Thursday, August 26, 2010

For the pyweek11 i wasn't sure if i should register because i thought it might be hard to find time to complete a game. After a lot of thought I did register. Just before the contest started, I had to work a little extra at the office, get some stuff done as a result I lost the first 2 days of the pyweek. Just when i thought i had the rest of the week (5days) for completing.. i was required/requested to travel. So i quickly decided on a simple game mechanic that i wanted to implement and started working on "StarDust".

Just after 2 days of work on the game, it looks pretty good. Im' glad i settled for a simple game mechanic and concentrated on getting the things work right. Im' really amazed that i could complete this game in just 2 days. Oh well just have a look and see for your self :D

Game Features:

Achievements tracking

High Score tracking

Beautifully animated Patterns for waves of stars.

Simple Mouse based Controls.

Editor to create new Patterns (easy to load them just copy to data folder)

The screens don't actually do justice to the games fluid particle animations. You can download the game and have a look.

Monday, August 09, 2010

Blender5.3 is the new beta version of the awesome 3d authoring tool. I've been skeptical about using it as it had changed some of the shortcut keys etc. I didn't want to make the jump to Blender5.3 yet but after taking a look at the latest version i was impressed by the ui changes. I decided that it would be nice to switch to 5.3 and try it out for creating art assets during the upcoming pyweek. So i started playing around with blender5.3 creating simple models, animations etc and decided that its' time to start porting the anim3d. The moment i started looking at the export scripts for other formats, all hell broke loose.. i was confused disoriented and frustrated with the lack of proper documentation for getting the information i needed to spit out the 3danim format that i designed. That is when i looked at the "python code sniplets" just a glance at this book and i was able to move ahead a lot in coding the exporter script. Right now only the key frame vertices are missing. I'll be working on this and hopefully will be done by the end of today. If you haven't already done it.. Please do check out blender 5.3 its' really nice..

update1: Finally got the python export script ported to 5.3 :). The output generated needs to be tested. Most probably it will work but i still have doubts. you can grab it from here .

Friday, August 06, 2010

If you have tried using Pencil with mouse on your pc, you will have discovered that the pan and zoom features are not accessible in an intuitive way.. i.e they are not the same as you see on gimp or any other image editor. "ctrl + wheel up" = zoom in"ctrl + wheel down" = zoom out"middle button + drag" = pan So ive' made a patch to fix this problem. I also made a patch to fix the compilation issues on linux + some bugs in the old_code branch for Pencil. You can access these patches here:Pan and Zoom with mouseBug Fix, Build Fix