the life of david
Torque Powered
As I tried to download the newest version of the Torque Game Builder (TGB) yesterday evening, I was greeted by a new version (1.7.4). There hasn’t been an official announcement of this release, but I’ll try it out ASAP.
Firefox
Firefox 3 has just been released! I subscribed for Download Day, where Mozilla tries to establish a world record of downloads in the 24 hours after release. And as I pledged, I’m currently downloading the file from Mozillas download servers. No Dutch version at launch, contrary to the previous release though. This download is coming from Brazil, but as long as it’ll install, I don’t have a problem with that. Nice download speeds too, considering the mass of people currently downloading.
The download is in. Let’s have a look at FF 3.0 now…
Yesterday I was looking at some free moments, and decided to start with the Breakout tutorial on the Torque Developer Network, to get the hang of the workflow one needs to use TGB 1.7. The ultimate goals is still to get a project to its conclusion, and a tutorial seems the best way to familiarize myself with TGB during the time in which the requirements of the first project are refined.
I was fairly well prepared. I downloaded the trial version of Torsion and still have the latest version of CodeWeaver on my development box. I wanted to see which of the two was most adapted to my way of doing things.
Sadly, when importing the JPEG images in one of the first steps of the tutorial, TGB utterly crashed. I’m curious that this happened. It was a clean install of TGB 1.7.2, the latest bugfix release. I’m a bit dissapointed that the import of JPG images led to a crash in a second bugfix release, but it’s perhaps too soon to complain about buggy software. I should be trying the same sequence of interactions with the program again for a few times, and check if I can reproduce the crashes. Who knows, it might be my first bug-report for Torque whoooohooo :-).
I’m ashamed to say that I got a bit discouraged, and fired up a session of Cossacks : Back to War. Maybe this weekend, I’ll try a rematch.
I found this on the Adventuredevelopers.com forums. The apparition of ScummC, a compiler with ScummVM 6 binary code as target, has stirred the waters a bit. The ScummVM project is one of the most visible and recognised adventure-related projects at the moment. Being able to develop for this platform is quite interesting of course.
G33k on the Adventuredevelopers forums found OpenQuest, which is an open source game made in AGS, to act as a demonstration game. The idea is to port this game in ScummC to have a reference and test the functionality of the compiler. It isn’t much of a game, as the story seems to be lacking.
I guess it’s their way of wishing us ‘Happy Easter’, as the guys and gals from Linspire are doing a special promotion tomorrow (not much time, I know). This is the mail I received to announce the promo:
Continue reading ‘Linspire 22% discount for 22 hours on march 22nd’ »
Xara has been acquired by Magix AG, a leading German software distributor for video and music applications. Xara, once distributed by Corel, has been in the news for its open source version of Xara Xtreme which was struggling to gain momentum, and then eventually stopped due to lack of developer interest.
It seems the acquisition by MAGIX will provide them with more funds to further development and to make distribution of their software easier.
MAGIX is distributor of MAGIX Music Maker and MAGIX Video Deluxe 2008.
It seems there is an exploit in the XML-RPC functionality of the Wordpress we’re using at the moment. It has been patched. More information can be found at the Wordpress site.
On a post on the website, Tom Spinner announces that Stage6, the DivX initiated web platform for DivX encoded movie playing online, will cease operations at the end of this month. Well, they even didn’t take into consideration that we have 29 days in february this year.
The reason is a simple one : it became the casualty of its own success. I am a DivX user and even though I didn’t produce anything worth showing the world, I remember being routed to Stage6 many times when looking at trailers and teasers for Video games. Starcraft 2 is one that comes to mind.
Of course, many sites on the net are offering downloads, but you will be hard pressed to find a site offering the same video quality at the moment. Youtube isn’t even considered, the quality of most movies there is laughable, given the fact that most of the movies are re-encoded to Flash video from other formats, without the special tweaking the DivX publisher could do when preparing his own movie on his own computer in the format that would be distributed.
A sad evolution, but I guess some other sites will take over. When looking around, many video sites are stopping, due to high bandwidth costs, which are directly related to their popularity, or due to the fact that they can’t compete with the best-known ones (Google Video comes to mind). We’ll see what the future may bring, as the last sentence is fairly promising in the post:
We remain committed to empowering content creators to deliver high-quality video to a
wide audience, and we’ll continue to offer services that will make it easy to find videos online in the DivX format.It’s been a wild ride, and none of it would have been possible without the support of our users. Thank you for making Stage6 everything that it was.
And now for something totally different: adventure games. I’ve been introduced to computer gaming, like an entire generation, by the means of the adventure games made at that time by Sierra Inc and LucasArts. Many will have fond memories of The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and the likes.
Several different Adventure engines have seen the light of day, among which the most known are Sludge, MAD, AGS, The Wintermute Engine and Agast. Continue reading ‘Indie Adventurers’ »
Based upon the foundations of Caligari trueSpace, Caligari gameSpace aims to be a version of the popular 3D modeling tool that is aimed specifically towards game artists (as the name clearly implies). The gameSpace package contains a number of specific tools towards that end:
The good news is that Caligari is organising a Group Buy. They gather as much people as possible, and the more people buy gameSpace, the lower the price will become.
Actually, the price stands at $129, and it could go all the way down to $99 if enough people step in. Considering the full price is $299, it’s actually quite a good bargain. Continue reading ‘Caligari gameSpace group buy’ »
