Max Williams

Ok, so I finally tidied this app up a bit and now it’s ready for release.

It was my first go at Cocoa programming, so don’t judge it too harshly. It draws lots of circles, in a geometric pattern. Have a look at the samples on the right.

This idea was based on a book my dad found, which just had pages and pages of these patterns. It starts off as you’d expect, with about nine circles on the first page, all just touching. The next page features the same circles, but in that pattern where they just cross and meet - like you used to draw with a pair of compasses in school. It carries on like this for a while, but then later on you realise that those circles you started are too big to be on the page now, so in fact you’re looking at circles centred a long way away from the page.

That was the difficult bit of making this app - trying to select from an infinite grid of circles which ones would be on screen at any time. And it works, so I’m pleased with that.

I tried to put a bit of polish into this. The “About” panel is nicely styled, and the “Help” window doesn’t just say “Help isn’t available”. Of course, there’s room for improvement, but I don’t think this project deserves that much attention. The icon is a bit sinister compared to the actual app, but I don’t mind that.

The one bug I didn’t catch is that it messes up a bit when you resize the window really small. I know it’s easy to fix, but I’d already made the read-only .dmg file… so I’ll fix that in a future version.

It’s universal, and I think it needs OS 10.4, so if you have that feel free to try it out.

Download (536KB)

I’ve just been looking at the Bullet physics library. It’s free and free, and it looks great. Have a look at some of the sample videos on that page, or download some of the demos. (If you have Blender installed, have a play with the demos here as well - even more impressive.)

Wow. That’s very impressive indeed. People are going to start to notice this, and maybe the huge licensing fee for Havok won’t look so inviting, which might mean more Mac and Linux ports of commercial games.

It looks easy enough for smaller developers to use, as well, so we should start to see a lot of interesting things happen there. Not just FPSs with crates bouncing around, but lots of fun little toys.

I hadn’t really considered using Blender as a total solution for game development before, but seeing some of those demos has changed my mind. I have to find out how easy it is to make a nice Mac executable, with the features you’d expect in a Mac game. I suspect that might be where the problem lies. But it looks like that might be a really nice way to work on my dumper truck game.

So we had a go with Flash. Here’s the result:

Click on stuff to see what it does. The bird flies a bit, the stalk sprouts new leaves, and clicking on the ground adds a flower. If you get overwhelmed, click the Sun to clear the screen a bit.

If the project had been a longer one, it’d have been fun to make the flowers do more stuff, or have a bit more background action, but I suppose it was a good introduction to Flash. I didn’t really like working with Flash too much… I kept having problems like: global.i = 0; trace(global.i); result: undefined I still haven’t worked out what I was doing wrong there, but that was the least of my problems. Running under Rosetta, Flash Professional took a very long time to load, and the interface was horribly slow. I’d rather work in a cleaner environment; I was struggling for screen space with the help window and the Actions window and everything open at once. I think they should either drop the object model or the procedural one - this amalgamation of the two isn’t very pretty. They won’t, but they should.

That said, some people manage to make some wonderful toys with Flash. Grow v. 3, and all of the work on that site is very fun, and very nicely implemented - you never feel that the author was constrained at all by using Flash.

It’s something I’d like to play with more; I think I could do some cool things with it, but I probably need to read a book about it first. Apparently we’ll have plenty of opportunity to use it next year, if we want to add some Flash work to our portfolios.

So, an update on projects.

In college, we have a few things going on. The major project is “Urban Environments”, in which we basically have to research and model a city, being sure to include lots of clues to suggest the timeframe and the culture and the atmosphere and so on. Which might be fun.

We’re also doing an “Interactive Animation” project, which involves Flash. My group is working on a flower, which will grow over time based on buttons the user presses. I don’t like using Flash very much, but it involves a bit of programming which is okay. The app runs horribly slowly on my computer though.

In my free time, I’m working on the guts to my game. This isn’t the 3D dumper truck one. This is the 2D vector-based one, which will have lots of particles flying around. It’s great fun to program, as once you have the basics in place it’s really easy to add some impressive effects.

I’m enjoying learning as I go along. A lot of the code (the particle engine, the .obj importer / editor etc.) will probably be useful to me later on, in other projects I work on. I think this game could be pretty cool, and I’ve been wondering what to do with it. My master plan involves building up a big community of people creating content. I’d certainly like to make some money from this, but maybe I’ll release the app for free and then charge for some expansion packs I make, or perhaps have a “gold member” type of subscription where people get cool things… I don’t know. But I plan to take my time with this.

Of course, is all goes to plan, this should run on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and all those other things that SDL supports. The Mac version will probably have a few cool extra features, though, like iTunes control.

I certainly haven’t given up on the dumper truck game. I’ve been looking at using Unity for it, but I’m slowly going off the idea. I don’t know why, really… I’m just remembering when I had my TiBook, and I’d try to run Unity games and get very poor framerates… I don’t want to upset my past self.

I finally have the internet.