Krux Games ::: Blog

So it’s official. It’s a new project I’ve come quite a long way with this project since i last blogged. I’m going to keep this entry short because i plan on creating a project website for it an everything. To get an idea of my progress, hit: http://hge.relishgames.com/doc/index.html
and click on “HGE Functions” on the left hand side. I’ve completed everything up to the Music_* functions thus far.  To test my code I’ve written a JavaScript unit testing framework… it seems to be working pretty well so i think I’ll stick with it.  Keep checking back for more updates on the project…. maybe some day I’ll end up making a game with it :)  Oh, and I’ve been throwing the idea of turning it into a browser plugin around too.  Imagine a browser plugin with native DirectX bindings accessible via JavaScript :)  Makes me all wet and stickey just thinking about it (of course it would have to have the ability to go full screen… web browsers suck for playing games in).

WTF? Yeah, Embedding SpiderMonkey. I’m embedding SpiderMonkey into the popular 2D game engine HGE. HGE is a great little 2D engine, with very little overhead. I hope to wrap all it has to offer into an intuitive API and/or object model scriptable via JavaScript. That’s where SpiderMonkey comes in, the JavaScript engine used by the Gecko rendering engine, more commonly known as the HTML/JavaScript engine that FireFox and Mozilla use. With relatively little effort to get the library compiled I was on my way to SpiderMonkey hacking. I’ve already implemented a native function “alert” (may sound familiar to you HTML/JavaScripters) that is callable via JavaScript. Once I’ve got the code in a more elegant state, I’ll post some examples. I really don’t think it’s going to take much to get JavaScript working in the HGE environment. Hopefully it’ll just be a matter of creating a set of JSClass* structures for each structure in HGE, and then creating method calls that call the HGE native calls. I’ll keep the blog updated as to the status of this little project

Or WoW TCG if you’re into acronyms. We’ve been playing it lately, it’s a truly excellent game. Of course, this is coming from someone who has never played any other trading card games (ie: Magic or Pokemon) so i don’t really have anything to compare it to. That being said, Jon likes it and he was/is a huge Magic guy (he still prefers Magic over WoW TCG however… I think that art of that reason may be that he’s not a fan of the WoW game). We’ve been playing the raids every other Saturday night at my house with anywhere from 6 to 7 players. Jon plays a mean Onyxia, but we were finally able to take her down after stacking decks specifically for the task at hand. We didn’t even loose a player! Our next encounter will be Molten Core. I’ve purchased two of the Molten Core decks so I’ll be able to stack it with all of the wickedest cards, that being said i won’t do that for our first encounter… we’ll use a stock deck We’ll probably play another Onyxia when Jon’s able to stack his deck with his favorite cards from that deck.

Playing this game has got me thinking about turned based RPGs, or card games played in a digital format. If I’m not mistaken, Magic can be played online… I’d like to try that out. I think it’d be really cool to play a TCG online, with cards on screen… and then watching an animated version of the battle chain play out. It’d be especially fun to play a raid in that fashion.

Well, once again it’s been a while since I’ve posted. The last post talked about the thread synchronization issues that i was having with the engine’s main loop and ui event dispatching/handling. Well, I’ve solved it… actually, a while ago :). It was a two part fix:

1) The engine now queues up UI/InputEvents durring the loop, and the main loop handles dispatching them at (or toward) the end of the loop. This ensures that the events aren’t going to occur during the update() or render() phase of the main loop (some day I’ll post a diagram and explain the entire main loop and the various phases).

2) I pulled the main loop functionality out of the kernel and moved it into a MainLoop object. This object inherits from Thread. Whenever a game state change is made, a new MainLoop object is created and assigned to be the current main loop, while the other one is unloaded and destroyed.

I also made a major change in that you no longer add IProcess and IRenderer (interfaces) instances to the Kernel. Instead, the kernel calls update() and render() on the currently active IGameState and the IGameState is responsible for delegating accordingly. This turned out to clean up code and address a lot of other issues that I was having.

The game demo is right around the corner, in fact… it’s playable now. Just point your java phone’s web browser to: http://mobile.kruxgames.com/ and navigate to the “Beta Games” section. If you decide to try it, post a comment

Ok, so I’ve written plenty of threaded applications, and I perfectly understand the wait(), notify() and notifyAll() paradigm in java/j2me. I think I’m going crazy right now though. For some reason when an input event is raised from the phone (ie: keyPressed in this case) my main loop thread is paused, stopped or killed. In my engine’s stop() method it basically does a:

keepRunning = false;
lockObject.wait();

and the main loop looks like:


while (keepRunning) {
......
}
lockObject.notifyAll();


My UI code is something like:


boolean onUIEventAction(UIEvent event, Kernel kernel) {
if (event.getEventType()==Widget.BUTTON_PRESS
&& event.getSource()==startGameButton) {
kernel.stop();
kernel.start(new DemoLevelGameState());
}
}

It’s fairly straight forward, basically the idea is that the button press initializes a new game state… but first it stops the current game state (basically stopping the kernel from executing it’s main loop), and that’s where it hangs. For some reason the input event is pausing/halting/etc the main loop. At least that’s what is happening on the emulators. I’ll do another post when I’ve found a solution

So, I usually only talk tech on this blog and I don’t think I’ve ever talked about sneakers. But this is too cool to not share I’ve got myself a pair of Mr. Cartoon Airforce 1s. They’re fairly difficult to get a hold of, and they aren’t exactly inexpensive (average price for these are ~$300, i got mine for $86). Well, Mr. Cartoon was at the Sneaker Pimps LA event last night and I was able to get him to sign my sneakers. Basically this means that I can no longer wear these sneakers (I shouldn’t have ever in the first place really) and I’ve got to find me another pair that i can wear now. When he was signing them I asked if he wanted to sign both he replied with something along the lines of it being bad luck… i took his word for it He seemed like a really nice guy. Right after he signed them and I came down out of the VIP section, Redman came running onto stage and did his set… he was excellent. Anyway, I dug out the original box and took some pictures of the shoes/signature… as you can tell, I’ve worn the shoes a few times Here’s the pictures (click for larger images):

So recently I was given an iPhone. It’s a pretty cool device, definitely a pretty device. But it’s lacking in a lot of areas, some of which is fairly basic and default functionality for phones these days, even the phones that are given free with new plans. There’s also numerous ways that it could be improved, ie: 3G (EDGE is way too slow), GPS, Flash, etc. This isn’t a post about the shortcomings of the iPhone though. This is a post to let the world in on a technological break through that I’ve made with the device: the ability to send picture messages, also known as MMS.

MMS is a very standard feature of phones these days, virtually all phones with any sort of camera is capable of sending a text message with a picture attached to it to another phone, or email address. I was shocked to find that my new iPhone wasn’t capable of doing this. With everything else that it does, you’d think that this basic and standard feature would be a piece of cake for the iPhone. While I’m sure that it’ll eventually officially support it (software updates), I’ve made major advances in this area with the iPhone that enable us to do this right now. And there’s ZERO software or hardware modifications.

Supplies:

• iPhone (duh)
• Any basic cell phone with a camera that’s got service

Here’s the phone that i used along with my iPhone:

It’s a Motorolla V2-something or other, and it has service through cingular.

Step by step:

1. Take picture with iPhone
2. Go to “Camera Roll” in iPhone and navigate to said picture, bring it up full screen
3. Break out the 8 year old camera phone (like the one depicted above) and take a picture of the picture on the iPhone
4. Send the picture using the 8 year old camera phone to the desired recipient

Pretty simple :)  Here’s some sample photos taken with the iPhone that i sent to my personal email address:

 A picture of some apples on the kitchen table:

 The steering wheel of a mustang:

 an xbox 360 controller:

 So, no more complaining about not being able to send picture messages from your iPhone!

I’m a HUGE fan of the transformers. I was in line for one of the early 8pm showings the day before the release of the recent movie directed by Michael bay. It was a fantastic film, if you disregard all of the bayizms and spielbergizms… which, thankfully, were few and far between. The robots didn’t look much like the original transformers, but the soul was still there.

You’re probably thinking “wtf, the title of this blog post suggested something about useless transformers. What is this crap about the transformers movie?”. I just wanted to be sure that everyone knew I love the transformers before i submit this: The 7 most useless transformers. It’s funny as hell, and some of my favorite transformers are on the list.

I don’t even know if this piece of music I wrote is possible on a single piano. it might be on multiple pianos. It has a lot of dissonance…yummy. Tell me what you think….

Click Here for Piano Madness!

Here is a first mixdown of the whole piece of music with all intstruments

Click Here to Listen