Untangle Deluxe

Personally i have´nt seen this type of game before, even though i consider myself an old rat in the gaming bussiness. Unfortunally after searching the AppStore i found that there was already 4-6 untangle type games. None of them looked as good as the Untangle Deluxe though, so i am still hopefull

Step 1 - Backgrounds

I got all the graphics from Nonoba in a .fla file, so the first step was therefore to manually export every piece of graphic from the Flash file to .png.

The game starts on the ground, where your task is to follow and untangle a string to your kite. The levels are therefore pretty tall, as they progress vertically throughout the game. My first decision was therefore  whether the game should run in landscape or portraitmode. I know you can make a game adaptable to booth, but that is just a road you don´t wanna walk! After looking through some of the levels in the original game i decided to go with the landscape mode. The original game was running in a 600×500 window and had an aspect ratio of 1.2, that meant i had to scale and cut the graphics to fit the 480×320 (1.5) iphone display.

I started with exporting the background graphics for world 1, which when scaled to a width of 480 pixels was still 4480 pixels tall. The maximum OpenGL texture size on the iPhone is 2048×2048, so obviously i had to split the image into several smaller images. Even though a texture that large was acceptable it would still have consumed too much memory for me (and the iPhone) to accept, so splitting it up was the only choice anyway.

There are 16 levels in each world, which leaves a vertical progression of 250 pixels for each level. Which means that everytime you complete a level the view moves 250 pixels up the tree. Instead of manually splitting the PNG file up i of course did i programatically.

( <- The picture to the left is a scaled down version of world 1)

Step 2 – Loading the leveldata

I got the level data as an actionscript file, which consisted of nothing but pure multidimensional arrays like this:

$.Init.Levels = [
 [[181,174,0,218,58,0,330,117,0,318,296,0,345,336,0,383,357,0,426,357,0,472,351,0,511,363,0,540,395,0],
  [8,9,0,7,8,0,6,7,0,5,6,0,4,5,0,3,4,0,2,3,0,1,2,0,0,1,0,0,3,0,1,3,0,0,2,0],[],[]],
 [[227,200,0,359,200,0,293,423,0,406,339,0,176,342,0],[2,4,0,2,3,0,3,4,0,1,2,0,1,3,0,0,2,0,0,4,0,1,4,0,0,1,0]
 ,[],[]],[[290,71,0,290,270,0,293,348,0,294,421,0,224,391,0,359,387,0,224,302,0,357,301,0],

To convert it to something a bit more sane but still save space (i know, it´s only a couple of kilobytes, but i´m from the era where every byte mattered) i converted all the arrays to XML, but conserved the comma seperated strings so it looked a little like this instead:

<level id="2">
 <knots>227,200,0,359,200,0,293,423,0,406,339,0,176,342,0</knots>
 <lines>2,4,0,2,3,0,3,4,0,1,2,0,1,3,0,0,2,0,0,4,0,1,4,0,0,1,0</lines>
</level>

It just felt better.. like sorting your socks; at the end of the day it doesn´t matter, but it just makes you feel good (or am i alone on this one?). It also made it really easy to parse with the SAX based NSXMLParser.

When put together it looks like this running in the iPhone emulator:

If you didn’t get it by now the game is about untangling the strings by moving the knots around. I therefore needed to do some basic line intersection detection testing on all the strings. As stubborn as i am i of course HAD to do this manually, without using the internet. So i dug up my math formula collection “Matematik 112″, and boiled it down to the following pseudocode (Where A and B are the points of one line, and C and D are the points of the other)

     (Ay-Cy)(Dx-Cx)-(Ax-Cx)(Dy-Cy)
 r = -----------------------------
     (Bx-Ax)(Dy-Cy)-(By-Ay)(Dx-Cx)

     (Ay-Cy)(Bx-Ax)-(Ax-Cx)(By-Ay)
 s = -----------------------------
     (Bx-Ax)(Dy-Cy)-(By-Ay)(Dx-Cx)

From here  it is only a matter of testing whether r and s are between 0 and 1. The only problem here (which puzzled we for a while) was that the lines that are connected to the same knot of course share a common point, which makes them intersect. I solved this by offsetting the points where the lines are connected to the knots by 0.1 pixels (hey, we are in the 21′st century, we work with floating points and ride flying cars, right?)

So, after about a week of development the game is actually already playable. Miles from finished, but the basic gameplay mechanics are done.

Next up: implementing the final two level elements, the black unmovable knot and the snapping slot.

As an example, i took not just a random screenshot, but the very first screen you are presented with when you install Ubuntu. As everyone knows, first impressions last, so this should be a pretty crucial part:

(Drag mouse over to see my edited version)

For everyone with just a tiny sense of layout and margins, this is just a nightmare. Everything is squeezed together, and it just looks messy and amateurish. In general the background, the colors and everything has a really nice look, so i am guessing that some kind of graphic artist must be involved, that knows what he is doing. The question is then, is it just a bunch of long haired hippie open source programmers that is messing everything up afterward? (let the flamewars begin!)

This is an issue not only in the above installation screen, but throughout the entire distribution.

Note: I am not a graphic artist, but i took the liberty of correcting (quite a few) things on the above screenshot. Everything is probably not perfect, but i think most people will agree that i has a much more straight look. It took me ~15mins to make the corrections, why haven´t anyone done this before? Come on, it´s version 10.04? (yes yes, i know, open source, i should do it myself)

Last night while waiting for some old QIC-80 tapes to restore on my 486, i coded this classic shadebobs demo effect for my Nintendo DS.

 

 

(Screenshots are from the DeSmuME emulator, but of course i tested it on the real thing as well)

I have custom firmware on my DS, and using some custom drivers for my wireless network card on the PC, i can upload the code to the DS directly from visual studio

It’s nothing you have’nt seen before, but if anyone should want it, here it is:

Shadebobs DS source

Shadebobs DS Binary

WLA DX v9.5a windows binaries

For those who have no clue what i’m talking about, WLA-DX is a cool assembler which handles 6502 / 6510 / Z80 / etc. processors, and have a lot of special Gameboy, SNES and SMS features. Go check it out at www.villehelin.com/wla.html

I must say i´m really impressed with Netbeans 6! I have been working professionally with Netbeans since version 3.x, but have never really felt that any of the major versions have been really ground shaking and innovative. This time though, the thing that struck me the most was, everything in the UI is SO polished! I am a real UI nazi and there was so many UI things that annoyed me in the previous versions of Netbeans (though it was still far better than eclipse!)

Especially the new deployment options are so cool! There is even an option so i can deploy the midlet directly to my S60 nokia phone directly after building it, using the standard Nokia USB cable that came with my phone. Sony Ericsson has had this for ages with their remote debugging capabilities in their SDK. Correct me if i´m wrong, but i have´nt seen this on any of my Nokia handsets yet?

Anyway, I renamed the game to Selectrons (actually because of lazyness due to filesystem conflicts hehe), and ported it to J2ME in an evening. It´s still needs some more functionality etc. to be really fun, but i can´t really think of anything right now. Suggestions are welcome

Download

source (Netbeans 6 project)

Binary (.jar)

It seems like Nintendo never released the NES in russia, so instead they made their only clone, which was as popular over there as NES was in the rest of the world. It came in all sorts of exotic cabinets, which resembled the looks of various other console. Even today you can still buy dendy clones in new original packages, which looks like PS1, Sega Megadrive, and more! I got the Megadrive look’a'like:

I got 3 (+116) games with it:

Adventure island 3, Contra 6, Chip’n'Dale, and “116 In 1 Super game”, which funny enough features a picture of Sonic on the cover!?. The roms are pretty much just copies of the original games, and i couldn’t spot any particular differences at first sight. The 116-in-1 are as usual just 3-4 games, which has been given to 116 programming monkeys on LSD, which afterwards has changed some colours in the sprites, messed up a couple of backgrounds, and split the various levels in the games, into seperat games!

My favorite is “Chip’n'Dale: Rescue rangers”, which i used to play a lot as a kid, and regularly still listens to the soundtrack from.

Tonight i decided to play through some levels, but ended up completing the game within an hour. It has been a while since a completed a game, since all newer games seems to take months to complete, so i was of course pretty excited after completing the last boss: what was the treat, what eye candy did the developers had in hand for a worthy player like me? Well, to my dissapointment the game just showed the following picture with some japanese subtitles, and afterwards just froze the whole damn machine?!

But anyway i had a good laugh, and i certainly enjoyed the game as much as i did 17 years ago.. Waauu it has been a while…

The M/S Halfmachine project

Let me quote a description from the halfmachine website:

HALF MACHINE is an artist collective based in Copenhagen. HALF MACHINE is interactive art installations, dance performance and concert event – collaborative art experiments involving the audience.

And from a review:

“Objects and dancers are suspended in a giant mobile, robots, video art and live concerts in water and light – a crazy and surreal eco system in the midst of an electronic playground”

The halfmachine project lately bought an old cable tug boat, a really cool old rusty industrial kinda’looking vehicle. Perfect for a surrealistic cyberpunk high voltage future art event! Somebody was so lucky to get their hands on the old scoreboards from “Parken” (the main football stadium in Copenhagen), which we was invited to come and hack.

The display boxes was equipped with a logical 8×16 matrix of 12 LED cells, which could display either red, green, or booth. And the boxes could be daisy chained, so you could shift data onto an infinite number of displays. Mads from halfmachine managed to reverse engineer the control board protocol, so all i had to do was hook up a microcontroller, and start coding! I was really rusty in low-level C coding, but i just felt so nice to fiddle with it again, and i kinda got the hang of it quite fast. We used the Arduino AVR boards for this, which worked perfectly with the supplied IDE and avr-gcc based compiler.

The first thing that came into my mind when thinking of what to code, was of course a sinus scroller. The displays wasn’t quite big enough for that, and i didn’t have time to make an abstraction layer that made it possible to place any number of displays in arbitrary setup, but only to chain them horizontally. So i decided to make a regular scroller, with a sinus curve behind it

I took the PC Bios font, which was the only font i could think of which was easy to find, and came in an 8×8 px bitplane, and quickly threw together a php script on my macbook, which printed out the sinus tables i used for the background.

The text that Pipaluk (the female heart of halfmachine) decided to show on the scroller was:

WHAT REALLY COUNTS IN THE HISTORY OF CULTURE AIMS AT THE BOTTOM LINE ONLY TOWARDS THE MOMENT WHEN THE NIGHT OF UNLIMITED DESIRE SOMEHOW IS CHANGING INTO THE BLINDING RADIATING DEMAND FOR MORE CONSCIOUSNESS FLUNG OUT IN EACH DIFFERENT TONE OF VOICE BY ALL PSYCHICS

L’ECART ABSOLU, 1965.

A cool text for the context, even though i still don’t quite understand the deeper meaning of it.

I managed to get time to code another little thing, for the displays placed along the main dance floor:

A man hanging in chains, above my virtual flowerbed

The flowers slowly grew up, bloomed, and eventually died out and made a new spore. All in a nice and slow tempo during the entire evening. Jacob the adventurous managed to screw it up all of a sudden though, when he demonstrated for some friends how easy it was to switch microcontroller boards on the displays, which resulted in a “bug swarm” randomly flashing in my pretty flowerbed! Funny enough, they spread out to 2 of the flowerbeds, and after about an hour they died out?!

It was a really remarkable and astonishing show, with everything from naked people in a tube of water, to Pipaluk dancing on a submarine, which sailed around in the harbor, and eventually dived with her standing on top. I can really recommend you go see it! the show is open every fri/sat/sun from 21-02 the rest of August. For further info, check:

http://www.halfmachine.dk/

Step 1: Installing hardware drivers

Under DOS, the lowest layer that communicates with the network card is a “packet driver”. This does not include any form of TCP/IP stack, but is merly a physical hardware abstraction layer, for sending raw frames. First you must determine which chipset your network card has:

The biggest chip with the most legs is usually the one we’re looking for. In this case it’s a Realtek 8019AS. Luckily realtek has always been very open, and good at supporting their old products, so i was able to find the original driver on their website.

Apart from the vendor, another great place for finding packet drivers is:

http://www.crynwr.com/drivers/

http://www.georgpotthast.de/sioux/packet.htm (also has a PCI detection utility)

The driver file itself should only be a small .com file, which you can run when needed (preferably run it in autoexec.bat at startup).

Step 2: A TCP/IP stack

There is no resident TCP/IP stack for DOS (maybe some commercial ones i haven’t heard of?), so most programs include their own. A popular (and free) TCP/IP stack is WATTCP. It doesn’t contain any resident daemons, but is more of a socket library you use when compiling network programs. So ping’ing the DOS machine from another host is not possible, unless a ping aware program is running on the DOS machine.

One thing can be shared system wide with WATTCP thoug, the configuration file, which is called WATTCP.CFG. WATTCP Clients tries to locate this in the PATH, or by looking at the enviroment variable WATTCP.CFG

wattcp.cfg:

my_ip=192.168.1.2 # ip address of local machine
netmask=255.255.255.0 # subnet mask
nameserver=192.168.1.1 # nameserver
gateway=192.168.1.1 # default gateway
hostname=me.foobar.com # hostname


All programs based on WATTCP will try to locate this file, and use it these settings.

There is also a 32-bit version of WATTCP available called Watt-32, with a lot of utilities etc.:

http://www.bgnett.no/%7Egiva/

Step 3: Applications!

There is some excelent lists of TCP/IP applications for DOS at the following sites:

http://www.dossolutions.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/wattcp.htm

http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0503736/php/drdoswiki/index.php?n=Main.Browsers

http://www.dendarii.co.uk/FAQs/dos-apps.html

http://sbeam.dk/projects/themes/

Take a look at: sbeam.deviantart.com