pocketSand on the way
2006 Nov 2nd
There is a simple yet addicting little game out there called Falling Sand Game: there are no rules or goals, but you have to be sure the imagination is your only one limit: rather than a game, i would call it simulation btw.
The first version i ever seen around was at the DOFI blog and since then, there have been other numerous variations on that theme such as this, this or this one too.
There is a fan-site too here and they have other numerous variations and add-ons to the original version, including a link to an SDL-based one, that’s a C++ port using the well-known SDL library: also, someone told me that there is a PalmOS version too.
At this point i was really expecting to see a [tag]PocketPC[/tag] version of that game, just because of the nature of the game itself: the game mechanics is coupled with the lowest human interaction i would expect to see in a game due to the fact that particles’ physics and properties do the rest, and this interaction is perfectly suited to a PocketPC’s stylus.
I ported the SDL-based version to the PocketPC platform, by using the cross-platform framework i’m currently developing: the screenshot on the right come from a win32-desktop build of pocketSand.
I plan to release it really soon, just the time to give it some tweaks and optimizations, mainly for the PPC build, and i really would love to have some feedback about it, such as how it performs on your device and/or if you are having problems just running it.
If you want to give pocketSand a try, stay tuned for updates!
Ogre3D past experiments
2006 Sep 30th
Although i’m currently working on something different than Ogre, due to my past (but hopefully future) activities on it i’m receiving mails on why there are no more releases of my OgrePostFilterManager: the answer is really simple, there is no OgrePostFilterManager anymore because it has been completely integrated into the Ogre’s core under the name of Compositor and supporting scripting too. If you want a little story of it… read on!
For those who don’t know it, Ogre3D is an (highly) object-oriented graphic engine, abstracting specific APIs (DirectX|OpenGL) and OS-specificity providing an incredibly huge amount of freedom. From the ogre3d.org website:
OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce applications utilising hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. The class library abstracts all the details of using the underlying system libraries like Direct3D and OpenGL and provides an interface based on world objects and other intuitive classes.
The experiments thing i was talking in the title of this post concerns image-space postfiltering with Ogre: that’s it, being able to post-process the resulting frame with an image-space fragment program such a gaussian blur or a bloom.
At the time of experimenting (about 2 years ago) the thing was pretty interesting: there was no direct way to export a RenderMonkey’s script to the Ogre’s material format, moreover, there was also no direct way to write a GPU fragment program and lets it post-process the scene but the engine was undoubtedly capable of this: after all, i still wanted to try an HeatVision effect (ala “Predator’s movie”) in a real-life 3d application after having it running in RenderMoney; beside this there were no really specific reasons for which i would to start implement this, i simply realized it would be great to have it running in Ogre too and share the way i followed with other developers that might be in need of a similar thing for their own projects.
After some nights working on this i come up with a not-so-elegant solution, but the effect was running and this was the first step to a complete rewrite that followed about one year later: while the HeatVision demo was running pretty good, i wasn’t happy of it at all because setting up an image-space postfilter required too much work and still there was way too much code for it.
I abandoned this experiment quite early and resumed something like one year later, when RollBot’s was basically finished: having the old code as a reference i started the big rewrite.
The goal was, given a RenderMonkey’s script, being able to just use it in Ogre with the minor amount of code and not having to deal with quad, nodes and other geometry-related stuff.
In the meantime, Ogre obviously evolved so i had to remove some deprecated APIs i was using in the old code: i nicknamed the project OgrePostFilterManager and after a while i released some screenshots also explaining how the changes affected the amount of code one needed to write for having it running straight-out from RenderMonkey.
After some days i released the source code for it, adding some new effects to shows it off although supersuper really did a better job and wrote entire threads of post-processing filters, good work man!
Also i’ve to mention :wumpus: which helped me to get OgrePostFilterManager working in the “Dagon” release of Ogre, thank you much man.
I’m really happy to say that OgrePostFilterManager has been taken to the next level: :wumpus: added the whole scripting support and after some reworks it has been completely integrated into the Ogre’s core under the name of Compositor.
Really good time with you Ogre-guys, hope to be able to put my hands on Ogre soon.
Have we stopped?
2006 Sep 23rd
Definitely no, but i’m going to explain the lack of updates thing.
By day i’m personally employed for another company developing web sites, backends and custom software applications: i also have to maintain and monitor our networks, the web servers and the mail server, solving their issues and spotting out hardware problems in our office machines too.
Coping with all this every day, five days in a week, isn’t easy at all, especially if you have more than one forthcoming deadline for two unrelated projects, have to add features to a third one that’s already online, and trying to be a composed man when you got a phone call asking for help.
Wow. Quite much work..
Anyway, i still find the mental force to sit down and start planning, designing and implementing software, but this time doing the kind of stuff Philipp “The Artist” (colleague in both by-day and by-night works) and me really would like to do for a living: videogames.
Our team has undergone a rework and we are currently
There is a talented young brother joining the team, Stefano, currently working on a Java game project side-by-side with Philipp: a funny game that we expect to be able to release soon ;)
After our first game RollBot: Escape To Freedom, i started the design of our proprietary cross-platform framework and four months ago i got the development started: we are now planning to develop a game based on it and to let’s people apply for beta testing, but more on this topic on the posts to come.
PHP bug?
2006 Aug 27th
It seems i’m experiencing this PHP bug and by reading all the feedback at that page, it seems someone else is experiencing the same as well.
Oddly enough, the status of the bug tracker is still showing a “No Feedback” after three years of reporting: anyway, i’m experiencing this while not being under an heavy load, and i just added this line to the interested .php file just before the session_start:
ini_set( "session.save_handler", "files" );
This way it seems to fix the error i was constantly receiving for 10 minutes, but i’ll have to wait some more i think.
<edit>
Well, it seems it’s working correctly now, i’m not experiencing the problem anymore.
</edit>
Welcome!
2006 Aug 26th
Hi, and welcome to my blog.
It was something like one year ago when i configured WordPress and reworked this cool theme by selder and finally it seems i’ve the time to get it running.
English is not my native language, so, whenever you’ll notice odd grammar or lexical constructions, please bear with me: if you are wondering why i don’t simply switch to my native language… well, mainly because i really want to learn it, but also due to the fact that english is far more widely spoken than italian, more concise but still better understandable when computer programming is the main topic (as the same should apply to source code comments as well).
Well, i also plan to talk a bit about the backstage of bit-fire.com, the temporary break it’s appear we took and the works we are currently involved in: our website hasn’t been updated for a while now, but, effectively, there are no games’s news to publish.
So, this blog has born: i think a common website is good enough to advertise new products, but when there aren’t any for a while, the whole thing wrongly reflects the team and its actual inner working, especially in a small crew, although we never took a break. ;)