MekaWars' miners

A further evolution in the simulator of MekaWars. In the original scenario, the environment show the presence of asteroids and resources all around (such as iron, silicon and uranium) and starships drop vehicles to harvest them.

During the development of collision detection algorithms, it was natural to consider also the explosion of torpedos, missiles and bombs against the asteroids: the obvious outcome was the production of resources just from the damages inflicted on asteroids. So every asteroid, made of a particular material, releases pieces of that material as resources.
In conclusion, fighters now have an additional use: to mine resources from asteroids to let harvesters collect them.

MekaWars' panels (II)

Just a screenshot to show
the VEHICLES BUILDER panel
currently in development

MekaWars' panels

Just a screenshot to show
the FLEET BUILDER panel
currently in development

Retro Remakes Contest 2008

When I heard of interesting competitions that involve the game development, I'm very happy to post news about them.
This one in particular is very intriguing because there are a lot of prizes, but also because the task is the development of games that has something to do, resemble or even clone, glorious games of the past.

The contest is divided into several categories, but all the entries partecipate also to the Grand Prize Competition. The categories are: 1) Retro Remakes, 2) Games That Weren't, 3) Sequels that weren't, 4) A Game For Helen, 5) 8 Bit Mashup, 6) We Like It Retro.
Here you can find the direct links to the categories, the rules and, finally... the prizes, just to wet your appetite.
The competition has already started in the past days and the submission line is around the beginnings of December, so you'd better to visit the site of RETROREMAKES for more info, if you are interested.

Lua-OpenGL binding

Someone may think that the basic radar-like screens on which I show the MekaWars' simulator capabilities and rendered thanks to specific code written in C++. In reality, those simple screens are drawn through code written in Lua, thanks to the LuaGL library.

LuaGL is a library that provides access to all the OpenGL functionality from Lua. It is a free software and can be used at no cost for both academic and commercial purposes. You can download LuaGL from its SourceForge project home page. That library works as a binding for all OpenGL commands, so you can have full access to the graphics hardware from Lua. Of course, there are performance penalties, so it's always better to use the high-level APOCALYX functions, except when a customized renderings are necessary.

In APOCALYX, the LuaGL support is useful mainly to create the so called ScriptObject, as shown in the "ScriptObject.lua" demo.
In practice, a ScriptObject is a graphical object that a programmer can add to the 3D world, but its particularity is an empty render() method. This means that no C++ drawing method is defined by default, while a Lua functions is called, instead. To explicitly draw the object, the programmer can use the LuaGL binding functions.
In the screenshot above, there is the usual background in which you can see a ScriptObject: a simple triangle strip with different colors defined at its vertexes.

MekaWars' torpedos

After cannons with their bombs (read The Guns of MekaWars), another weapon has been implemented with its projectiles: torpedo-tubes and torpedos. Of course, those are only names to differentiate these two kind of weapons available to MekaWars' spaceships and fighters.
In the small radar-like screen shown in the screeshot, the white pixels correspond to bombs, while the red pixels to torpedos. You can see also a chain reaction: a row of mines that explodes in sequence.

As already explained, there are a lot of differences between bombs and torpedos:
the cannon shoots bombs at a maximum constant speed, while tubes may drop torpedos at any speed (up to a maximum), even zero speed (in that case they act as mines); the number of bombs is limited only to the amount of energy available, while torpedos are finite; the cannon can't shoot when the shield is active, while tubes can; bombs explode at the end of their run or when they hit an obstacle, while torpedos can explode after the activation time has expired and, after that, they react when hit or when a vehicle enters the activation range; bombs are not affected by other explosions, while torpedos, when activated, react to nearby explosions (as in the shown chain reaction).
So torpedos are more versatile than bombs and I'm sure that very advanced players will create smart pilots who, being hidden behind an asteroid, will make their torpedos bounce against other asteroids to hit enemies on the other side: That's A.I.!

APOCALYX 3D Engine 0.9.3

The APOCALYX 3D Engine 0.9.3 release is finally available. It includes some improvements and bug fixes. To download the engine in a easy-to-get 60 Mb installer, or in smaller selected pieces, visit to the APOCALYX Official Site's Downloads page.

New features:

• Added MDLModel functions: setTransition(), setTransitionTimer(), getStoppedTransition()
• Added IM (Imaging Toolkit) support in IUP GUI
• Added primitives: Cylinder, Disk, PartialDisk, Sphere
• Added setPointerVisible(), isPointerVisible()
• Added string.pack(), string.unpack()
• Fixed bug in collisions between ODE objects and BSP geometry
• Added support for Arbitrary Precision Math (MAPM)
• Added support for Video Capture functions (experimental)
• Added support for MySQL databases
• Added support for SQLite databases
• Removed AngelScript language support
• Removed SMALL language support
• Removed CSL language support

New demo (in full-installer):

• Mushroom's Ride, that shows some of the engine features at work.

You can download the runtime of the engine and the demo packages from the Downloads page. For more detailed descriptions of the demos, visit the Demos page. Feel free to ask more about the new capabilities of the engine on the forums or by e-mail. Visit the APOCALYX Blog (this one) to read daily news about the engine and its development.