Did you take a look at the games with the highest staff ratings? Rolly the Purple Ball, Ethereal Peace and Chode?
The power is there, just nobody's pushed the kit to its limits yet. It can support maps with millions of animated tiles at full speed (1 frame per monitor refresh or more).
That's odd because it runs at over 100 FPS on my P2 450MHz system. I have found in the past, however, that having the right video drivers is very important -- make sure your video card drivers are up to date and support DirectX. BTW, if you want an exact FPS number, there is an option to turn that display of FPS on. Also, If you were playing ROBOTWARS, I don't recommend basing your judgement of the FPS on that game. Try Rolly the Purple Ball. It runs at a respectable speed.
It's open source. It can export to XML. It would be easy to create a program that exports selected pieces of data (or all of it) to practically any format you like. That could be done as a stand-alone program or even as a VBScript that runs in the IDE.
Hopefully the small number of games and the 2 rating systems on the projects listing page alleviates that problem. Each project has an admin and a user rating.
Oh, and in reply to the rest of your comment, the kit doesn't support a truly isometric view, but the included Wizard sample game does demonstrate a simulated kinda-isometric view. Rather than effectively offsetting the camera downwards and to one side, it only offsets it downwards. That means you can walk behind walls when your sprite is above (but partially overlapping) them on the screeen, but everything is still aligned to vertical and horizontal lines. You'll also have a problem if your sprite is tall enough to need to be in front of a particular graphic sometimes and behind it at others. (IE, walking in front of or behind the same piece of a tree trunk is not possible based purely on the position of the sprite).
At least there are some ways to kind of kludge a semi-isometric view. But it's not quite as helpful as a true isometric engine would be. Hopefully the parallax scrolling multiple layer support makes up for part of that defficiency.
Version 1.4.0 introduces support for larger graphics. So, while most of the existing games use small sprites, the new version supports sprites and tiles up to 128x128 pixels. Even though the maximum size prior to version 1.4.0 was 64x64, many of the games didn't make graphics that large. Hopefully 128x128 will invite the larger graphics and make more people happy with graphic sizes in general. The new version also introduces support for multiple resolutions. Previously, all games were 640x480, but now they can run in 320x240, 640x480, 800x600 or 1024x768.
I am glad to hear that because I think the physics model is where the most effort was put in. Sprites don't just have a single hot spot; they check all 4 corners to determine whether they are running into a solid. Sprites that follow paths don't have a pre-set exact path (although that's an option), rather they try to follow the path by altering their current velocity (indirectly) just like the player has to do. And if the kit itself doesn't give you enough control, you can set the sprite type to "scripted" and write your own script to define exactly how you want it to move.
I (as the author) have long been excited about the idea of maybe just porting the runtime engine to another platform, since the runtime engine is a small percentage of the total project, and is the more important piece. Then you would at least be able to play the games accross platforms if not design them on any platform. I would probably have to drop VBScript support for the cross-platform version of the runtime, though, unless someone has implemented VBScript for other platforms.
Unfortunately I have few of the skills and little time to take on such a project (I haven't done much Linux/Unix programming). I'd be happy to support whoever would be interested in taking it on, though.
Re:Bogus Unsubscribe addresses...
on
FTC vs Spammers
·
· Score: 1
Simply marking messages as spam doesn't address all the problems associated with spam. Namely bandwidth problems. The emails are still wasting server cycles, network bandwidth, storage space and, yes, even sender's time which could be better spent doing something more productive. Hopefully requiring such a mark would be the kiss of death for spam, though, with the spammers realizing it would be pointless. But that would require that everyone use a spam filter to make sure spamming is pointless. Not sure that the majority of people have filters, or would add them even if they could be perfect.
It's not about luck, it's about *contact*. About 5% of the programmers I know are female, and about 10% of the programmers I work with are about my age. So that's what, 0.5% of the people I work with being female and my age? Unfortunately, I don't work with 200 people so that doesn't get up to a whole person there;)
The way I see it, multi-processor systems need to become more commonplace in the PC world. I don't know why they haven't. Is it a cost issue? My assumption is that's how the G4 performs so well, based on the fact that the multi-threading is what gave the program its edge.
He (the defense) says it was intended simply to allow playing of DVDs under Linux. Seems quite reasonable. How can he be faulted for this? Perhaps they would have preferred that he also build in the same security mechanisms as other DVD players, but these, of course, would be easily defeated, assuming the code is open source. I guess I don't see a lot of details in the article, or I'm missing some of it. Would the prosecution suggest that any open source DVD player is illegal?
For one thing, if gravity was instananeous it could conceivably be used to send information anywhere in the universe with zero ping time. Imagine a gravity-wave wireless link that would enable us to communicate with civilizations in other galaxies. Imagine playing Q3 with an alien on a planet in M3 and still having a 20ms ping.
... unless through some application of uncertainly-like principles it turns out that it takes longer to create a detectable gravity signal to a farther distance. For instance, if you're 1 light year away from me, maybe it takes 1 year for me to move the moon far enough out of position that you possibly could sense any information from that motion at that distance. After all, I don't know of any method to make informational "gravity waves" other than moving a lot of matter (or, as recently discovered from another post, a *lot* of photons, which can in turn only travel at the speed of light). There must be some minimum displacement that would be detectable at a certain distance. And I suspect that it could relate to the speed of light. I'm not saying I believe that gravity travels faster than light, just suggesting that this argument might not be useful in determining how fast gravity travels.
I wonder if the Scrolling Game Development Kit will ever make it on to one of these CDs. Do they regularly scour SourceForge for highly active windows projects?
D'oh... you now see me unsuccessfully scrambling for any way to convince you that this post was anything but an invitation or "ad" to visit the site -- and shameless self-promotion. But really -- it's on topic!... see? unsuccessful;)... perhaps because that's exactly what it is. Oh well.
Linux, of course, will still be around and install fine, but no one will care, because they get an extra 7 updates per second playing the Windows version of Quake 82, so it will still be considered a 'toy' OS.
Not to mention as many Kernel updates per second due to the neuro-enhanced kernel developers and the massive neuro-integrated source code control system networking the brains of 2^13 Slashdot geeks directly to the kernel.
It let you create simple games like 2600 Pitfall clones and the like.
Dang, I never heard of that, and my first computer was an Apple ][ compatible! Sounds like the dream kit I wished I had the whole time I was "growing up" -- big platform games are my favorite and the only one I knew of was Aztec. That would have been a dream come true. As it is I just ended up creating my own, now that computers are powerful enough to do that more easily:) But this one's on a PC instead of an Apple. (http://gamedev.sourceforge.net).
Shoot, I'll be kicking myself for a long time about not being the among the first to post a response to this article. There are many good construction kits and games (created with the kits) still coming out today. I finished creating a kit in 2000 and have been upgrading it to the present day -- currently on version 1.3.1. The most popular program I'm aware of is Game Maker by Mark Overmars. It's free and you're free to distribute your games created in it. My own program is the Scrolling Game Development Kit. It's not only free, but open source / GPL. The kits are out there and a few people are using them, but I bet they could be a lot more popular -- I just don't know how. As computers get faster and cooler, kits are getting easier to make and use and can do more interesting things. I wish I had had the Scrolling Game Development Kit when I was growing up:-).
I don't get what's with all the ideas of putting the password in a safe? How is putting the password in a safe and deciding who knows the combination to the safe different than simply deciding who knows the password?
Heh, heh... the phrase "You're gonna be free whether you like it or not!" comes to mind:-)
If we're taking sides, I'm with GPL, BTW -- authors need *some* license to release to that will give them some protection, and GPL is the most free license that offers some assurance to the author that their work is safeguarded from various "evil" entities:-). Without GPL, so much software would continue to be closed source and inaccessible. At least GPL is *something* to encourage more open source.
The point is, without GPL, you'd have more closed source non-free software, not more public domain software.
(Hey, I know this is all off-topic, but if you're reading this thinking about that, you've been following an off topic thread down too many levels to be moderating things down for being off-topic;-) )
Slashdot Mirror
Did you take a look at the games with the highest staff ratings? Rolly the Purple Ball, Ethereal Peace and Chode?
The power is there, just nobody's pushed the kit to its limits yet. It can support maps with millions of animated tiles at full speed (1 frame per monitor refresh or more).
That's odd because it runs at over 100 FPS on my P2 450MHz system. I have found in the past, however, that having the right video drivers is very important -- make sure your video card drivers are up to date and support DirectX. BTW, if you want an exact FPS number, there is an option to turn that display of FPS on. Also, If you were playing ROBOTWARS, I don't recommend basing your judgement of the FPS on that game. Try Rolly the Purple Ball. It runs at a respectable speed.
It's open source. It can export to XML. It would be easy to create a program that exports selected pieces of data (or all of it) to practically any format you like. That could be done as a stand-alone program or even as a VBScript that runs in the IDE.
Hopefully the small number of games and the 2 rating systems on the projects listing page alleviates that problem. Each project has an admin and a user rating.
Oh, and in reply to the rest of your comment, the kit doesn't support a truly isometric view, but the included Wizard sample game does demonstrate a simulated kinda-isometric view. Rather than effectively offsetting the camera downwards and to one side, it only offsets it downwards. That means you can walk behind walls when your sprite is above (but partially overlapping) them on the screeen, but everything is still aligned to vertical and horizontal lines. You'll also have a problem if your sprite is tall enough to need to be in front of a particular graphic sometimes and behind it at others. (IE, walking in front of or behind the same piece of a tree trunk is not possible based purely on the position of the sprite).
At least there are some ways to kind of kludge a semi-isometric view. But it's not quite as helpful as a true isometric engine would be. Hopefully the parallax scrolling multiple layer support makes up for part of that defficiency.
Version 1.4.0 introduces support for larger graphics. So, while most of the existing games use small sprites, the new version supports sprites and tiles up to 128x128 pixels. Even though the maximum size prior to version 1.4.0 was 64x64, many of the games didn't make graphics that large. Hopefully 128x128 will invite the larger graphics and make more people happy with graphic sizes in general. The new version also introduces support for multiple resolutions. Previously, all games were 640x480, but now they can run in 320x240, 640x480, 800x600 or 1024x768.
I am glad to hear that because I think the physics model is where the most effort was put in. Sprites don't just have a single hot spot; they check all 4 corners to determine whether they are running into a solid. Sprites that follow paths don't have a pre-set exact path (although that's an option), rather they try to follow the path by altering their current velocity (indirectly) just like the player has to do. And if the kit itself doesn't give you enough control, you can set the sprite type to "scripted" and write your own script to define exactly how you want it to move.
I (as the author) have long been excited about the idea of maybe just porting the runtime engine to another platform, since the runtime engine is a small percentage of the total project, and is the more important piece. Then you would at least be able to play the games accross platforms if not design them on any platform. I would probably have to drop VBScript support for the cross-platform version of the runtime, though, unless someone has implemented VBScript for other platforms.
Unfortunately I have few of the skills and little time to take on such a project (I haven't done much Linux/Unix programming). I'd be happy to support whoever would be interested in taking it on, though.
Simply marking messages as spam doesn't address all the problems associated with spam. Namely bandwidth problems. The emails are still wasting server cycles, network bandwidth, storage space and, yes, even sender's time which could be better spent doing something more productive. Hopefully requiring such a mark would be the kiss of death for spam, though, with the spammers realizing it would be pointless. But that would require that everyone use a spam filter to make sure spamming is pointless. Not sure that the majority of people have filters, or would add them even if they could be perfect.
It's been mentioned a couple of times, but not with enough emphasis. http://www.nasa.gov/ has sub-sections for kids and students.
But I think their multimedia section is the best -- a treat for all ages. The pictures of the day are always cool.
Did you totally miss the modifier "context-sensitive"? That means it takes the context into account and shouldn't rule out chicken breast.
Actually, I believe (2^32)^32 != 2^64
2^64 = 2^(32*2) = 2^32 * 2^32 = (2^32)^2
... but not (2^32)^32
It's not about luck, it's about *contact*. About 5% of the programmers I know are female, and about 10% of the programmers I work with are about my age. So that's what, 0.5% of the people I work with being female and my age? Unfortunately, I don't work with 200 people so that doesn't get up to a whole person there ;)
The way I see it, multi-processor systems need to become more commonplace in the PC world. I don't know why they haven't. Is it a cost issue? My assumption is that's how the G4 performs so well, based on the fact that the multi-threading is what gave the program its edge.
He (the defense) says it was intended simply to allow playing of DVDs under Linux. Seems quite reasonable. How can he be faulted for this? Perhaps they would have preferred that he also build in the same security mechanisms as other DVD players, but these, of course, would be easily defeated, assuming the code is open source. I guess I don't see a lot of details in the article, or I'm missing some of it. Would the prosecution suggest that any open source DVD player is illegal?
I wonder if the Scrolling Game Development Kit will ever make it on to one of these CDs. Do they regularly scour SourceForge for highly active windows projects?
... see? unsuccessful ;) ... perhaps because that's exactly what it is. Oh well.
D'oh... you now see me unsuccessfully scrambling for any way to convince you that this post was anything but an invitation or "ad" to visit the site -- and shameless self-promotion. But really -- it's on topic!
Does your project by any chance resemble this CueCat decoder?
Not to mention as many Kernel updates per second due to the neuro-enhanced kernel developers and the massive neuro-integrated source code control system networking the brains of 2^13 Slashdot geeks directly to the kernel.
MSDN content is freely available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/ is it not?
(http://gamedev.sourceforge.net).
Shoot, I'll be kicking myself for a long time about not being the among the first to post a response to this article. There are many good construction kits and games (created with the kits) still coming out today. I finished creating a kit in 2000 and have been upgrading it to the present day -- currently on version 1.3.1. The most popular program I'm aware of is Game Maker by Mark Overmars. It's free and you're free to distribute your games created in it. My own program is the Scrolling Game Development Kit. It's not only free, but open source / GPL. The kits are out there and a few people are using them, but I bet they could be a lot more popular -- I just don't know how. As computers get faster and cooler, kits are getting easier to make and use and can do more interesting things. I wish I had had the Scrolling Game Development Kit when I was growing up :-).
I don't get what's with all the ideas of putting the password in a safe? How is putting the password in a safe and deciding who knows the combination to the safe different than simply deciding who knows the password?
IIRC, a fully packed DVD can hold 17 GB. Unless this new media can hold more than 300 GB I don't think it can hold the contents of 20 packed DVDs.
Heh, heh... the phrase "You're gonna be free whether you like it or not!" comes to mind :-)
:-). Without GPL, so much software would continue to be closed source and inaccessible. At least GPL is *something* to encourage more open source.
;-) )
If we're taking sides, I'm with GPL, BTW -- authors need *some* license to release to that will give them some protection, and GPL is the most free license that offers some assurance to the author that their work is safeguarded from various "evil" entities
The point is, without GPL, you'd have more closed source non-free software, not more public domain software.
(Hey, I know this is all off-topic, but if you're reading this thinking about that, you've been following an off topic thread down too many levels to be moderating things down for being off-topic