OddMods Returns

With the availability of UT4 and its extremely nice editor, I'm happy to announce OddMods returning to the scene with our first map for UT4 - BlockFort64.

This is a remake of DM-Odd-BlockFort64 from our Unreal Tournament 2004 modding days, and I'm happy to say that many of the old team members are returning for this iteration, and for this map specifically. We're doing this one first because it's relatively simple, so we can pick up the new tools along the way, and because it was a lot of fun and used to be played on a few fairly popular servers back in the day. It is, of course, in the very early stages of development - basically just some BSP and placeholder textures - but I was so excited I couldn't wait to post about it.

BlockFort64 is, of course, a port of the BlockFort map from Mario Kart 64. The original project is here.

Ice Tank update!

Finally had a minute to sit down with this project again, and we've got a controllable player, collisions, a moving camera and a new level format! Up next: level editor, because the new format used 4-bit sequences for values, and that makes manual creation require bit shifts.

Picture is of level data (with a huge contrast boost) and the level in-game.

More ouya

Man, the folks down at ouya sure know how to make development fun. I'm coming to you this time with a level loader for a small offshoot project; this code is taking the graphic on the right, a 5x5 bitmap, and using its color channels contents to build a level from the tileset on the left (result is on the television).  With levels stored as small pngs, sending them over a network should be easy..and so should making s level editor.

&Cats on Jupiter

So, sideprojects. It's been a while. I got my Ouya the other week, and I was already looking into projects for it. The Ouya is great because it's easy to develop for; it's Android! It's not super powerful, it's not super cutting-edge, but it is super fun. And it works great with the AndEngine, which is basically what I would've written if I'd thought I'd have the time to write a whole engine for the game. And since it's about as well documented as something I might write myself, I'm also using this awesome book to get up to speed. So far? Got a cat walking around. Not much, but I've only put a few hours into it.

So, cats? Jupiter? What's all this?

The development Ouya Tile

Comic Hill

My brother, Nick Smith, is developing a very, very cool web application for reinventing the way you read web comics, Comic Hill. While only in its early stages now, the application already shows great potential and has been supported by several web comic artists. The idea is to bring together all of the web comics you read into one place, and have all of the updates presented seamlessly instead of meandering around the internet trying to find your place in the comic so you can continue reading. Even with only 4 comics on it right now, it is very convenient, and I've been using it a lot myself.

But I'm not here to boast about how awesome my brother is, even if that is completely true. I've been discussing with him a mobile version of Comic Hill, and I am going to begin working on it with him shortly. He's build his application on the Play! framework, which, from what I've read, is an agile alternative to Java webapp containers like Tomcat, and he says most of the functionality already works as a RESTful web service, so moving it to an Android application should be easy.

Oh, I should mention that I no longer have the hardware to develop for the iPhone, so I'm talking about making an Android port only; at some point in the future I may consider moving it to iPhone if I get the opportunity.

Motionwerks

Back when I was at the GDC, I saw a demo of a PC motion controller by Sixense in Left 4 Dead 2, and playing around with it, it was awesome; it was way better than other motion controls on the market, including the just-announced PS Move (which was on display there as well). Well, I saw it on Steam, and that was all I needed to pick up the consumer model, the Hydra by Razer. Key to my decision: the SDK available for it.

It's very nice, from what I've read of it. Don't have the hardware yet, but I've been thinking..what environment should I start playing with this in? The SDK comes as a couple of dlls, which is really nice, and what's nicer is documentation, geared at C++ development. And what engine is better for C++ development than Leadwerks?

So, I'm using the Leadwerks demo right now, coding up a simple environment to use the Sixense controller in. I have a few ideas of what to make, but nothing specific yet..although my friend Leo expressed some interest in working with me on something more formal (more on that later?), so this might go somewhere. Either way, I may be posting more about it.

As for Android development, I haven't forgotten about it. I have a live wallpaper which mostly works, but I want to tweak some things before releasing it (here or on the market) and I'd like to improve the performance of it a bit, too (right now it uses more RAM than I'd like...but I think most of that is because of the extra buffer I have, which is saving a lot of CPU). I do have a solid idea for a mobile game, and I think it could really catch on. More on that later.

Gone Mobile

I've finally upgraded myself to the 21st Century of Telephony with a Droid 3, my pick as the most desirable android-based phone/pocket-sized computer-from-five-years-ago. As it happens, I'm going to be doing some mobile work now, again. I guess I've done a lot of mobile work so far, and honestly I've enjoyed it, so why not?

I'm thinking the first project will bring Dorthu Beats up to speed on a mobile device; the site simply does not work on there as-is. The mobile version will have smaller (and likely different) images to save bandwidth, will suggest not streaming content, and will allow touch-based gestures if possible. Also, different views for different orientations. I'll probably also tweak the way audio is delivered to make it less data-heavy than the normal version (the normal version begins preloading audio before you start it to improve performance, but this is less-than-desirable if you're paying for the data transfer..especially because it will often load songs that you end up not playing at all, and relies on client-side caching to ensure duplicate requests aren't being made).

I'm trying to decide what kind of app I should write for the platform first..I have a lot of ideas, but nothing that's very useful. I'm thinking of trying a custom unlock screen that shows the strings of a bass and unlocks when you fret the right sequence of notes, but that seems impractical...I'd like to do some sort of a gesture-based game, but I don't have much of an idea past that....part of me wants a compiler on my phone, but that's just silly. I donno. We'll see where it goes.