“Do you remember Bronzemurder? Well, here’s another graphic saga from Dwarf Fortress, penned by the talented Tim Denee. Mark my words, the legend of Oilfurnace shall not soon be forgotten by dwarf or humankind.”
Tower of Heaven
charming pixel platformer — personally I’m not a fan of platforms that float in space — I like when artists anchor them to reality — but besides that bad tradition, this game is good fun.
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Sprite Sheets in Cocos2D
This morning, I decided to learn how to animate sprites using sprite sheets in Cocos2D. I did a quick google search and discovered this excellent tutorial:
How To Use Animations and Sprite Sheets in Cocos2D | Ray Wenderlich.
Before you too attempt to tackle this tutorial, I’ll provide a couple gotchas that got me and you can avoid:
1. This entry helped illustrate Ray’s post.
cocos2d wiki entry for animation
2. I had to patch Cocos2d’s class: CCSpriteFrameCache as described in this article as I was getting a format compile error: ‘cocos2d: WARNING: format is not supported for CCSpriteFrameCache addSpriteFramesWithDictionary:texture:’ and this article points how to add the additional format 2 setting:
zwopple integration patch for cocos2d
Other than that, it was a straightforward process and it took me about 3 hours to finally see my animated sprite but that was mainly do to research time. In the future, it should take me about 5 minutes to setup a sprite sheet and introduce it to my project.
Zwoptex: After reading Ray’s recommendation, I purchased this software for $24. My current plan is to use Flash to draw and animate the assets, texture them in Photoshop (just to change up the art style so they don’t look all pure vector), and then finally bring them into Zwoptex to create the necessary png sprite sheet and plist files.
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Monocle Studios Tutorials – iPhone Development with cocos2d-iphone
Monocle Studios Tutorials – iPhone Development with cocos2d-iphone.
This is an excellent tutorial. I was able to take it and quickly modify it to add menu items and create new scenes.
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E3’10 hands on: Limbo – feels like heaven while playing in hell | Gamer Limit
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Cocos2D Box2D iphone dev dump
cocos2D IPHONE for iPhone SDK 4.0
After spending a couple mornings messing around iPhone 3.0 sdk and various incompatible libraries, I’ll like to dump some points around getting up and running with Cocos2D for iPhone.
Right now, I’m developing on iPhone 3G, and the following are very loose steps about how I got the latest version 0.9.44 of Cocos2D to compile.
1. I decided to install iPhone SDK 4.0 and XCODE 3.2.3 from the apple developer site.
2. If you recently upgraded your iPhone OS 4.0, you may need to get another provisioning profile.
After I upgraded my OS to 4.0, I got a “No Provisioned Iphone OS connected error” and here is a tech note about that issue.
3. Once I upgraded my OS and downloaded the latest version of Cocos2D, I wanted to setup XCode with Cocos2D templates.
If these templates fail to install, you may need to follow the instructions in the terminal after the error message. It failed for me and followed the advice to:
./install-templates.sh -u
BUILD
setting:
If you using an older iPhone 3G, you may need to change your Build Architecture from arm7 to arm6
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/7320
Also check the drop down Device – 4.O |Debug and make sure arm6 is checked!
You may notice that when you create a app via the template, you will encounter classes with a “.mm” file extension.
.m vs .mm
The light straight from the Objective C Primer
.m
This is the typical extension used for source files and can contain both Objective-C and C code.
.mm
A source file with this extension can contain C++ code in addition to Objective-C and C code. This extension should be used only if you actually refer to C++ classes or features from your Objective-C code.
You can mix objective-c and C++ classes although you should be careful doing so.
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gamercamp
We missed the first gamercamp last November but fortunately we can check out the all presentations on their site and mark it on our calendars this year!
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bitey worked on dragonage2D
I was checking out what’s new on new grounds this morning and watched this neat short “the faun and the nymph” which is heavily inspired by the work of biteycastle who did the 2d artwork and animation for dragonage 2D.
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SIGNAL RELAY
After watching this Sketch Book Party video I decided to email the director this morning and see if anyone from Toronto happened to contact her to about starting one here.
This got me thinking about how a strong distant SIGNAL can attract attention and potentially RELAY information back to the receiver about someone or something in their own background. It would be interesting to try to map the process.
Awhile back, James Duncan started a “signal parties” mapping project. We should re-visit this work. I’ll see if James is open to adding it to my Github for now [hey maybe we should create a we get signal github!] so we can have a working prototype up on this site to play around with.
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iPhone Flash Blocked
While we’re currently prototyping Digger Dwarves in Flash and wish to distribute it to flash portals and other social sites like Facebook, I think at some point we would also like to see it live on a mobile device.
A few months ago, I paid the $100 and signed up my solo sandbox, Headwinds Studio, for the iPhone developer program. Along with wanting to learn Objective C and play with it on my iPhone, I was also totally convinced that the iPhone was the device for 2010 after hearing the news that Flash CS5 would be able publish iPhone apps. Again, that was 3 months ago, and today with the release of the latest iPhone 4.0 SDK, I was disappointed to learn that apps produced with web technologies like Flash or HTML/CSS/Javascript (ie Titanium) would now be blocked on the iPhone. Bummer.
Oh well…CS5 wasn’t my only reason for signing up for the iPhone Dev program. I’m also interested in Objective C and bought a couple books on the subject after watching John Stringham prototype with Box2D and listening to my friend Adam Hunter (an iPhone/iPad developer) exclaim its virtues on our weekly drive to our Ultimate games. With the introduction of function closures, Objective C now has all the benefits of being a first class citizen like AS3 or Java — its just different but not beyond the grasp of any decent developer.
Of course Digger Dwarves isn’t even finished, and still I’m looking into its mobile future. By then, I may have decided to trade in my iPhone for the latest flavor of Android or Apple might have re-thought their position. Any case, I really shouldn’t care about it but can’t help getting caught up in following the flood of outrage.
Beyond Flash or Javascript, what’s a script-kiddie to do? perhaps that’s where Lua comes in…
If you were a hardcore World of Warcraft player, you may have had customized Lua UI. This scripting language is also used by many other games companies:
And now — thanks to Ansca Mobile — it’s available for the iPhone/iPad and they want Flash developers
A quote from their blog states that its iPhone/iPad safe too:
“It is true that when you develop your app, you’re initially developing in Lua. But when you click “Build”, you are getting a real bonafide XCode-produced executable binary. Obviously, I’m leaving some details out (that’s our secret sauce) but ultimately your binary is produced by compiling a combination of Objective-C and C++ code. We use XCode to compile and link these binaries to official iPhone Documented API’s. It’s why we have always required you to install Apple’s iPhone SDK.”
The 30 trial is free and I plan to kick its tires, and see if it could be a good fit down the road.
Its far too early to tell what will happen when we’re ready to port something to mobile — its changing too fast which isn’t comforting. Right now, I’m putting more faith in the Flash portal sites which have stayed true to the platform for years now.
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