World: r3wp

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.

Second example is direct game engines. I was making some games in 
PTK (it's a c++ library for mac and win) in the past. I wanted to 
use PTK with a higher level language and making a binding to it feels 
like a major pain to me, so after the BlitzMax+Lua experience I simply 
made a simple "engine" with it and embeded enkovm/haxe in it . I 
exposed some functions from c++ side like loadSprite, drawSprite 
and make some call-ins into the nekovm like "draw" and I could already 
code a simple game with it.  So embedding if possible at all of course 
would mean a great strength for rebol in my eyes! I think I once 
noticed that this will be possible in R3 but I couldn't find it later 
and I remember it only vaguely.

links to what I mentioned: BlitzMax + Lua game:

http://itmmetelko.com/blog/2008/10/06/bravekids-summer-job-in-outer-space-2/
     PTK+nekovm experiment http://itmmetelko.com/blog/2008/10/12/haxe-nekovm-meet-ptk/

rebol would be very interesting  choice for this because it can "do" 
and process it's own code at runtime and it would make for a *dream 
combination* of making games that you can code and edit at runtime 
without restarting!

Anyone got experience with Stackless Python? http://www.stackless.com/
It seems to be suited for game programming.

Oldes, I'd suggest you look at http://unity3d.com/unity/

This framework could be a good choice for your port of the flash 
game. You can publish on WIndows/Mac/Wii/iPhone.

I have been playing with their IDE on Mac..it was not so great but 
not much worse than Flash IDE  I know they are now building IDE for 
Windows.

You can script the game using JIT compiled JavaScript or C#(Mono)..what 
a pity there is no Rebol support :)

Looks good.. but we first must finish the Flash version anyway. I'm 
now working on level 11 so at least another 11 still have todo.