New Category
There's a new category in the game dev section and a new tutorial about the convex wrap.
Also christmas is almost here, I'm almost in vacation, wooohooo.
Thursday 17 December 2009 - 22:21:49 - NZR - comments: 0
Volumetrics
I got interested in volumetrics this week because I want to make some clouds for my projects.
After I googled the subject for a while, I found this very nice presentation on mega particles that presents an algorithm used for volumetric cloud rendering.
Basically all you have to do is
- Draw Spheres
- Blur
- Fractal Noise
- Insert more cool looking distorts
Only problem I've found until now is that depth management is quite hard when using this method (not impossible though).
Sunday 15 November 2009 - 11:50:16 - NZR - comments: 0
I'm confused
Analytics says I had just a few visitors, e107 script says I had fewer visitors than Analytics says I had, none of them shows any activity in the download section,yet downloads increase?
If anybody stumbles upon this, can you tell me which is in your opinion the best stat logger?
UPDATE: Looked closer in analytics, it showed some activity in the download page, but the question still stands
Monday 02 November 2009 - 22:14:19 - NZR - comments: 0
Sound and Music
I've talked about this thing before, but I feel I can expand a bit on this subject because I bet there are tons of developers out there, not necessarily game devs, that had an urgent need for sound effects or background music some time in their lives.
So you have a game/app/whatever and you think it would be a lot nicer if it just had some sound effects and you basically run into one or more of these problems:
- Sounds cost money
- Music costs money
- Audio editing software costs money
- After paying money on editing software, you don't know how to use it
- It takes time to make quality music
The thing is that the easiest and obvious solution to these problems is to pay someone to help you, but let's assume that paying is not an option because you have a low budget.
So the first app I'm going to present is sfxr.This is just perfect if all you need are a few sound effects for button pressing, or some quick shmups. In fact all the sounds in snake fight are made with sfxr. And the best thing about is that it's free.
Ok, now we have some basic sound effects, let's move to background music. This is a bit trickier because as you can probably guess, it's harder to make a computer program that automatically generates background music, though not impossible.
But back to the music, here you have two options. The first and easiest option would be to use music licensed under creative commons. If you don't have a commercial project, just an opensource app, or a game made just for the fun of it, this is probably what you're gonna go for and the best website I found for doing that is the newgrounds audio portal. It has everything from techno to metal, very well organized and you an easily contact the author to ask him or her for permission. I've never actually used it in that sense, but I go there from time to time to listen to music because some of the tracks are very good.
Now let's take this to the next level. Let's say you don't want to use other people's work or you find the CC license too restrictive and therefore have decided to make your own music. The first thing you should do is install LMMS. The Linux Multimedia Studio is an opensource app for editing audio and it's damn good at doing it. It comes with tons of presets and samples that make music authoring a whole lot easier for any kind of music from metal to pop. Plus it includes a ton of LADSPA filters for mastering your finished track and a VST plugin, in case you ever get bored by the ton of available presets.
Also one last thing I want to talk about is the piano roll. It's actually pretty cool and a very neat idea to represent musical notes as bars on a grid, but I sometimes find it easier to make music using a traditional sheet view which brings us to the next app.
Tuxguitar is a cute software for tab editing. It provides a clean sheet music interface for a traditional music authoring. Plus if you're good with a guitar you get the option of editing songs by specifying the guitar frets rather than the notes. This software, while being a very useful tool in music authoring, kinda lacks playback capabilities. However it can export to midi which can later be imported into LMMS for further editing.
Another great app for the same purpose is Denemo. I haven't had the opportunity to play around with it yet because I installed it the same time I installed Tuxguitar and when I hit the playback button it required some additional setup that I was too lazy to do at that time, but some of you might like it more.
And now to conclude this post with the last, but not least, Audacity. So let's assume you've gotten through the whole audio authoring process and have a wav with the final output and it sounds ok, but not great. That's where Audacity kicks in. Mastering, crossfades, you name it, with just a few clicks this app can make all the difference between good and great.
And that's about it, hope this helps someone
Thursday 29 October 2009 - 21:00:20 - NZR - comments: 2
Brb I guess
I've promised myself that I'm gonna do something spectacular for Astrobite, but college courses have gotten the best of me.
On the bright side, I'm participating in Imagine Cup this year with three friends,Aether Games is our name and our game is... secret, more or less. I'm probably gonna talk about it some more either in spring or in summer.
But until then I'm just gonna have to deal with the college assignments.
Tuesday 27 October 2009 - 23:16:22 - NZR - comments: 0
It's my Birthday
I just turned 20 today and I promised myself that Astrobite will have multiple fighting scenes by the end of the day, or well at least in the next couple of days.
Anyway, woohoo, partyyy.
Thursday 24 September 2009 - 10:54:00 - NZR - comments: 0
AstroBite 0.8
Slowly getting there. I uploaded today a .zip archive with the installer for AstroBite, changed the license to MIT because I think it reflects better the spirit of this game.
Feature wise it has everything you can see in this video, more to come soon.
Monday 21 September 2009 - 20:04:46 - NZR - comments: 0
Programmer's day
Apparently on the 256th day of the year (13 September this year) it's the programmer's day. Add to that that my birthday is coming soon and man only thing I can think of is that september is becoming one big celebration for me.
Friday 11 September 2009 - 20:28:38 - NZR - comments: 0
XNA Koch Snowflake
Got bored today and made this.
It's an XNA implementation of the Koch Snowflake curve, source code and all. It started out as a challenge, but right now I'd much rather think about it as a demo on how to draw lines using SpriteBatch rather than vertices.
Hope it helps someone
Friday 04 September 2009 - 17:53:09 - NZR - comments: 0
Damn Formulae
I'm currently working on the math tutorials and it's damned hard to write mathematic formulas even using special software (Thank you open office suite ).
At least I don't have to draw them...