I’ve been meaning to write this one for a couple of months now, but never really found the time and actually got around to do it. So here goes. I started noticing a lot of games on the Android Market with familiar looking icons, and after closer inspection, it’s clear that most of the graphics have been stolen from Jewels. I have not downloaded the games, but I would hazard a guess that the sounds are also taken from Jewels for most of these clones.

Do a quick search for “Jewels” on the Android Market. What do you find? I counted 8 (that’s right, eight!) games that have graphics stolen from my game. Six (6) of those eight games have one of my Jewels graphics as icon image. One clone is the worst offender. It has stolen the graphics, the icon (yes, the actual Jewels-icon a couple of versions back) and get this… even the freaking app description is copied from my game! The best part — and the gist of this entire posting — the game is named Jewels.

Now let’s be realistic: “jewels” is a common word. (All those eight games have the word in their title; most probably there other clones with stolen assets with other names.) It’s not like I invented the word. But why on Earth does Android Market allow two apps (two games, both in the Casual-category) to share the exactly same name? Why? Especially when the copycat app clearly has stolen almost everything from the original app. I mean what the hell? Why couldn’t they check for the app name and prevent duplicate named apps from the Market? I can see them allowing same named apps for different categories, but I don’t understand the current policy at all. (Perhaps that other Jewels has some whitespace characters in its name, I don’t know, but frankly I see no reason why names like “Jewels_“, where _ is a space, should be allowed.)

The Market is also riddled with app spammers, developers (in the lowest possible meaning of the word) that pump out dozens of sub-standard apps and spam them in with different developer accounts. This is of course a whole different issue, and one that doesn’t really matter to me, but it lowers the quality of the marketplace on the whole. I feel that Google should do some cleaning up on the Market, get rid of all the crap — and of the spammed apps using stolen assets (the most obvious cases, at least).

All this “steal assets from a popular game, and name it similarly” is of course to get a share of the attention those popular games receive. I guess I should be flattered that people bother to steal those graphics? Nevertheless, I’m sure that more popular apps have it worse than I do: look at all those wanna-be Angry Birds -games on the Market. Just sad…

***

As you can see, I’m not thrilled with the Android Market as it is now, and I shall carefully consider whether to bring my future games to the platform at all. Apple has things far better on the App Store; the control is much tighter, but at least it keeps some of the crap out. And they don’t allow two apps with the same name, something that became clear to me with iJewels. Not to mention I’ve come to like the iOS-platform much more than Android, but that’s a different story..

This stealing assets thing is also one of the reasons why I still haven’t (and never will, it seems) added the music from iJewels to the Android-Jewels. It would be stolen the instant I hit the big ol’ Publish-button on the Market.

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

After a lot of searching I found a couple of interesting themes. Eventually I selected this nice theme called iNove, and this is what you see, with a few tweaks here and there (mostly fonts and the Home-button graphic). I hope you enjoy the new theme, personally I think it is very refreshing — and as a plus the site also works a bit better than it used to from mobile devices.

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

So it’s been a blast, I still cannot understand why it’s been so successfull. Ok, mostly because it’s Bejeweled, but there are loads of other B-clones on the Android Market, so that doesn’t explain it entirely. I guess there just was a (big) niche for a free & polished B-game.

Although some people have complained about the addition of ads — which are only in the main menu and not some distracting blinking colorful banners either, I need to clarify — turned out it really was the best thing to do. I’m not allowed to share any numbers, but it’s been waaay over my lowly expectations..

I’d like to express my gratitude and thanks to all those numerous active players, and of course to the good folk at Google AdSense for making this possible! I had never anticipated it, but turned out that ad supported apps and games are indeed a viable business model.

…and still it’s only the second most popular free game on the Market; I cannot beat that bloody Solitaire for the life of me!

Driftmoon

Check out Ville’s games at www.monkkonen.net or head directly to 2BeeGames in order to check the finalist games. You can place your vote in either of the sites.

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.

In other news..

I haven’t progressed on the game project, but I have played games. I finished Saints Row 2, it was a blast. Currently I’m playing InFAMOUS, which I bought recently. Great game! Thinking of buying Red Faction: Guerrilla next. So many great games, so little time..

Ok, so I finally got around getting a proper hosting and a domain for my MHGames site, and here we are, at the sparkling new http://www.mhgames.org! Yay! I actually wanted .net-domain, but alas it was already taken (like was .com, .org was my third choice).. Oh well.

So what’s new? Here is a list of things I’ve been doing the past 1,5 weeks:

• I chose to use WordPress, with the intention of combining my existing site with my separate blog. This worked out nicely, I was able to import all my blog postings from Blogger without too much hassle! Great work WP-team. I can highly recommend WP for any blogging purposes, and even beyond that.
• I did a custom theme for this site, basically from scratch. Had some difficulties making it scalable, but it works. I’ve tested it in Firefox 3.5, Chrome, IE 7 & 8, Safari, Konqueror and the latest Opera. All of those worked fine, phew. The theme is valid XHTML and CSS, so I can always blame the browser if something doesn’t work! Needless to say, I’m happy with the results on how this theme turned out.
• Finally I crafted the old MHGames-content over to this new site.

Now that this site contains both my development blog and my games, direct all your gaming needs to this address, so to speak. I will eventually get rid of the old site, so remember to update your bookmarks, if any!

That is all this time, enjoy the new site and do drop a comment on what you like or don’t like. I hope to resume developing my game project now that this site is alive, stay tuned.

Although PolyAnim is generally on hold due to the game project, I made a few optimizations (reducing garbage generation mostly, still quite high though) to it. As for the game, I’m still working on the engine side — BUT — I’ve written down some things on the game plot and other design! I have a vision of the game beginning, but the actual plot still needs to be thought up. Sooo yes, I don’t have much at all, but it’s a start. Luckily I don’t have too much pressures on the story side, as even if it ends up sucking donkey balls (excuse my language), it’s still infinitely better than the “stories” of my previous games combined!

Meanwhile, in the programming land…

It’s been so long since my last update, I’ve worked on so many things I don’t even remember them all. Instead of trying to remember the details, I’ll just list the things I do remember:

• First of all, I started using revision control for the source code (+ related resources). Instead of using the familiar Subversion, I decided to try something new and thus chose Git. All in all, this helps me keeping track of the things I do and also serves as a backup in case my computer decides to blow up. Git is nice since you can use it locally, on any directory without a server.
• VBO (Vertex Buffer Object) support. This means storing geometry to the GPU and rendering it in one batch. Basically it means better performance. Using VBOs I could optimize the text rendering by buffering the rendered glyphs into a batch, up until the buffer fills up (or the texture changes). The buffered glyphs are rendered in one go, and the process starts again.
• Particle systems! I started doing a “particle engine” a while back, got it done except for the different emitters. I still need to finish this up: complete the basic point emitter, add more emitters and add the ability to load particle systems from resources (perhaps a YAML or XML file). VBOs are used to render the systems, when supported by the GPU.
• Lighting system improvements. Lights can now have different effects on them, like flickering, fading and pulsating. The effects are defined in a YAML file of properties.
• Player character designs. I’m not sure if this guy ends up being the final character, but might be. I did a quick idle animation for him (need to adjust that a bit, though), I should add a walk cycle next as it’s quite boring to watch now. (The previous animation, test from PolyAnim, did walk!)
• And now for something completely different: Water effects. Yes. This is mostly eye candy (as Box2D doesn’t support buoyancy yet, I think the water is only going to be used for restricting player movements as in the player can’t swim..) so it made no sense to do it at this phase of development. But I did it anyway, I’m childish like that.. The water reflects the scenery above (provided the GPU supports Render-to-texture) and I even wrote a fragment shader to make it all wavy and twirling..

I have noticed a problem during the development of this game, which was not apparent on my previous game projects (since they were much shorter): I have this annoying tendency to start working on different (sub)projects even when the previous stuff is still not finished. That means I have heaps of unfinished subsystems in this engine, like the particles, scripting, triggers, etc. And I’m already thinking of doing the sprite system and other things as well! I mean, what the hell, it should be bloody obvious I should concentrate on the unfinished things and finish them.. Argh, hopefully I can sort this mess out. Speaking of which, I guess I should start coding the particle system to an usable state.

And of course, to all aspiring game developers: design the game first, damnit! Figure out the plot, setting, characters and whatnot BEFORE getting sucked in the bottomless fathoms of Teh Engine(tm)! Yes, I really should take my own advice some day!