So I spent a few hours this evening, porting VectorStorm over onto the iPhone. And what was the first thing I ported across? Why, Vector Physics, of course (as it was really the only thing I have that uses a pointing interface; everything else uses a gamepad of some sort).
It runs acceptably on a real iPhone; probably holding about 20-30fps in a normal scene (though ropes start hurting performance rather noticably). No, this isn’t in the app store at the moment, but I reckon I might polish it up eventually and release it. And it’s pretty awesome to see something like this running on a mobile phone, IMHO. 
Just a quick extra shot today; this is a new, quite simple MMORPG Tycoon starting area (it’s zoned for adventurers of level 1 through 3). This particular starting area has 75 monsters in it, and therefore supports having up to 225 players in the region simultaneously. This is great for a starting area, especially in the very early game, when you might not want to spend your time managing and financing the upkeep for multiple regions.
You can also see the quick “mountains” graphics around the borders of the region, which form impassible barriers to divide regions. Adventurers cannot cross these mountains, unless you place crossings.
Note that these mountainous barriers only exist at the edge of the world (that is, at the junction between zoned regions and unzoned ones, as in this shot), and between regions of different level zones, but not between regions with matching levels. By default now, quests send players to fight monsters within the same region as the quest-giver (previously they sent players into adjacent regions).. but the player will now be able to place “epic quests”, to send players from one region to another.
Even though the number of adventurers in a region has increased, sending adventurers around into new regions will be important, not just for managing server load, but also to keep the adventurers interested; they’ll become bored if they end up hanging around in one region for too long. Especially if they end up having to grind combats, in order to gain enough levels to go explore a new area.
I had to add a little extra note.. one of my favourite entries in the TIGSource Retro Demake competition is this demake of Sly Cooper into an LCD “Game & Watch”-style game: Thieving Raccoon.
I love how Shoo has captured the core gameplay of Sly Cooper, and rendered it down into such a minimal form. If you liked Sly Cooper, you owe it to yourself to go have a look and a smile. No download required, it’s Flash!
Well, it’s happened again, TIGSource is hosting another interesting competition. Folks here will remember that I started MMORPG Tycoon as an entry for their last competition, the “Procedural Generation” competition.
This new competition is “Bootleg Demakes”; basically selecting a game and creating a bootleg version of it for older hardware. Full details and rules are here. I’ve had a few fun ideas for it, but I don’t think I’ll actually be entering this one; there’s too much stuff to do on MMORPG Tycoon, and I already took one break from MMORPG Tycoon, to make “Robot Finds Ice Cream”. I don’t think I could justify taking another big break. But there’s a lot of exciting stuff happening in this contest.
My vector-loving heart is absolutely in love with VipeÜt (a demake of WipeOut, to the Vectrex console). I especially love that it’s simulating the bright spots where the vector hardware’s display gun accelerates. Someday I’ll add that sort of fine touch to VectorStorm.
Anyhow, back on the topic of MMORPG Tycoon, there’s been a lot of progress recently, but there’s still a long way to go before I reach 1.1! I’ve got a thread with progress reports running over on the forums. Check it out, if you’re interested in how stuff is moving along.
After some discussion over on the forums, I’ve finally implemented the new road placement system for version 1.1. Roads now pass through “Road Nodes”, which serve as anchors for splines. Each “road node” can have up to four roads attached to it. This means that in 1.1, you’ll be able to have nicely curved roads and branching roads, and it’s easy to specify exactly the path that roads should travel, instead of always being approximately straight lines between destinations.
There’s still a little work to be done in the interface (the road node graphics need to change their scale based upon the current zoom level, so they’re always visible but not obtrusive, adventurers need to actually use the nodes, etc).. but placement is working in my development branch, and I’m pretty happy with the behaviour.
For the curious, in this screenshot, there are six road nodes. Though I could have done it with just five. And those green dots are monsters (we’re zoomed too far out to see more detail than just dots)
For those who’ve been bitten by the “Preference value too high!” crash, I’ve finally found the cause of that, and have uploaded a fixed version of MMORPG Tycoon; it’s 1.0.16, available from the link in the sidebar.
You may need to delete your old Data/Preferences/MMORPG.prefs file, if you still have trouble with the new version.
So I see that Geometry Wars 2 has been released on XBox Live Arcade. I kind of have to acknowledge it as it’s one of the few other glowy vector graphic games out there right now. And wow, they’ve really nailed the glowy vector thing in a big way.
Granted, in this revision they’re a bit less vector than they’ve appeared to be in the past; lots of things have been added which are obviously textures and there are plenty of curved lines (which usually aren’t present in old-school vector graphic games), but the overall look is still very nice.
So in reaction to Geometry Wars 2’s beautiful glows, I’ve been revisiting the glow shader used by VectorStorm games. Here’s a shot of the current map screen in the in-development MMORPG Tycoon 1.1, using my updated glow shader. For those who’ve played MMORPG Tycoon, you’ll notice a few interface niceties already; textual level ranges have vanished at this sort of zoom level and in fact, similarly-zoned regions are being drawn as just one larger region, when we’re zoomed this far out. Also, there’s a cute little compass rose in the northwest corner of the map. But really, this is showing off the new, brighter, softer, and much more accurate VectorStorm glow shader. I’m pretty pleased with it.
And it doesn’t even cost much more GPU time. In fact, the optimisations I made to the code probably actually make it cheaper, on most video cards. (Although I’ll confess that I haven’t actually profiled it)
With bare minutes to spare, I’ve finished Robot Finds Ice Cream! Go grab it from the sidebar.
I’m vaguely pleased with how it came out, though I do wish I’d had more time to spend with it. You’ll notice that it feels a little more rushed than the previous GiaW games; that shows up mostly in the inconsistant art style, its lack of a main menu, and the rather small number of levels (I’d have been happier if there were about fifteen of them). But hey, what do you want for something that’s free and both designed and implemented in under a week?
And now I’m going to post this, before the clock turns over to midnight. Hope you all enjoy!
I’ve added a simple set of forums to the site; logins are shared between this blog and the forum.
Casual comments here on the blog still only require an e-mail address, but you’ll have to actually create an account to post to the forums. Sorry about that; it’s a requirement of the forum software I’m using.
Anyhow, I’m closing off comments to the static game pages to keep them from becoming any more ridiculously lengthy, so we can have some proper threaded discussions now, and hopefully make those static pages load a little faster.
Check out the new forums. If you’re having trouble with a VectorStorm game, or want to make comments or suggestions, or just make idle chatter with like-minded individuals, then this is the new place to do it!
So the latest TIGSource competition has finally been unveiled: Procedural Content Generation. The competition starts today (or yesterday, depending on which part of the world you’re in), and finishes in four weeks time; on June 2nd.
I’ve never entered one of the TIGSource competitions before, as I usually found out about them when people started announcing the winners of competitions which had just finished, but I managed to catch this one in time, and I’m entering it. So I guess this is the start of my very first Game-in-Four-Weeks.
I think I’m going to be implementing my as-yet-unnamed MMORPG concept, which I mentioned a week or two ago. Really, four weeks feels like an eternity.. so I’m going to keep myself productive by trying to get a basic gameplay proof of concept up and running in the first week, just as though it was a regular “Game in a Week” project, and then spend the rest of the time on improvements and tutorials and polishing and suchlike. Wish me luck!
So I spent a few hours this evening, porting VectorStorm over onto the iPhone. And what was the first thing I ported across? Why, Vector Physics, of course (as it was really the only thing I have that uses a pointing interface; everything else uses a gamepad of some sort).
