Now that Cosmo wields this amulet (no doubt excreted by the Zerg queen herself) his all infestor army tactic is sure to finally actually win a game! (Yeah, it’s a cheapo Starcraft 2 thing I bought on ebay and strategically hung around the house until he noticed it)
Not to be outdone, here is Eon-kun inventing a delicious soy sauce soup. Leave him alone for a minute and he always finds a way to make the magic happen.
Before DDR pads, balance boards, and Kinect, we had… this kid:
So I’m sort of working on a new cross-platform game. The basic idea is “local splitscreen/networked multiplayer tank combat with easy touch control that’s fun for me and my kid”.
Basic movement. Ugly as hell but hey, four players!
I spent a lot of time getting really flexible split-screen support in. I can add as many local players as I want. In addition to specifying the window size, I can specify their rotation. Touch controls smartly adjust.
The irrBullet hello example running on an iPad. Man, what is with that floor texture!
Hey, how about real physics for the tank movement? Let’s integrate Bullet (with some wrapper help from irrBullet)
I had a feeling I wasn’t going to end up using it because of speed and networking issues, so this was mostly a for fun side diversion and practice.
Ran IrrBullet’s Hello World example on the iPad and the Nexus One (Android). Decent speeds, especially on iPad.
Plugged it in for the tank physics. The only way I could get reasonable tank-like movement was to use eight “raycast wheels” per tank.
It turned out quite computationally expensive and I could see it was going to take approximately four hundred years of tweaking to get player controls to feel “right”. Screw this.
So I dumped Bullet and decided to just do my usual homegrown cheapo physics. Not as good, but easier to tweak and runs fast. Looking forward to using Bullet in the future for something though.
A crappy test level is created in Max. I use “Point helpers” to mark the position and rotation of spawn points. Easier to see in max than dummies.
I use max’s “render lightmaps to a texture in an intelligent way and apply the texturing to the second map channel automatically” feature.
Tanks can now smoke and blow eachother up.
More progress:
Next up: Turret movement…
Went to the shrine as is the tradition in Japan today. Cosmo caused a shock (well, to my mother-in-law at least) by asserting his skepticism.
He tearfully refused to give a coin and pray because:
“magic is pretend, and I don’t want to”.
I never do, but I don’t make a deal out of it. This is something he felt strongly about this year for some reason and, well, I’m proud of him for thinking it through and making a stand about something important to him.
Took me a lot longer.
It’s true. Things don’t always go the way we planned. A wave of horrified shock may wash over your body as happened to Cosmo in this picture. (How do cone mechanics work?!)
When it comes to buying and installing Android apps this is especially true.
I’ve been collecting tips and tricks that I can give to users having install problems (99% of the Android tech support email I get is “It won’t install”, before the game has even run) and I figured posting them would be a good idea.
The first line of defense – more space:
If that fails and you have Android 2.2 or newer:
Using Cyanogen?
Getting the infamous “error -18”?
If you still can’t get your new RTsoft game to install (or run, or any other reason, for that matter) properly:
Note about install problems:
The download and install process is 100% handled by Google and the Android OS – install errors occur before the game is actually run – unfortunately this isn’t something we can fix on our side other than possibly making the initial download smaller.
Don’t give up
If Dink Smallwood HD, Dungeon Scroll, or Mind Wall refuses to install, please try again after updating to the new Android Market, it seems to have fixed some issues. New Android OS updates may also help.