Photoshop Sprite Map Script

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I was recently searching for a good sprite map script for Photoshop, and came across this script:
http://boxhacker.com/blog/2011/05/23/a-little-spritesheet-script-for-photshop/

However his approach assumed a graphics engine would take any size image as a sprite map, with myself working in XNA I needed a sprite map that generated images in powers of 2 (32, 64, 128 etc.)

With some tweaking, and learning of JavaScript, I have modified the original to output power of 2 sprite maps:

The script comes in 2 flavors;

  1. Square centric with the generated map being the closest power of 2 in a box layout (Top)
  2. Dimension aware, and filling the maximum possible horizontal texture size before extending vertically (Bottom)

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EA Pulls Rock Band IOS

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Oh, Thanks!

Talk about shady business practices, while I admit I’m no fan of EA, this is a new low even by their standards.

I have no problem ending online play after a few years, I understand servers cost money etc, that’s fine.

Rock band IOS came out in 2009, a fair while ago, so what’s the problem?
Well this takes it a step further, and it locks you out of not just multiplayer but single player. Customers up until April 30th have be able to buy the game hoping with the notion of being able to play it so long as they have their device/ITunes’s account, Only for EA to turn around and use some EULA guff to say that these gamers were only HIRING the game. So if your some of the really unlucky ones you would of spent £4.99 to play this game for a total of 31 days.

One then questions what kind of business deliberately codes a separate lockout mechanism for single player, away from the ITunes ecosystem (That lets you keep apps even if their deleted from the store so long as you don’t delete them).

Also need to remind you that they did this exact same manoeuvre a little over a year ago, by killing their old Tetris game to force people to buy their new Tetris game that came out little more than 2 weeks later.

I wonder what EA can possibly gain from this, as this can only abolish customers trust in their brand.

I lay a prediction in the coming week EA will announce that the message only referred to online play, after the storm of the Internet lashes back.

If you have rock band on IOS I strongly recommend you loge a complaint using iTunes, and if you only brought it last month ask for a refund, and take a mental note for the future!

LolVid

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Recently I made a video aggregator that scrapes reddit’s /R/Videos for YouTube links; it takes the top YouTube link once a hour and adds it to its database of videos:

http://lolvid.co.uk

This drastically cuts down the mounds of video that is otherwise published every hour taking only the cream of the crop thanks to reddit’s hive mind. It’s nowhere near perfect yet and needs a lot of tweaking, but shows how a content rich site can be created in hours by utilizing api’s top sites offer.

Collision Detection 3 – Ray Plane

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Ray - Plane

One of the most fundamental algorithms in 3D games is being able to calculate the arbitrary distance between a point with direction and a plane.

A few key concepts to understand is:

  • The plane is infinite in length
  • Unless the ray is parallel to the plane, the ray will eventually hit the plane (due to it being infinitely long)
  • Despite the guarantee of hitting the plane the ray still may hit the plane behind the point you started your ray from.

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Collision Detection 1 – Introduction

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Preface

I started writing these collision tutorials as I have recently learnt some of these techniques, and found many tutorials completely useless at explaining the core concepts to a novice. In this I aim to show you how I got my head around the concepts of collision detection, and response. Instead of providing you with code to blindly copy and paste, I hope this will give you enough information to go on to create your own code, and know how it works.

Stuff you should already know:

Parallel

 

Perpendicular

Normal 
   

+ The fact most 3D maths problems can be flattened into 2 Dimensional problems, If your stuck, solve it in 2D then move into the 3rd dimension
+ Use a pen and paper to draw problems out.
+ Unit or normalised vector (-1 to 1)

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King Pirate

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About
King Pirate was a game developed in 26 hours straight at the X48 GamerCamp competition in Birmingham, UK.
The theme ‘Discovery’ was given to us on the Friday morning, we had to design and create a game by midday Saturday.
I was with my friend Paul Thomas, and we were the only team of 2 that produced a game in the event.
I took the task of programming, and Paul took the task of Graphic

Theme
The player takes control of a pirate ship, who has to explore the 7 seas, colonizing islands, gathering resources and finding all the 10 pieces of treasure.

Along the way the player can build a shipyard to reuse the found treasure for ship upgrades and improvements.
The objective of the game is to find all 10 peices of treasure without running out of supplies.

Completion

We set small target for our game, given we only had 2 members, unfortunate due to many setbacks the game is complete but lacks any replayability or interesting features, I would love to work on this in the near future and work on making it a true game for windows mobile or XBLA.

 Download

X48 (Skydrive)

Screenshots
This is the developmental log of the event, I took a screenshot roughly every 3 hours of the games progress:


We knew we wanted a ship based game, so initially I worked on the ship mechanics, rotating and moving around the screen.

I later worked on a method for the ship to dock with an island, I opted to use per-pixle testing


The insomnia started to get to me, this picture taken 10 minutes to midnight on Friday, I forgot to apply the timestamps. I worked on a HUD and fixed the collision (which took a good 2 hours)


3am – Starting to drift in and out of consciousness, eyes hurting from staring at the monitor for 17 hours, I got the menu system in and worked on a progress bar when the player is collecting supplies

Unknown time – I finished the menu in the early hours of the morning, wonderful artwork from Paul

10am day 2 – the ship’s wake effect was implemented, and the treasure and ship upgrade mechanics were inbuilt. No more time to add features, or enemies.

Astral Catapult

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Physics based Platformer for PC and Windows Phone 7
Game design by Jack Dye, developed by Silicon foundry (Matthew Harris, David Hart, David Armstrong, William Dann, Ashley Eglin, Jack Dye)

Design
The basic design was formed in a response to a brief set by aim higher, which was to create a short game to inspire prospective students the benefits of university education and debunk some urban myths about the type of people who go to university.

The game begins with the player as a ball on a starting platform, the player must execute a series of jumps to bypass obstacles and land on green safe platforms, the objective of the game is to make it through the level without dying.

The player loses if the ball lands on spikes, lava, or rolls to a stop without landing on a green platform.


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GLSL Battlefield

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Developed for university coursework, where the objective was to create an entire scene using only shaders and models. All the models had to be positioned using the vertex shader, and all the animation had to be shader based.

Tools used
ATI Render monkey
NVidia Normal Map Plugin for Photoshop
artist-3d.com (Models)

Features
Shader particle explosion
Shader jet flame trail
Shader fire and smoke
Volumetric smoke
Phong Lighting
Bump map lighting
Shader vertex animations
Screen based Ash effect
Animated water

Demo
The source code requires ATI’s render monkey package to run (Which handles all the model and shader loading)
http://icepick66.co.uk/Uploads/GLSLBattlefield_RenderMonkey.zip

Further Work
I hope to add a lighting model that supports spotlights, change the time of day, add parallax mapping and billboard trees/grass.

Screenshots