MHGames

UPDATE on May 20th: So Google I/O 2013 happened. They announced — finally — a gaming service called Google Play Games. This is pretty much what I was expecting to have after last years I/O, but nevertheless the thing is now real. The biggest surprise was that it also supports iOS devices! :O

So I had already integrated OpenKit for Jewels 2, which was great, but there were some nice bonuses with Google’s solution. After thinking about it for some days and trying the code, I made the decision to switch to GPG from OpenKit. As GPG also supports iOS, there was not much point of keeping the both services implemented.

Naturally this has caused a delay in Jewels 2 development, since I had to rewrite the leaderboard and cloud save (*) stuff, but it only took about three days of work, so not that bad. However, Google requires a game using the services to have at least 5 achievements. As I wrote earlier (below, actually), my plan was to add the achievements in a later update, but now I need to have them in by the first release. Oh well, shouldn’t take too long. Still a few days of May left, let’s see if I can get the Android version out before June (probably not, though).

*) Doing cloud save is actually pretty difficult when you cannot merge the datasets when there is a conflict.. The end result is that the game should not be played simultaneously on several devices when syncing on the same account, because only the latest sync is kept. I’m still testing various approaches of manual, semi-automatic and automatic sync. If I could merge the datasets, using automatic sync would be a no-brainer, but alas, it’s more difficult in my case.

The original post is below:

Long time no write; it’s time to unleash a quick post for your reading pleasure! I have some exciting news to share with you — and no, it’s not the release date, sadly that one is still a mystery even to myself.

However, I can give you the Ultimate Deadline(TM) for Jewels 2. This has been known to my Twitter followers for some time now: I will do my best to release the game before July 2013, hopefully sooner than later! What’s so special about July, then, I hear you ask? Oh, you didn’t ask? Well I was sure I… *ahem* Anyway, in July my wife and I are expecting our second baby, a little sibling to our now 3 year old daughter. So that’s the Ultimate Deadline(TM). Now, if I had to guesstimate the release date, I might be inclined to say May instead of June, but too early to tell for certain..

But wait! There is more. Remember I talked about the social gaming components earlier? Continuing on that note, I am hereby announcing that Jewels 2 will support cross-platform leaderboards (and hopefully cloud sync of game data) through Google Play Games (see the update above) our friends at OpenKit! This means that players can compete with each other in the numerous game modes, no matter whether they’re playing on an iPhone or an Android device.

And even better, I’m hoping to add in cloud synchronization of the game data, meaning all your player profiles (if you have more than one), statistics and saved games in Jewels 2 are accessible from any other device you might have. On iDevices Jewels 2 naturally also supports Game Center leaderboards. Of course, should Google unveil some magical gaming component at this years Google I/O, I’d be delighted to support it as well.

As for achievements: currently the plan is to first release Jewels 2, and then in a later update add some achievements for the players to reach for. What’s on my TODO list before the release, then? Well I’ve still got a couple of background scenes to draw/set up, the cloud sync thing, some minor code thingies and some polish. And testing, of course. So not too much work, actually, which is nice.

What else… Oh, you might have noticed the screenshot on the right? (That also appeared on my Twitter before; keep an eye out for more, especially on #ScreenshotSaturdays! ) It’s from the COLLECT-mode, where you need to collect an increasing amount of each jewel per level.

Aaaand that’s it for this post, bye!

(a bit late now, but anyway…)

Happy holidays folks! Here is an appropriate picture of our baby girl, Nella (click to enlarge):

Yes, this was the big personal event I was talking about earlier.. My wife Annemari gave birth to a little, healthy baby girl on the 3rd of May! That makes me one happy (newbie) dad.  She’s four weeks old soon — doesn’t sound like a long time, but it’s been all new for both of us, so it feels like it’s been much longer already.. Most of my time now revolves around her, as you probably can understand. Learning new things about her every day, it’s nice!

Well, to wrap this post up, here are some pictures of her. The pics are from the oldest to the newest, left to right.

Hi, everybody! (“Hi, doctor Nick!” …sorry.)

Little background on today’s topic: When I first heard of the Google Android-platform some years back, I thought it was interesting but never actually expected to see proper devices (i.e. mobile phones) coming to reality. Now that there is several Android phones from a few manufacturers, I’ve been eyeing out the devices with great interest for a while now, I guess closer to a year actually. Waiting for them to arrive here in Finland. And, as you might have guessed already, they have arrived.

The Hero emerges..

So, I got myself a brand new HTC Hero! Obviously, the main interest for me was the prospect of developing software (ok, games) for the Android-platform. Also, it’s darn good phone as well, who would have thought of it? My previous phone was a few years old Nokia, just a basic model with no bells and/or whistles — so this is all new to me.

Why not iPhone, then? Well, there are several reasons I went with Android:

1. The development environment. It’s free, cross-platform and well integrated into Eclipse. Plus I get to write in Java, which I very much prefer over Objective-C.
2. I don’t need a freaking Mac for developing (as if the phone wasn’t expensive enough..)! I can use my old, cruddy PC instead. 
3. Android Market, while still in its early stages, has great potential. Plus not nearly as much competition as in the iPhones App Store (obviously this also means less customers, but things improve when Android-phones gain more market, I hope).

Read more…

I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux 90% of the time, and Windows XP 10% of the time, for about a year and half now. I’ve been keeping an eye out for Windows 7, though, as it seemed like a good Windows after the disappointing Vista.

So when I saw that Windows 7 RTM was already available at MSDN AA, I decided to give it a shot, having never seen it in action. I was expecting problems, since this PC is based on components made in 2004, so it is quite old. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked quite well, even before installing any drivers manually. Networking worked, sound worked, the spiffy Aero desktop compositioning worked. (My tv-tuner, Terratec Cinergy C PCI, didn’t work, but that’s no biggie — it works in Ubuntu.) Then I tried some OpenGL — oops, no hardware acceleration. No problem, I thought and went to install the latest drivers for my Geforce 7600 GS (AGP).

After the driver update I tried Tomatoes, worked just fine. Great! I went on installing Eclipse and setting up my workspace for the game project going on. And what did I find out: it was running very slowly, barely making 40-50 fps and fluctuating a lot! What the hell, it works solid 60 fps even in Linux (it’s capped to 60 fps, so in reality it would run even faster), not mention Windows XP!

Then I thought, ah, the Aero effects, obviously they would affect the performance on machine this old. Disabled Aero, tried again: same results. I tried plenty of older drivers, plus a new set of drivers released a couple of days ago. Nothing changed. It would sometimes reach 60 fps when there was not much to render, but especially the water shader was killing the performance. This was not acceptable, I mean it does not really motivate me to develop something running too slowly, when I know it works much better on this very piece of hardware I’ve got.. Of course I understand that it will run slower than in XP (on this old PC), since W7 requires more resources to run, but it should not make this big a difference in fps.

After asking about the problem on Windows 7 forums and getting nothing, I decided to admit my defeat.. I guess either the OpenGL drivers just are not what they were before, or this PC is plainly too old for W7. I suspect the first. Of course, OpenGL has always been the ugly step child in Windows world while Direct 3D is receiving the love, so.. Too bad, really, I was starting to like W7.

I went and dropped back XP, and boom, everything runs fast again. Ubuntu dual-boot comes a bit later.

However, I might try W7 on the laptop of mine, that is currently running Vista. Vista seems too bulky for that cheap laptop, starting up very slowly etc., so I suspect W7 might help a bit. Indeed, I will probably see how the install goes on the laptop. Stay tuned for my report!

UPDATE: Writing this from the laptop running W7. Seems to be working fine, except the smart card reader. Better than Vista, that’s for sure.