MacBook Pro – The Better GPU
It was a few month after I got my laptop I found this out, but you need to activate the more powerful GPU on the new MacBook Pros, otherwise it just uses the less powerful one.
It is not complicated, but it isn't exactly intuitive, though apparently Snow Leopard changes the way this works so you don't require a restart.
First goto "System Preferences" on the dock.
Now select "Energy Saver".
Now select "Higher Performance", it will ask you to restart for changes to take effect.
Once you've restarted, that is it, you're using the more powerful GPU. My games gained a huge amount of FPS when I did this, and with the help of the Fan Control application, I was able to keep my laptop relatively cold.
To undo the changes, repeat but select "Better battery life" instead.
On another note, I notice the new Firefox takes into account left and right scrolling on the Mac now for moving forward and backward between webpages :).
Escape From ASDA (Source)
The quests can now be authored more in Lua. There are conditionals for whether the quest is active, and whether the quest is complete.
I'm tempted to make the entire game in Lua, and just use the application as an intermediate for calling functions and rendering. Then I could just execute functions within rooms / npcs for the relevant dictionary word.
There are still some flaws in the text output, like it doesn't split up words onto new lines if they are longer than the line width.
Next on the list is 8x8 Board Games, get rid of that horrible green.
Download Source: Escape From ASDA v2.1.0 (MacOSX)
Download Source: Escape From ASDA v2.1.0 (Win32)
Escape From ASDA (Update)
This weekend I've been going through files I've been meaning to upload to my website for some time now.
I've got all the World of Warcraft addons finished, so I began on the C++ games I made at university.
Escape from ASDA is one of them, I was gonna upload it as it was but after noticing a few memory leaks.
As I started to clean up the code, and then got a little carried away and practically rewrote most of it.
Originally it used a custom text file format for data, that was % deliminated, now it uses Lua which makes it at lot easier to understand when editting.
I also modified the title screen to use a bit of ASCII art, and made the commands more flexible.
Unfortunately unlike v1.0.0, it does not support mouse input for navigation. And since you can't seem to change the console caret in MacOSX, I've had to make a custom console buffer that I use to render to before outputting.
There are a few more changes I plan to do to make the game script more flexible before I upload the source, but for now where is the binaries for Win32 and MacOSX.
Making it compile on WIN32 again was a pain, much more than it should have been, maybe its just the Microsoft implementation of STL...
Download Binary: Escape From ASDA v2.0.0 (MacOSX)
Download Binary: Escape From ASDA v2.0.0 (Win32)
Catalyst
Whilst working on animation support for Athena for Courage, I began working on a game for the iPhone called Catalyst last weekend.
I was thinking about a game I had played about a month or two before called Polygonal Fury, and realised it would port nicely onto the iPhone.
So I started a OpenGL ES project (and discovered the new version of the iPhone supports shaders), and started with just making some circles bounce around.
Since the collision of a circle is easy, they seems the easiest to setup for interaction with touching the screen.
Initially I just made them "die" if tapped, but later I added the ability of shapes to spawn reactions.
All sprites within the game are triangle fans, but I will probably change them to quads with a texture due to the break that occasionally appears in the geometry, and alpha glow around the edge.
It is not much, but it is a start, I plan to add some more particle types, and maybe a few different upgrades than the ones giving in the Flash version.
The background needs changing, I was thinking of something going on in the background like in another Flash game I played, Spewer, with maybe cut scenes like the Nintendo DS game Contact had.