Game design : Espionage and sabotage

As usual my last big posting concerning “Phase 2” is now almost three months old and therefore I decided to change my habbit on posting news for “Phase 2”, so from now on I’ll add a new categorie called “Game Design” in which I’ll post smaller “snippets” about changes in the game’s design. Those postings will be more frequent and should be a better way of showing what’s going on behind the scenes that thos “quarterly” big postings on my progress with “Phase 2”. [Read More]

Newton Game Dynamics Engine goes Open-Source

Time flies by, already march and still this is my first posting for 2011. I’m pretty busy outside of coding, but rest assured, I’ll have some new info on “Phase 2” soon. But still this news item is a great one, as the Newton Game Dynamics realtime physics engine recently went open source (under the zlib license), with both branches of the code, 2.xx and 3.xx now available online. As you may now this has been my (free) physics engine of choice for years now (used in several games like Jagdgeschwader, Newton Playground, tech demos etc. [Read More]
newton 

2010 - Final posting

Welcome to my last posting of 2010! I haven’t been doing regular yearly recaps on my blog since launching it like 5 years ago (time flies by, eh?), but I think it’s a good idea to do a little recap on what happened in 2010 and on what I plan to get done in 2011. Please note that this posting may contain some personal notes and/or ramblings of mine! [Read More]

Newton 2.26 (beta) headers uploaded

I’ve just uploaded updated header versions for the latest beta of the Newton Game Dynamics Engine, namely 2.26. This new versions adds severel new functions and procedures, but no changes within the joint library. You can grab the updated headers over here. As usual they should work with Free Pascal and Delphi (tested both under windows) and should also work under linux, though I don’t test them there. Note : A user over at the newton forums pointed me to some small errors in the current header. [Read More]
newton 

Projekt "W" on current c't magazine issue

Upon opening my letterbox (yes, the real one) this morning I found a free copy of the current issue of the german c’t computer magazine. Why I got this one for free? Because it features the last release of Projekt “W” (Phase 1, v1.2). Back in september I got a mail from the editorial staff of the c’t magazine telling me that Projekt “W” (which is listed on their online download portal) made it into the preselection for the next c’t’ software collection to be featured in one of their future issues. [Read More]

"Phase 2" status update

As promised some (long) time ago (but better late than never) here is a new status update on the progress for “Phase 2” of Projekt “W”. Although my spare time is getting more and more limited due to some real important real life things that I have to take care of I still somehow manage to make progress on what now seems like my personal swansong, and actually a lot of things happened since my last status update, so this one is getting a bit longer this time. [Read More]

PlayStation Move

Don’t worry, this is no advertisement, and no, I don’t get any money or so from Sony for this, but it’s something I wanted to talk about since all this motion gaming stuff seems to be the future (though it’s been here for a long time now, just think of the EyeToy camera for the PS2). But this week (wednesday here in germany) Sony released it’s new Move controller for the PS3 which is based on the PS-Eye camera and which claims to be better than what the competition has to offer. [Read More]
gaming 

New user interface in motion

As promised some weeks ago I finally got around capturing a video of the totally new user interface that I decided to put into “Phase 2”. As mentioned earlier it’s not only a visual “upgrade”, making the UI more sleek and futuristic but also adds a lot of information to the default view and also brings in lot more usability. As you can see in the video most parts are already done, though there is still some work to be done before I can call it finished. [Read More]

"Phase 2" running on Linux (using WINE)

After releasing “Phase 1” (which was actually quite some long time ago) several people were asking for Linux support, but actually I wasn’t keen of having to port the game over to Linux (and I haven’t changed on that since then), so there never was (and never will be) a port for Linux. And as it seems it was also not possible to get the game running using WINE due to the fact that it used GDI+ for doing several imaging related things. [Read More]

Quick interception

Time flies by, and so the last posting is already collecting dust. As usual I’m not getting much time to work on “Phase 2”, but I’m making steady (though little) progress on an (almost daily) base. So the new user interface I’ve been talking about in my last posting is in (with a few minor things to be done and sorted) and it looks stunning, adding a lot to the game, both in terms of visual style and usability. [Read More]