Browsing Date Archive: 2007 April

Hello and welcome to the third edition of the “Carnival of Video Game Bloggers”. This month’s edition is being guest hosted here at the Sodaware blog, the blog of an indie developer. If this is your first time here, why not check out a list of the best articles that have been written?

Regardless of whether you’re new to the site or a regular reader, you’re sure to find something great to read in this feature packed carnival, so let’s get started!

Welcome to super fun carnival adventure!

You stand at the entrance to what appears to be a traveling carnival. A sign above the gate reads “The Carnival of Video Game Bloggers”, which strikes you as somewhat odd. You hear a strange tune in the distance, and your senses are almost overwhelmed by the barrage of lights and lasers. You can go north.

> Go North

You are greeted by a shady looking gentleman wearing a long black robe and a top hat. On closer inspection you see his nametag, but before you can say anything he introduces himself.

“I am James Newton, the Grand Master of this Carnival. We gather the finest game bloggers from around the World and force them to write articles until their fingers fall off! Mwuahahaha!”

After a few minutes of evil laughs, he clears his throat.

“Sorry about that old bean, just a silly little joke I like to play. Please look around and talk to these fine folks, as they have many pearls of wisdom to share with you. Before you go, please read ‘My Personal Journey of Dreams‘.”

He hands you the book, but before you can thank him he lets out a blood-curdling cry of “WA-HA” and disappears in a cloud of red and purple smoke. How very strange. You can go west, east and south.

> Go South

You cannot escape the carnival!

> Go West

Life is peaceful there.

As you look around, you see a booth containing a gallery of paintings that seem to move. The sign “Fantendo” hangs at the top, and as you stare at the paintings you are approached by Jordan Bieber.

“Wii Want Wiimakes” he says, waving what appears to be a white remote around. You step back in case it is some form of magic wand.

“The Wii is a powerful system” he continues “and many great GameCube games would work even better with the advanced controls that the Wii provides”. He motions towards some of the paintings, which have titles such as “F Zero GX”, “Beyond Good & Evil” and “Pikmin”. As he waves his wand, the pictures appear to react! You should escape before this sorcery affects you too! You can go east or south.

> Go East

Stephen W is manning a stall named “Project Paradox“, which features a game involving throwing hoops over bottles. The hoops appear to get smaller as they approach the bottles, which is somewhat disconcerting.

“Roll up, roll up!” he calls “Win a great prize for that special person! After all, Nothing Says ‘I Love You’ Like an Epic Mount!”

As you peruse the stand, you realise that the mounts are indeed epic. You can go east or south.

> Go South

You are at a food stand named “SharpBrains“, manned by Alvaro Fernandez. There is an array of snacks, ranging from hotdogs to cotton candy and some strange dishes you have never seen before. One of the hotdogs looks like a finger.

“Get your brain food!” cries Alvaro “There’s lots to choose from!”

“This one is named ‘Training the brain with a computer workout program: MindFit‘. Eating this will give you the knowledge of computer games that can train your brain” he moves to the next dish – “Brain Exercise FAQs will give you more knowledge about brain exercises from video games, and will help you strengthen your brain.”

He points at the third dish “And finally, this dish will impart the knowledge of a Brain Essay Contest for High School Students. You should tell everyone about this!”

The food looks delicious, but your appetite seems to have departed since you entered this carnival. You can go north or east.

> Go East

Jimmy Atkinson, caretaker of the Online Education Database, is standing guard in front of a huge black obelisk. The obelisk reaches so high that it appears to touch the moon itself. Strange marks cover the surface, and it seems to gently glow in the darkness.

He whispers to you “This is ‘The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Degrees and Careers‘. It contains an endless amount of knowledge on obtaining a video game degree or career”.

You stand in awe for several minutes, before gathering your thoughts and moving on. You can go west or south.

> Go South

You walk into a bar. OUCH! You shake your head, before walking into what appears to be a small tavern. “Taverns aren’t normally found at carnivals” you think to yourself. As if by magic, the sign above the tavern change to “This is no ordinary carnival”.

Many people are inside, chatting and laughing about all kinds of subjects.

Gene of “1 Life Left” is talking about How to Be Sponsored and detailing how to get your competitive gaming team to attract major technology sponsors and get paid to game.

The mysterious wizard jai from the realm of GAMEBLOGGER sits at a table, summoning small dragons and other mystical creatures. The dragon blows smoke and flame, and scorches the words “GAMEBLOGGER: March 2007” onto the table.

The scholar Ybother from TodaysTen.com is stood on the table at the center of the room, and is singing 10 Fun Things to do in Second Life. People around the table are clapping and cheering at these tales.

You see Viv, the leader of “Cool Moms Rule” in the corner. She appears to be cradling a Faery, and the book “Game Recommendation: Faeries” rests on the table by her side.

The bartender dries a glass, as Mon Macutay from GM Tristan Online: Gaming and MMORPGs talks about Sex in Video Games, and why developers, users and cultures use sexual innuendoes in game design and culture”. The bartender nods in agreement, before beckoning you to drink. You decline. You can go west.

> Go West

Jigsaw hc guards the entrance to “Rants & Reviews“, which appears to be an impossible maze that defies the laws of space and time. You step inside…

The first wall reads “Game Magazines Dying?“. You step forwards, but your body feels as if it is moving back. You turn around to see another wall marked “3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures Review“.

Your pulse quickens, and you look up to see what appear to be stairs. As you look, you feel a strange sensation as gravity appears to shift. You close your eyes, and when you open them again you are walking on the ceiling! The floor has many strange markings on it, but as your vision clears several phrases appear. They read “Tony Hawk Project 8 Review“. “Tetris Evolution Review” and “Desktop Tower Defense Review“.

Panic and confusion set in, and you open your mouth to call for help. No sound escapes, but instead a butterfly emerges. The words “March Xbox Live Arcade Recap and Review” are emblazoned across its wings. It was a very big butterfly.

You feel your vision failing, as all images blend in to each other in a whirlpool of bright colours. You black out.

> Open eyes

You stand at the entrance to what appears to be a travelling carnival, but only blackness remains where there was once light and sound. There is now only a sign that reads “Submit an article for the next carnival using the carnival submission form, and view past and previous editions at the blog carnival index page“.

It’s over. You have escaped the carnival!

The End

That’s it for this issue. I hope you all enjoyed the adventure, and you can subscribe to the RSS feed for many more thrilling tales!

Technorati tags: carnival of video game bloggers, blog carnival.

Even though hard drives are getting bigger and Internet connection speeds are increasing at a dizzying rate, not everyone has access to the latest technology. The smaller you can make your software, the more you increase the amount of people that can play it – thus increasing downloads.

Use the Right Tool for the Right Job

If you’re compressing images, choose the right format for the right job. PNG is a lossless format that is much better at compressing pixel art images than photographs. JPG can leave a lot of “artifacts” on these kinds of images, and is better suited for compressing photos or painted artwork. Choosing the right format not only shrinks the size of your application, but helps to maintain the quality of the final product.

Shrink Executables and Libraries

You can generally shrink you .exe and .dll files by around 50% by using UPX, with no discernible change in performance.

Note: Always compress executables after icons and resources have been added, as adding resources to a compressed executable can result in programs working strangely (or not at all).

» Get UPX

Shrink Images

If you’re using PNG images, pngcrush is an essential application to have installed. It has many different levels of compression available and can generate considerable space savings. Perhaps the most useful feature is the “brute force” option, which will try over 100 different combinations to create the smallest possible image file.

» Get pngcrush

Shrink Music and Audio

Using OGG or OXM for music can generate large savings when compared to raw formats such as WAV and XM. OGG is well suited to sound samples and music, and can make a huge difference if the correct quality settings are chosen. It’s usually best to try a few settings and listen to the results to see which quality to use, as some qualities work better for different kinds of sounds.

OXM is a compressed version of the XM music format, a MIDI like format that uses its own samples. The OXM format compresses the samples using the OGG codec, and can easily shrink a track by 70% or more with virtually no audible differences.

OggEnc is a command line tool for encoding OGG files, whereas OggDrop is a GUI application that supports drag and drop. OggMod is a tool for compressing XM files into OXM.

» Get OggEnc / OggDrop | OggMod

Pack Your Data

If your game uses any kind of custom data definitions, such as text or xml level definitions, you can generate extra savings by compressing them. There are many different compression algorithms, and some are more suited than others. Run Length Encoding (RLE) works well for data that has large areas of sequential data values, but isn’t as effective for other formats such as XML. There are plenty of freely available compression libraries, and including zlib and unrar, and most languages have a wealth of examples to look at.

Automate the Process

Manually compressing all of your media can be a slow and tedious process, and can generally be left until the game’s release. At the simplest level, you can place all of the commands into a Windows batch file and run it once you’ve compiled your software. Other options include using build software, which is covered in more detail in the recent build tools article.

Every issue we look at what changes have been made, what games are new and how the progress on other projects is going.

A lot has happened over the last few weeks, and although it was mostly behind the scenes there are still some exciting new features to talk about.

New Site Features

New Games Rating System – All of the games on the main site can now be given a rating with some fancy new stars. Let the World know what your favourite games are, and help make Sodaware a better place.

Tell a Friend Feature – Want to share the fun with a friend? The new “Tell a Friend” feature makes it easy! Simply fill out email addresses and names, and we’ll do the rest. Don’t worry, your details aren’t used for anything else and aren’t stored, so you won’t be signed up to any newsletters.

Of course, you’re more than welcome to sign up to the Sodaware newsletter, which is published every two weeks and contains news and information about upcoming games.

New Games

The following games have been added since the last update:

Battles of Norghan – A deep and addictive turns-based strategy game that will keep your entertained for hours.

Little Soldiers – A fun puzzle game in which you guide your tiny soldiers to the goal using their skills to overcome obstacles.

Invadazoid – An original and entertaining mix of Space Invaders and Breakout.

Eets – A bright and colourful puzzle game with some of the craziest levels and objects you’ll see!

Cactus Bruce – A fun and amusing puzzle game featuring a pirate cactus.

All of these games have free demos, so you can try them out totally risk-free.

New Tools

The very first version of BlitzBuild was released on the 9th of April 2007, and you can download it from the BlitzBuild project page. It’s currently at version 0.1, but it carries out most standard functions. Updates on new releases will be published on the blog, so subscribe to the RSS feed to stay in the know. You can probably expect an update within the next few weeks once bug reports start coming in, and the 0.2 release should arrive at the end of April. 

Next Issue

Next issue is very special, as the Carnival of Video Game Bloggers is dropping by! If you want to submit an article to be featured, please use the carnival’s submission page, and make sure you drop in to see what’s on show. There have already been some great articles submitted, but more are always welcome so get cracking!

As its title suggests, Frontier: Elite II is the sequel to the hugely popular “Elite”, a game first released in 1984 for the BBC Micro. Elite was a space game that blended several genres together to create a unique and compelling experience, and Frontier built upon this solid foundation. Several new features were added, and although the game received its fair share of criticism, overall it enjoyed plenty of success.

With rumours of another sequel to Frontier floating around the Internet, now seems like a great time to look back at a true classic from the 16-bit computer era.

What works

It’s a Space Sandbox

You can choose to start the game from several locations, but once you’ve started you’re left to your own devices. There are no commanders briefing you, no tutorials to wade through. Once you’re in, the choice is yours. You can destroy ships and steal their cargo, mine planets and asteroids for precious metals, take up assassination contracts, ferry passengers around or just trade regular cargo.

Frontier’s main strength was the complete freedom given to the player. Although there was no story, there were many missions that could be carried out, and it took a considerable amount of time and skill to obtain the largest ship.

Easy to Change Your Style

This might seem like a strange point, but some games with different career paths make it difficult or impossible for you to change once you’ve started. In Frontier you can change whenever you want with very little difficulty. For example, if you’re tired of ferrying around passengers, you can sell your ship and buy something lighter for courier delivery, or perhaps something larger and more suited for dishing out death. Having freedom to choose your path is always good, and adding the extra freedom to choose when you wish to change is even better.

Semi-Random People

There are really two important points here:

1. All of the faces are dynamically generated using an “identikit” process. This kind of content generation can save a lot of time in the long run, and also helps to prevent the various people becoming too alike in appearance.
2. Even though space is big, some people keep cropping up. Sometimes you’ll run across the same person in different systems, usually when they’re on the run. It’s a very subtle touch, and perhaps it’s not even meant to be that way, but it helps to shrink the game world a little. It’s great to have a huge world to explore, but a little familiarity prevents the player from becoming too disconnected from the game world.

What doesn’t work

It’s a Space Sandbox

Space is big. Really big. Traveling through the galaxy is fun, but most of the “outer” systems contain no planets so there’s very little to do. For the most part, the outer reaches can be avoided, but you may be unlucky enough to suffer a hyperspace “mis-jump”. It may throw you a few light years off course, or you might end up 400 light years from where you want to be.

It’s great having so much to explore, and technically it’s impressive, but in the end it means a huge amount of the game’s content is just barren star systems with nothing to do.

Realistic Physics

In space travel, half the time of travel is spent speeding up, and the rest is spent slowing down. Frontier replicates this feature, and it’s not particularly fun. Because everything works in real-time (though thankfully you can speed time using the “star dreamer”), all of the planetary bodies move including space stations. Traveling to a station often takes several days, so the station and the planet it orbits will be in different places. Keeping up with all these changes can be quite difficult, and it’s not particularly fun either. If you don’t have an autopilot, you’re on your own.

Again, this feature is technically impressive, but it makes the game more like a space simulator than a space game.

Essential Items Aren’t Included by Default

The autopilot is not included by default in any ship you buy and it’s only included on one of the starting points. This means you end up selling other packaged equipment to raise funds for it.

Using the autopilot is not mandatory, so players can switch between manual and automatic controls without any problems which makes the decision not to include it even more baffling. Whilst it’s more than possible that someone could learn to pilot the ships and land manually, it is incredibly difficult. Landing on a planet is one of the hardest things in the game, and nine times out of 10 you’ll end up plummeting into the ground before you even realise it.

Intrusive Anti-Piracy Measures

One of the classic methods of preventing software piracy was to require text from the manual to be entered during run-time to prove it had been purchased. This is the method Frontier uses, but instead of a single check at the start they appear randomly throughout gameplay. They’re integrated quite nicely, with police officers asking you to take a “starship ownership test”, but there’s no immediate feedback if you got it right or wrong. If you type the wrong letter, you can end up continuing only to find out later in the game that you failed the test (which ends the game). Hurrah.

No Aliens

Elite had some of the coolest randomly generated aliens, complete with bug eyes and purple skin. Sadly Frontier stuck entirely to the human race, which is a shame.

There aren’t many games like Frontier any more, and the official sequel has been in the works an absolute age now. The closest I’ve found is Flatspace II, which is a modern take on the space trading and combat genre. Even though it uses different perspective to Frontier, it’s definitely made in the spirit of the Elite franchise. Download it here.

It’s been a while since the last issue, but there’s been plenty going on behind the scenes. This issue sees the release of a new developer tool, some improvements to the website and glimpse of what’s in store next issue.

Featured Article

Automating the Build Process

Building software can be a difficult and tedious process, with many different elements going together to create the finished package. This article looks at…

Read the full article.

Also Featured

Also featured in this issue:

• New Resource – BlitzBuild — The very first release of BlitzBuild, a command line build tool developed especially for the Blitz series of languages.
• GDL – Frontier: Elite II – Rumours of another Elite game are surfacing again, so it seems like a great time to take a look at one of the classic games of the 16-bit computer era – Frontier: Elite II.
• Shrink Your Software — Tips and utilities for shrinking your finished software, which leads to lower bandwidth bills and increased downloads.
• The Fizz – The regular column that details all of the exciting things happening at Sodaware.
• Quick Tip: Adding Apps to the Windows PATH — A really simple tip that can speed up your work if you use the Windows command line.

Finished reading all of that already? Issue 3 is due out on April 23^rd

What is BlitzBuild?

BlitzBuild is a command line tool for compiling BlitzPlus and Blitz3D applications, although it can be used to automate other tasks in a similar fashion to Windows batch files. BlitzBuild’s primary aim is to make it easier to build software with the Blitz series of languages, to remove the IDE from the build process and to combine several key build steps (such as documentation creation and testing) into a single step. This saves time and can also improve the quality of the finished article.

For the latest updates to this project, see the BlitzBuild project homepage.

Important Note: This release is very much a “preview”, and as such isn’t really recommended for a production environment.

License

BlitzBuild is freeware and may be used without restrictions.

Quick Links

Donations & Support

If you find this library helpful in your projects, please consider donating. Donations of any size are always welcome!

If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them here. You can also send an email or leave them as a feature request on the bug tracker.

Download

This is a simple change that can make using the Windows command line much easier. Adding a directory to the Windows PATH will mean Windows will search the directory when a command is entered. The main reason for doing this is that it acts as a shortcut for common applications you may run.

For example, instead of typing : "C:\Program Files\SomeProgram\Bin\MyProg.exe" --some-arg to launch an application, you can type MyProg.exe –some-arg. This has three main advantages:

1. Looks Neater – This can be important if you’re using batch files. Long lines are hard to read, so shortening things is a good idea.
2. Less Typing – Speaks for itself. If you use the command line or batch files for any amount of time, you’ll appreciate how much easier it is to use if you’re not typing full paths for your tools.
3. Portable – Perhaps the most important detail. Not using hard-coded paths makes it easier to port your batch files to other machines.

Note: Be careful when editing your path variable, as you could render some programs unusable if you make a mistake. Also remember that changes won’t take effect until you restart the console.

Editing the Windows Path Variable

1) Right click “My Computer” and select “Properties” OR goto Control Panel and select “System”. This will open the “System Properties” window.

2) Switch to the “Advanced” tab, and select “Environment Variables”.

3) There are now two options. You can modify the global path variable, or add your own to your personal profile. If you want all users on the machine to have the same shortcut, add it to the global path, otherwise use the local one. 

Modifying the Path Using the Command Line

If you’d like to do this using the command line, you can use the “setx” command included with Windows XP service pack two. To add the directory “c:\program files\SomeProgram\Bin” to your path, use the following:

setx path "%PATH%;C:\Program Files\SomeProgram\Bin"

Remember to include the %PATH% variable at the start of your setx command so that you’ll keep existing path names.

Creating software is a time consuming business, and it’s important to always be on the lookout for ways to reduce the amount of time spent on less important tasks. The process of actually building software (creating the finished distributable binary) is one such area that can be optimised. Opening up your IDE and hitting “compile” might not seem particularly time consuming, but it’s only one part of the build process.

To get you started, here’s a short list of tasks that can be automated:

• Compiling the executables and dependent libraries
• Packing media
• Creating an installer
• Uploading files to an FTP site
• Checking out files from a repository to be built
• Sending an email about a finished build to other developers
• Creating the application documentation / Converting it to HTML
• Testing the software

The benefits of using an automated build system include:

• Saves time – Run a build and leave the computer to do the work whilst you take care of other tasks.
• Documents the build process – If a build requires several steps before being completed, a build file will document this process for you. This is useful if templates need to be generated or options need to be set before a build is ready.
• Improves quality – As well as automating the creation of a binary package, tests can be automated. This saves a lot of time on the development end, as tests can be constantly run so you’ll quickly find out if the software’s behaviour has changed.

Simple Automation – Batch Files

The simplest way to automate many of these tasks is to use batch files. A batch file is a list of tasks to be run, usually in the form of a list of applications with some command line parameters. Using a few simple commands it’s possible to run many tasks in succession without any user input, leaving you to do more important things. Microsoft.com has a is a simple guide to batch files which is a good place to start.

As useful as batch files are, there is only so much they can accomplish, and there may come a time when something more complex is required for your project. Thankfully there are many build systems available

Build Tools

There are plenty of build systems available, and several of them are targeted at certain platforms or languages. It may take a while to become comfortable with a platform, but the savings are worth it.

• GNU make – A standard system used by many Linux projects. It consists of a plain text file that lists targets and dependencies, and features many advanced features such as automatically determining which files require rebuilding.
• Apache Ant – Ant is designed as a replacement for make, and uses XML files to describe the build process instead of text files. It’s written in JAVA, and is completely portable.
• nAnt – nAnt is a .NET based version of Ant, and although it is not exclusively for .NET developers it has many features that make it useful for building .NET apps.
• A-A-P – A-A-P is a portable build tool that uses text-based “recipes” to compile and distribute software, but it can also be used for other tasks such as publishing websites and generating files from templates.
• Visual Build Professional – VBP is a commercial build tool that takes a more visual approach to creating build scripts. It integrates well into many Microsoft IDEs, but also supports other languages such as Delphi and Java.
• BlitzBuild – A free build tool aimed at BlitzPlus and Blitz3D developers.

Breaking the Task Down

Most build scripts will contain more than a single command, so it is useful to break the build script into different groups or “targets” that can be executed individually. This is particularly useful if building of data files is included, as it can be used for art or music to be built independently of the main application. Many build platforms also allow targets to be called from other targets, which effectively breaks a build script into a set of functions that can be executed in any order.

Common targets include compilation, installation and cleanup, but the choice is entirely up to the developer. It may also prove beneficial to include a separate target for generating debug versions of the application which can be distributed as a troubleshooting option.

You may have noticed the “Community” box appearing on all of the game pages, which gives two new features:

1. Rate This Game — Any game on the site can now be given a rating of between one and five. You don’t need to register to give ratings, and the system is nice and simple. If you’ve played a game and you want to let other people know how great (or bad) it is, please take a few moments to rate it.
2. Tell a Friend — Want to tell a friend about the site? Now it’s as easy as filling in a simple form!

There are also several new features to be added over the coming weeks, and several areas of the site will be improved to make them more attractive and more usable. Any feedback is always welcome.

In case you’re wondering where all of the regular blog updates have gone, the next two issues will be released on April 9th and April 23rd respectively.