Muttley’s Blog

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] (81) - 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] (162) - 12.45 MB

Last Minute & Cobbled Together [OSX/Intel] (62) - 12.39 MB

Last Minute & Cobbled Together [Linux] (55) - 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 (64) - 21.2 MB

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

I’ve now got the GameState management stuff in and working, though it’s a little different to the original way we did things, and I’m still not 100% happy with the design.

I think the next step is to work out the best way of managing resources.  I think I want to have an XML config file which has all the file and type details which the Resource Manager loads, and then individual resources can be requested from it.  This should make it easier for different GameStates to share the same resources easily.

A little update with regards the work I’m doing on refactoring the RetroRemake Framework.

The Graphics Service has now been enhanced so you can change screen resolution, depth, refresh rate, plus switch from fullscreen to windowed mode, and between OpenGL and DirectX drivers all on the fly

I just need to work out how I’m going to handle the resource management to handle re-loading/re-caching existing graphics.

I also want to be able to chuck config files at the resource manager, so you can load and purge batches of graphics for levels, etc.  May end up using XML for this, with maybe a little GUI for adding resources to the configs.  You can’t tell I’ve been playing with XNA, eh?!

Oh, and I’ve made a good start at wrapping all the OOness into procedural function calls for those who prefer it.

There’s still a few things I’ve not pulled the following into the new core yet:

• Bitmap Fonts
• Input
• Messages
• Particles
• SineFont
• Texture/Sprite Management

I’m trying to make some existing stuff more flexible too.  For example, the audio engine is currently locked in to OpenAL, but I’d like to let people use FMOD, BASS or another existing audio driver if they want (of course, the licensing issue would then need to be handled by them if they were selling whatever they made with the framework).

Oh, and I have quite a nice Verlet Integration Physics engine I will throw in as well.  It’s a bit basic and has no collision detection/reponse stuff, but you can fake it well enough.  Of course that needs to be optional and linked to the Sprite manager.  It would be nice to make the Physics Service a wrapper so we can eventually plug in other Physics engines, like Box2D or Chipmunk.

Lots to do still…