Armlessoctopus.com Interview

Yesterday, 26th March 2012, Dave Voyles published an interview of me sharing my thoughts and why I worked on Ace on Steroids as well as the open source Indiefreaks Game Framework.

You can read it here: http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2012/03/26/phillipe-da-silva-spills-the-beans-on-ace-on-steroids-and-the-indiefreaks-xna-framework/

Ace on Steroids Windows & IGF v0.9.2.0 releases!

Today is a release day!

Ace on Steroids for Windows

Ace on Steroids just passed IndieCity CAP (Community Approval Process) and is now available on Windows Vista & Windows 7 (32 and 64 bits editions). Browse to the store to see what you get: http://indiecity.com/game/Ace

Other platform releases (WP7 and Xbox 360) as well as Desura’s are getting ready too and I expect a full blown communication about it mid April. At least, that’s what I’m aiming for press wise

IGF v0.9.2.0

On another note, the Indiefreaks Game Framework gets an intermediate release before v1.0 based on requests I received from developers asking for an official release with support for SunBurn engine 2.0.18.7.

It actually is a pretty heavy release even as I’m adding a lot of features I’ve been working on as well as a set of bug fixing and performance improvements.

As usual, you can get the release following this link, its source code here  and the SunBurn Plugin here.

IGF v0.9.2.0 release notes:

• Feature: Added SunBurn engine v2.0.18.7 support (doesn’t support versions below).
• Feature: Added GammaCorrection Post processor to allow developers or even players to tweak the Gamma of the game depending on their screen (courtesy of bamyazi)
• Feature: Added Windows, Xbox 360 & WP7 enabled StorageManager (based on Nick Gravelyn’s EasyStorage) to read/write files for player or game data.
• Feature: Added VirtualGamePad feature for WP7 allowing developers to define Touch areas on screen and mapped gamepad controls.
• Feature: Added IndieCityManager for Windows allowing developers to easily plug IndieCity SDK within their game such as DRM, Achievements and Leaderboards (more information about IndieCity http://developers.indiecity.com)
• Feature: Added support for IGF’s Project Mercury Effect Editor content files. Developers can now create their particle systems in the tool and load them through their Content Projects.
• Feature: Added BEPUPhysicsRenderer manager to IGF Physics assembly allowing developers to see physics debugging information in their game (contacts, islands, physics’ bounding boxes, etc…)
• Bug: Fixed a bug in Goal driven AI where the implemented code wouldn’t get processed in rare occasions.
• Bug: Fixed a few trigonometry issues in AutonomousAgent and Steering Behaviors.
• Bug: Fixed a bug on FadeIn/FadeOut transition effects where they could be called at the same time.
• Bug: Fixed a bug in Lidgren Session Client code where SceneEntities and Commands wouldn’t properly register themselves with the server.
• Bug: Fixed a bug in Lidgren Session to allow the creation of 1 player LAN games (previously, it required at least 2 players which wasn’t possible since the session needs to be created to create a lobby).
• Bug: Commands and Behaviors now properly unregister when their Agent’s ParentObject is removed from SunBurn ObjectManager (accross network too).
• Bug: Fixed a bug where some GUI controls wouldn’t get properly refreshed once loaded.
• Bug: Fixed a bug where GUI controls would throw an exception on WP7 if not using a power of 2 size.
• Misc: Added ClearDevice management on the Application class so developers can control when calls to GraphicsDevice.Clear() are performed.
• Misc: Added Application.Run<T>() enabling automatic Exception report on Xbox 360 (useful for Exception tracking on Xbox 360 builds of your games).
• Misc: Developers can now tell their GameStates if they should use a local ContentManager to load content or use the global Application one.
• Misc: Slight performance increase on games using multiple Layers.
• Misc: InputManager can now return useful Keyboard and Mouse helper methods through its KeyboardInputState and MouseInputState properties.
• Misc: Layer.IsVisible property is now set as Virtual allowing developers to override it and react to property changes on their inherited Layer classes (i.e.: GUI transitions)
• Misc: All session implementations now have an additional Starting state set when the StartSession() is called to allow games to setup and synchronize players, scenes, entities and commands before the actual session really starts.
• Misc: Added an Enabled property on Agent, PlayerAgent and NonPlayerAgent classes to allow easy activation/deactivation of their Behaviors and Commands (useful for game pauses or the like).
• Misc: Performance improvement on Behavior and Command processing.
• Misc: Particle assembly is now splitted in two: Indiefreaks.Game.Mercury.dll for Project Mercury implementation and Indiefreaks.Game.Particles.dll for actual SunBurn engine integration (no breaking changes to the API, just internal design).
• Misc: Small performance improvement on ParticleSystem update and rendering.
• Misc: GUI Image controls now set their rendering size based on the texture size (Scale is applied to Texture width and height)
• Misc: GUI Label control has now a readable Font property allowing developers to access Font properties.
• Misc: Added WP7 touch support to GUI.

Ace on Steroids Announcement trailer

I’ve been quiet recently since I had a lot of side things to be done taking me away from game development.

However, I’m back now and I come with a couple of news:

Ace on Steroids announcement

Finally, I am ready to submit Ace on Steroids on 3 platforms (Windows PC, Xbox 360, WP7) and most of it is currently undergoing. I can now estimate a release date for April 2012 with not much worries (and hopefully on the first half of the month).

I am now working on the marketing material that will accompany the game release including PR, screenshots, videos, etc…

I actually have a simple announcement trailer available which I’m sharing with you today:

I’m also going over the source code of the game to clean it up and place some useful comments to ease developer’s life finding how things work. Once this is done, I’ll start recording the tutorial videos series with updates probably coming every 2 to 3 days until the end of the series.

Indiefreaks Game Framework v1.0

With Ace on Steroids getting released, I’m way more confident for a v1.0 release of the framework. The game development and tests on the 3 platforms helped me a lot finding bugs or issues with the 0.9.1 release. I still have 2 major bugs to solve before releasing v1.0 but it should be along the lines of Ace on Steroids release date.

Until then, I’ll probably make an intermediate release named v0.9.2.0 since I had a couple of requests from IGF users to get a release build that supports the latest version of SunBurn (2.0.18.7). This build should come later this week as soon as I packaged everything correctly.

With that, I’m back to work and you may expect some more news in the coming days