a lot and it’s really grown on me to the point that it’s probably getting up there with my favourite albums of the last few years. It’s very mellow and angsty, and quite different from his previous stuff, but this is a man baring his soul to the world and is incredibly beautiful and moving. There’s some wonderfully tasteful guitar going on too; stuff you’d normally expect someone like Gilmour to do. Plus he somehow manages to make clean guitars sound heavy at times.

Here’s a few YouTube links containing some stuff from Ki (crap audio quality as always with YouTube unfortunately):

Can’t wait for the next album. If it’s even half as good as Ki we’re got a real treat in store.

Finally PC users can experience the wonders of my mate’s game, Space Giraffe, the game that Braid developer Jonathan Blow compared to Ulysses.  Something that until now was only available to lucky Xbox 360 owners.

From the Llamasoft site:

This is more than just a copy of the Xbox 360 game! In the intervening time the development of the Neon engine has continued, and we now have a lovely new shader library. These new shaders have been used to create a NUXX mix of Space Giraffe which is at once much nicer-looking than the original, and alsoless intensely psychedelic (one criticism of SG 360 was that some of the effects were *too* intense; accordingly the new mix is beautiful and abstract without being quite so overwhelming).

For those who do enjoy the full-on psychedelia of the original, that is still available, because SG PC comes with two packs of 100 levels each - the NUXX smoother mix and the Acid Mix which is the levels from SG 360. We also added the capability for us to make available further level packs - which can be completely new levels rather than simply remixes - should there be sufficient interest. We could make chillout level packs, ultra-intense packs, shorter game packs (maybe 20 levels instead of 100 for those who want a shorter game), special themed packs to celebrate Christmas or L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday - whatever people would like.

I’m especially pleased, as I created one of the sound effects for the game (the feedback monsters), usng only my collections of guitars, my Marshall amp and a copy of Cakewalk SONAR.

You can download a demo of the game here: http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/downloads/SpaceGiraffe.exe and you can buy it (and other games) from the Llamasoft shop here: https://www.llamasoft.co.uk/shop (I personally recommend Gridrunner++ because it’s just awesome fun).

There’s also a host of information about the game here: http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/games/space-giraffe

The RetroRemakes 2008 Competition has started, and this year I’m going to enter. So, after a few days tinkering with my game engine, I”ve actually started work on it.

I’m doing a remake of Bank Panic (one of my fave arcade games that I never actually played untl MAME came along). Anyway, as I can’t draw I decided to have a play with using vector graphics for everything, and here’s the results of 4 hours of experimentation with Inkscape trying to do the money bag logo, along with the original for comparison:

I think I need to get a bit more practice in before I start trying to make the main characters (rotoscoping FTW).

I’ve set up a small discussion forum.  This will be mainly for information and support purposes for my BlitzMax modules to start with.  Not much there yet, but I’ll start adding things over the next few days.

There’s also a section for discussing the RetroRemakes Framework, so if you have any questions or suggestions, that’s the place to post them.

EDIT: A link: http://www.muttleyville.org/forum/index.php

Hurrah! The YakYak Programming Competition #1 crown is mine. Though I do feel slightly guilty that my entry was neither big, nor clever.

There we some fantastic entries.  My favourites being nyarla’s Llamalamp and Colonius’ scrolly demo written in Excel of all things!

I now need to come up with a remit for the next competition…  Hmm…

The RetroRemakes Framework now includes Chipmunk Game Dynamics physics library.

I’ve converted the Chipmunk demos to use the framework, and a Windows executable can be downloaded here: RRFW Chipmunk Physics Demo [Win] (186) - 572.79 KB

As always, you can download the source code for the framework, including these examples from the Google Code project page here

You can now vote for your favourite demo entry in the YakYak competition here.

The first YakYak Programming Competition has finished, and we’re awaiting the results.

This “Just for Fun” competition had a straight-forward remit:

pick a *minimum* of 10 of your favourite yakak forum members to greetz in your demo, and at the end write a special greeting to the Yak. You can greet as many yakyakers as you like, but don’t make your demo too long (or too short).

Sounds simple enough, eh!

Well, we had from the 11th June to the 13th July to complete our entries.  Needless to say the 13th July arrived and I hadn’t even started. *oops*

Luckily there were several others in the same boat and so the competition was extended by a week with a new closing date of the 20th July.  Of course that meant I put things off a bit more and didn’t actually start work on my entry until the 17th.  *double oops*

So, 4 days to knock a demo together, no problem.  Except it didn’t turn out to be 4 days, it was 3 as the wife wanted to watch a film Saturday night (Sweeney Todd.  Very good.).  So, 3 days, no problem… well, I say days, but what I really mean is a few hours a day for 3 days… *eeek*

Anyway, I just about managed to pull things together in time, and the initial response I’ve had has been very flattering.

The demo is an old-skool romp, complete with starfields, scrolling messages, flashing colours… and a nice little sneak peak at something else I’ve been working with a friend at the end.

Anyway, you can see for yourselves at the links below (thanks go to RiK and Devlin helping out compiling the OSX and Linux versions respectively)

Last Minute & Cobbled Together [Win] (250) - 12.45 MB

Last Minute & Cobbled Together [OSX/Intel] (134) - 12.39 MB

Last Minute & Cobbled Together [Linux] (138) - 12.19 MB

I’ve been experimenting with capturing Super Crazy Comets in action, first with Fraps (OK, but costs), then with .kkapture (Fantastic, and free).  .kkapture basically runs the game/demo in slow-mo to create perfect captures at the frame-rate you request.

Here’s one that YouTube mangled on upload:

Here’s the original capture (you’ll need the Xvid MPEG-4 codec to view it): Super Crazy Comets Preview #1 (141) - 21.2 MB

I’ve started moving my Open Source BlitzMax Modules over to a Google Code project called muttmod.