World: r3wp

Grrr...  :)  I have no desire for millions, but ... I wrote and published 
a fantasy card game back in the early 80s; an entire decade before 
Magic the Gathering.  They made enough money to buy TSR.   Rassafrassa. 
 :)  Not to say my Monster Romp (tm) game competes with Magic;  I 
paid an artist a whole $3 for each picture, but had I flogged it 
I could be independently wealthy now instead of umm, not.  I have 
about 800 decks of the original 1000 run.  Sold 60 decks the one 
day I set up a booth to sell it, then gave away the rest.  From those 
days forward I promised myself to never pursue an idea.  Best to 
let them die on the operating table and skip the what if crap.  That 
is until I bump into a greedy partner.  Success requires greed imho, 
or at least a state of mind somewhere above "communist".  :)


Paul;  I'm not sure, but I posted this to the calendat back in July. 
 http://rebol/mustard.co.nz/rebtower-0.0.4.zip

after looking at Allen 's  penguin card game, I downloaded the card 
game engine cge.bin file. I do not know how to extract .bin files. 
Has someone used the engine before or could point me in the right 
direction?

:) btiffin, maybe open source and GPL together with a commercial 
license is the answer, at least for us software developers?

Sorry to hear that btiffin, but I find once you grasp the idea behind 
rebtower it is a hoot.  I wish the other player could be a person 
instead of the computer and if I were you I would approach offering 
it to one of those online sites or somewhere they offer internet 
based games and adapt it for such.

John; I am a big fan of OSS (with enough, well barely, wisdom to 
know that people should earn a living)


Paul;  Nothing to be sorry for.  That was actually a happy semi-sarcastic 
griping.  But thanks nonetheless :)

latest rebtower should always be at http://rebol.mustard.co.nz/rebtower.zip

and re multiplayer version of Rebtower - its under development atm.

thanks ICarii

Many games operate with Truevision TGA image files, also known as 
TARGA file format. I've made a function to load such a format:
http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/libs/gfx/tga.r
Usage:
i: load-tga %some-file.tga
img: i/as-image


img is now a REBOL image! type image, that can be viewed as normal, 
e.g.:
view layout [backdrop black image img]

The load-tga function returns an object holding TGA image information 
like image-data, pixel-depth, width, height, etc.

When do you sleep John?  :)

I was wondering the same thing.

LOL :-)

I had some good sleeps this week-end, as I had a fever and a bad 
throat. I also had time to play Assassins Creed and the old Outcast 
some, so I do other things than coding. :-) I've been working on 
many of the things, I post here in REBOL3, for some time, before 
I post it.

I'm thinking of adapting Rebtris for a very basic network-based competitive 
play.  The idea is several people log in (to a minimal CGI server), 
everyone starts at the same time and scores and game-over times of 
all players are constantly refreshed and displayed.  Ultimately determining 
who a) had the highest score and b) lasted the longest.  The game 
would be capped so that no one could realistically survive past 15-20mins 
(I have my reasons).

Am I setting myself a reasonable goal?

Any willing helpers?  (can't offer anything other than gratification, 
I'm afraid)

speaking about games...

this guys (I think its a Singapore based company)

http://www.viwawa.com/


they run their games (Mahjong, Big2 etc) off Amazon's infrastructure 
to help handle the load.

Maybe you know, that I'm using my Rebol/Flash dialect to create this 
Flash game http://machinarium.com/We are still far to complete the 
Flash version, but there is already a demand to create also non Flash 
based versions. It would be nice to have a Rebol version, but it's 
not too realistic in near future so any idea what one could use? 
Is there someone who knows for example SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) 
http://www.libsdl.org/?

Are you creator of that fantastic game ? :)

Oldes, one solution that is easy though a bit ugly, is to make the 
standalone version Windows only (ie. DirectX etc) but make sure it 
works perfectly in Wine. Then you automatically get a version that 
runs on Windows, Linux and Mac (intel). Anyone else can use the flash 
version. (Mac users would need crossover, or manually installing 
wine; but if you think you'll have enough users, you could license 
the transgaming engine and bundle it with the game so that it "looks" 
like a mac game to users - eg. just like Spore is doing)

Oldes, any plans for XBox Live support? I think SDL works there too.

Not just me. I'm just one of 5 people.

One of the demands was to port it to WII. I think I can downgrade 
it to Flash 7  or something like that (not using some effects like 
blurs etc.), which is the last working Flash Player version on it 
but still you need also Opera to run flash content on such a machines 
which eats resources as well. I think I will wait. Maybe there will 
come someone who has the know how and I will prepare what's needed 
(as I have it in bits level as I'm using my dialect:)

Why not use OpenGL?  It seems your game primitives are just that...primitive. 
 A little physics, collision, sound, etc.   Nothing difficult.  IF 
you make it OpenGL, it can work on Mac, and even many Cell phones.


You might be able to write an abstraction layer so you can keep a 
lot of your Flash code in place.

If I were to make games "today" this would be how I would do this.

Port it to Wii, Oldes, I'd like to be beta-tester ;)

I have a Wii too .... ;) (WiiWare or would you publish it yourself 
as a DVD?)

i don't know what the Wii is using so no idea on what the best way 
would be. using opera might be overkill, otoh maybe it'll save you 
a huge amount of dev time.

this guy has a game for windows, mac, linux and wii: http://2dboy.com/games.php

maybe you can email him and ask :)

GOO is nice game.. he is using Python to design the levels http://sourceforge.net/projects/wogedit/

It looks it's not easy to get the Devkit to develop for Wii http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=424725

I think when 'Defend your castle' can be on WiiWare, it's probably 
not so hard to get some license.

But it's just a simple Flash game (without any effects) which you 
probably can play in Opera on Wii... I don't know, I never seen Wii 
in real life.

The Wii version has Wiiremote controls (as I read, I don't have that 
game) so it's probably not Flash version.

Weare thinking about using this https://www.scaleform.com/to get 
ourgame running on consoles, but it's quite expensive

You can negotiate anything.

I know.. we will see... but it looks it's an interesting product. 
And has a nice page.

...and these are great times to cut a deal!

Does anyone know if Ryan Cole's raycasting games are still available 
anywhere? ( previously at http://www.sonic.net/~gaia/games/wanderer/wanderer.r
 and ../see.r )  I've also just begun to look at cyphre's raycasting 
example - is anyone familiar with it?  (in it's default state, it 
crashes).

http://www.rebol.cz/~cyphre/raycasting.r

working:  http://guitarz.org/files/raycasting.r

Very cool!

Reminds me of the old Wolfenstien game that had that maze-like movement.

Wolfenstein had indeed the same type of engine.

I read about raycasting in Olivier's book, newly translated by Peter. 
 It was so simple to understand - just 30 or so lines of REBOL code 
(REBOL has enabled me to explore every development curiousity in 
which I've ever had an interest).  Digging in to Cyphre's code is 
a bit of a challenge - always is - but I'm looking forward to understanding 
it better.   Does anyone know what techniques have superceded raycasting? 
 I'd like to pursue that interest more.  I was so amazed by Brian 
Hoadley's R3d scripts last year - thought they should've won the 
contest.  Was he ever an active part of this community?  Having brilliant 
code like that donated to the community is the biggest reason that 
I hope for stronger REBOL promotion in future.  We need more people!

Richard (Cypher) should be back from holiday soon, if you post to 
him privately he will respond.  

I don't know of any "better" system than ray casting for making that 
type of game.

However, in general, everything is a sub-set of raytraciing.  The 
game is to do the most with the least CPU.
You should look at some of the Quake engine stuff.

Thanks Reichart, I will :)  I've played a little with the OGRE engine 
in Purebasic - I think it's time more of these standard tools start 
getting wrapped in REBOL, now that the command potential of REBOL 
has been opened up.  I personally think that the pay-for-api access 
was one of the main reasons that REBOL never became as popular as 
it should've.  Wrapping cool tools should really help open more eyes 
as to what REBOL can do, at least on initial look'n'see.

yes, I completely agree with NickA... python's lua's haxe's very 
important strenghts were always that you got a easyer "scripting 
/ dynamic lang" access to various c/c++ apis ranging from databases, 
 openssl, libevent..  to wxwidgets to 3d and 2d engines (pyogre, 
pycap, pyglet) ... These bindings aren't all "perfect" fit to the 
language, for example coding xwPython app feels a LOT more low level 
than java swing app as you are dealing with direct c++ api, but they 
give you full world of choices that you otherwise just couldn't have, 
and you can always build wrap core api-s in more in this case rebolish 
shape.

There is also other side of this equation that is also very good 
to have IMHO. Easy binding to c libraries, and the reverse, possibility 
to embed REBOL vm/interpreter into c++. Lua (and nekoVM) for example 
allows both these things very nicely, python seems to be much worse 
at embedding and it's generally discouraged for example. To give 
just 2 quick examples, when I was making BKSJOS game (still in the 
making) I could very simply embed lua into the otherwise BlitzMax 
game and I used just lua instead of something like XML to "define" 
the individual levels, so they could also include "dynamic" logic 
(via events) and special behaviours with no complex coding in the 
blitzmax side.  If I could use REBOL for something like this it would 
be great.