 | | [Website] TOWeb V3 is available! | Monday, June 22, 2009, 10:40 PM
Oh happy day, just two days before my birthday the ToWeb people released the new version 3!
And what nice features they have included 
- tons of graphical gizmos you can do with your website's style and layout,
- search engine enhancements to get more hits on your site,
- more effects for images,
- comments for blogs (YES! Finally!),
- captchas,
- so called i-Services for blogs, forms and mailing lists using server side PHP (used for the blog comments for example) including a builtin backup solution,
- support of Google free services like Google AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Diagnostics and more,
- builtin search engine is improved
- and much more
Only disadvantage is the update fee - but hey, nothing as good and simple to handle like this tool is for free...
You'll see what I can use for this site in the next time  | |
| | [Game Dev] Flash game development? | Sunday, June 07, 2009, 10:18 PM
Friday night I had a quick look at Flash for game development.
I downloaded the free Flex SDK from Adobe, followed by FlashDevelop which is a nice (Windows only) free IDE for Flash development and also some Adobe Flash player debug versions.
Finally I downloaded Flixel which is a nice little library to help you creating Flash games.
Only half an hour later I got everything installed and setup (just follow the tutorials on the FlashDevelop and Flixel sites) and I successfully compiled the demo game of Flixel!
Pretty cool I must admit.
Don't know if I will continue the Flash way some day - it was just a nice little experience seeing that it was pretty easy to get everything working.
But of course Flash's main problems are still valid:
- it's slow compared to native compiled games (like BlitzMax or PlayBasic or C++) or JIT environments (like Java),
- it does not support HW acceleration (at least I've never heard about it) and thus lacks all the eye candy.
Advantages are:
- ActionScript 3 looks cool and is a real OO language,
- FlashDevelop looks like a nice powerful IDE (which is free!),
- coding platform independent games that run in an ubiquitous environment (a Flash player is installed in nearly any browser around the world).
I think it's pretty good for simple games but not for all ideas that jump around in my brain. So I'd better get back to improve my BlitzMax coding and finish my first BlitzMax game first
Cheers,
Tommy | |
| [Game Dev] First part of BlitzMax tutorial finished! | Sunday, June 07, 2009, 10:13 PM
I declare the first part of my top down shooter tutorial for BlitzMax finished. Feedback, suggestions and enhancements are highly appreciated!
The next part of the tutorial will cover bullets, enemies and sound effects. I will begin with it in the next few days I hope | |
| [Game Dev] Bits and pieces added to the tutorial | Monday, June 01, 2009, 10:13 PM
Some more paragraphs made it to the top down shooter tutorial. I added code for the TPlayer type and it's explanation and also added the modified main loop code. Finally you can download the first part of the tutorial at the bottom of the page.
Coding the game is so much faster than explaining it | |
| [Game Dev] First refactorings of the tutorial | Monday, May 25, 2009, 10:11 PM
After reading the tutorial for several times now (proof reading while adding new content) I detected what was nagging me all the time. I didn't like the implementation of the TFRLTimer class. The main class in it's main loop had constant access to some fields of the TFRLTimer and even modified them!
This breaks many OO rules of course. So I just had to refactor the class. And while I was at it I also added some FPS code to show the amount of logic update calls and render calls per second. I inserted a refactoring paragraph into the tutorial before starting to explain the new classes TCoordinate, TGameElement and TPlayer.
Have fun reading the enhanced top down shooter tutorial  | |
| | [Website] More changes | Sunday, May 17, 2009, 10:20 PM
How do you like my game logos on the right?
Took me around an hour to create them with the help of PhotoImpact and The Logo Creator. They are far from perfect but I'm satisfied enough to keep them
I also added the built in search engine of TOWeb to a panel frame on the right. Give it a try. I still need to feed more keywords to my pages and their paragraphs but it's a nice feature to use.
And just for fun (and because TOWeb includes several sets) I switched to some different smilies  | |
| [Website] A bit of a new look | Monday, May 11, 2009, 11:21 PM
I played around with my current theme. Hope you like it
One thing I also want to do is to create some graphics teasers to promote my own games a little bit with nice images on the panels on the right side.
I'm playing around with The Logo Creator which is a nice piece of software to create some cool looking logos. They also have another software The Web Graphics Creator to design 3D eBook covers. But that's a bit tricky to use - and I'm no artist at all 
But sooner than later I present my first results here - you have been warned! | |
| [Game Dev] Some more work on the tutorial | Monday, May 11, 2009, 11:17 PM
I added some more paragraphs and also fixed and enhanced the first ones of my BlitzMax top down shooter tutorial. So if you want you can read them all over
Feedback is highly appreciated as usual! | |
| [Game Dev] Started with the tutorial | Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 10:58 PM
I put the first paragraphs of the BlitzMax tutorial online. Have a read and maybe give me some feedback. | |
| [Game Dev] Another tutorial is in the works! | Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 10:44 PM
Recently I've been kindly asked if I could do a BlitzMax tutorial (greetings to Leon ). We quickly agreed on some simple game to be created in the tutorial.
It will be some kind of top down shooter where the player controls a rotating turret in the center of the screen and has to shoot different enemies that approach him from all sides.
The game gets more and more difficult by raising the speed of the enemies, introducing different enemies that take more hits and so on.
As it shouldn't be too hard to code that and pretty good to introduce some OO and other nice features of BlitzMax I decided to give it a go
You can follow the progress here. | |
| [Game Dev] Just another screenshot |  Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 8:57 PM
Just added this paragraph to show you another generated cave to see that it's really randomly generated
The basic idea of the algorithm is the usage of a so called midpoint displacement. The sea bed requires one curve, each cave requires two randomly generated curves, one for the ceiling and one for the ground. Not too complicated... | |
| | [Game Dev] More playing with BlitzMax | Tuesday, February 03, 2009, 9:40 PM
Whoa! More than four weeks without an update of this site! This is a good indicator how busy I'm currently.
But still I found a few minutes once in a while to have a more detailed look at BlitzMax. I started implementing my Scuba Dive map generation algorithm with BlitzMax which is a nice little exercise to get used to the new language and IDE.
I'm progressing as expected which means steady but slow
Maybe I can show some screenshot with the next post. Let's see...
Later,
Tommy | |
| [Game Dev] New toy to play with | Friday, January 02, 2009, 10:47 PM
One of my christmas presents was a license of BlitzMax. For several years I avoided it like a hot potato for some unknown reason. But recently I was in one of my moods again - you know: fed up with the current tools, looking for some new, shiny tool to play with
As usual my criteria for a satisfying game development environment were the same as they have been for several years now:
- must have OO,
- must not be C++ (I hate .h files and their declaration / definition bullshit, I hate operator overloading, I hate missing a reflection framework),
- must be able to generate an executable with all required libraries and without additional runtime downloads (like Java JRE or .net),
- preferably multi platform (Windows, Mac OS and Linux)
Slick is Java based so people require Java to play games created with it. I've got complaints that people won't download and play SpiderTrap just because it requires Java and is not available as a zip file containing some .exe to double click
And PlayBasic misses OO features (or to be more precise I miss OO features in PlayBasic) and it is not multi platform.
So what about BlitzMax now?
- OO? Yes. It does have classes (named types), knows inheritance, static fields and methods (named globals and functions), instance fields and methods, there is some reflection functionality, there are abstract classes and methods and more stuff. Compared to Java and C# it still misses a lot of OO features but what is there is sufficient enough to comfortably code games in it without missing too much. Check.
- Not C++? Check It's some Basic dialect with a syntax looking like a mixture between Java/C# and Pascal and several other languages.
- Generate executables? Yes, BlitzMax is a full compiler language which can create executables, dlls and modules (add on modules for BlitzMax itself). You can even include media files and other required resource files into the executable using the incbin command! Check!
- Multi platform? Yup. Windows, Mac OS and Linux are all supported. Check.
- Graphics: 2D only, but native OpenGL if you want and DirectX under Windows. The 3D module is going to be released as open source under some LGPL or BSD license! Additional Check!
So there must be some cons, right?
- The price. 80 bucks are 80 bucks and as I have to pay taxes in Germany for a digital download it's pretty close to 80 Euros! Ouch!
- The IDE. I paid additional 15 Euros to get a proper IDE that covers most of my needs (BLIde).
Anyway, I'm giving it a try and currently fiddle around with some game ideas and a nice little framework (Retroremakes framework).
Feel free to contact me if you want to know more - at least I am happy right now
Bye,
Tommy | |
| [Real life] A happy new year! | Friday, January 02, 2009, 10:44 PM
I know I'm one day late. But do you care?
All the best to all of you for 2009!
Cheers,
Tommy | |
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