Bad luck

Disk crashed, must spend time fixing computer instead of coding game :(

Wizznic! for Nokia N900/Maemo5

Some awesome person, Aapo Rantalainen have worked on Wizznic! And ported
it to the Maemo5 platform, and in particular, the N900 phone. This looks really
promising, and there's even touchscreen support there, which will be really sweet
when I complete my work on making the whole UI pointer-aware :D

The code from Aapo will be merged into the Wizznic! master branch as soon as I
complete the UI work. :)

Here's the announcement.

The code is here, I think it was done on windows since the patches are a bit off,
which means a some manual labour for me, but never the less, this is an amazing piece of work which is greatly appreciated :)

And last and most awesome, a video of the thing running! :)

More Wizznic :P

Been hacking a bit more on Wizznic, finding the "angle of least change" in order
to turn the text/arrow keys based menus into something that also works with a mouse-pointer..
I made a nasty hack that I quite like, and that I suggest you think about twice before doing..
Every time I call my "txtWrite" function, that function will now update an internal variable containing the "box" size of the text..
So, right after a call to txtWrite, if I do getTxtBox, I get a pointer to this rectangle.
Thus:
txtWrite("Some text", some, position);
if ( isBoxClicked( getTxtBox() ) ) { //Box was clicked }

Hehe..
In other news, I was briefly hospitalized this thursday, and thus, wasted a weekend of coding, so wizznic release date is pushed a week, meaning there's also a slim chance my gfx guy have the time he needs to finish another theme :)

Wizznic, Content and the big 1.0.

qubodup of freegamer asked me about my graphics guy, so I thought I'd share a bit of that history and use that as an excuse for not being productive ;)

As the intro should show (the third credit), ViperMD did a great deal of graphics work on 0.9.9 release of wizznic, I met VMD at a LAN around 2000 and I consider him to be one of my close friends. He has a talent for computer graphics, both in 2D and 3D, and is an avid gamer. I have spend fair amounts of time hacking on wizznic on his couch, for whatever reason, we never talked about working on the project together.. So for the 0.9.9 release I suggested that we collaborate, admitting my shortcomings as an artist :) VMD did the Thor theme, which is going to be the default Wizznic theme, however, if I can convince him, Thor is not the last eyecandy you will be seeing from VMD, he have also shown interest in Wizznic3D, so expect some sweet graphics there ;)

VMD did 95%o of the work on Thor, with some (annoying, I'm certain) comments and input from me, Thor is his very first contribution to computer-games, and even without taking the technical limitations and my confusing and lacking leadership into account, it is a sweet piece of work if I have to say (which, obviously, I do, so I did).

We also worked together on condensing the ~80 existing levels down to 40 levels, which were divided into two packs. I hope this process increased the overall quality of the puzzles, but only time can tell. Of course I plan to add more levels in the future (New packs, and only slight adjustments/reordering of the existing ones).

The process of sorting the puzzles was interesting.. None of us had any real idea of how difficult individual puzzles were, so we did the following:

1. Rendered a screenshot of each level, and put those on a network share.
2. We now had 80 screenshots, but I wanted to mature the quality of the puzzles, and decided to only include 40 puzzles, divided into 2 packs of 20. So our first task was easy, we made a "Delete me" directory, and were allowed to choose the 20 levels that we thought looked "ugly" and delete them.
3. Now, remaining was 40 unsorted puzzles (with screenshots).
4. We created two directories there, "Easy" and "Hard", for "Pack 0" and "Pack 1".
5. We then inspected the level files visually to try to identify their difficulty, and then move their files into either one, this meant we could both work on the same task at the same time.
6. Once we had 2 dirs with 20 files in each, we made 4 subdirs in both of them,
7. we then worked on each our dir, and tried to identify the easist, medium-easy, medium-hard and hardest puzzles, and put them in their directories, this process was easier since it was now only 20 files to be sorted.
8. Finally, 20 directories were made inside both "easy" and "hard", the idea here was to go through the 4 subdirs, having the first "map" logically to "1,2,3,4" and the second to "5,6,7,8" and so on, this way, we would only have to worry about sorting a chunk of 4 levels at a time, which is a lot easier than to inspect 20 levels as a whole.

If that sounded confusing, don't worry, I haven't found a nice way of explaining it yet, which lead to some misunderstandings, but in the end it was a pretty easy task, and a method for sorting puzzles that I will be using again in the future, hopefully combined with the statistics I gather (from people who chose tho help me by enabling stats-upload in wizznic).

Deadline for Wizznic 1.0-rc is 29'th of January this year. That means I've got 4 weekends to work on it (I don't have much time during the week, and easily run out of steam..).
Todo for 1.0:
Updating all files to the new level format.
Optional "Unsolvable", "Out of Time" and "Reset level?" graphics (and make those for Thor).
One more theme (if VMD feels up for it), sound theme for Thor.

Once these features are completed, 1.0 is released, it's done.
Newer versions only be bugfixes and new content.

By the way, my 3D engine that I'll use for Wizznic3D. VMD modelled and textured the spaceship.


Lot's of work needed on that one..

More Wizznic! hacking! :D

I've been giving Wizznic some attention lately, and gotten some nice things done, I feel sharp :)
I added a little cursor inside the cursor to give the user a better feel of where the actual cursor is, it feels right :)
I fixed a long standing bug that made the cursor sometimes "jump" around when moving a brick with a brick on top of it, this happened because I have this lock mechanism, but I forgot to "unlock" the bricks after un-grabbing them :P

I also rearranged the way levels load graphics, walls are one part, "brick die" animations is one part, and the rest of the tiles are one part. This means that for example, die-animations are no longer dependant on the name of the tileset, walls are no longer dependant on the name of the tileset. This makes it possible to have several wall-sets in (or tile-sets, or die-animations or any combination hereof) in a theme.

I also solved an issue that have annoyed me for quite a while, that the "magnet/glue and one-way only" tiles were not treated as walls, even though they are basically that.. Now they are, which makes the wall-tile-selection a lot prettier to look at visually, they are also overlaid on top of the walls, making reuse easier (but optional).

I also noticed that some players had trouble detecting (yes, people are machines) the edges of the walls, making them believe that sometimes they were able to move bricks, even though there were a wall there, other times they would not move bricks to obvious places, because they believed that there was a wall (when, in fact, there was none). I have partly solved this by making the edges of the walls a little brighter. In addition, I am thinking about adding some more details to the inside of the wall tiles, tough at this moment I don't know what it would be, maybe my graphics guy have an idea and will do this? :D

And here's a little video showing those new cool things, the code is not on github yet, I still need to convert all the levels..

Wizznic! Touchscreens!

So, I hacked around Wizznic a bit last night and got some pretty decent mouse/touchscreen support going, this is pretty usefull on wiz, and if there's a touchscreen on the PSP I could imagine it'd be nice there too..

Anyway, it also works on PC.. I', not done with this yet though, if you wanna try it, you'll have to compile the source from github.