Check out my Bitcoin related service – SteamCoin.com

A few months ago I opened up a service called SteamCoin that lets you buy Steam games, packs and DLC for Bitcoin. Over the past couple of months I’ve put a bunch of updates live on the site, including support for packs and DLC, as well as a back-end update that ensures that all Steam game prices are accurately reflected on SteamCoin.

Unlike other services out there that let you buy Steam games for Bitcoin, SteamCoin.com doesn’t require you to remember app IDs, nor do you need to download any browser plugins or other programs. These features make SteamCoin.com the leader in Steam gift services for Bitcoin.

Give it a try!

Project Broadside Updates!

I’ve written up several new posts over at the Project Broadside blog, focusing on Tim’s work on the model for the Imperial Crewman (the concept for which he finished based on the original front view by Eric) as well as the first two posts in my series on integrating NVIDIA’s APEX SDK.

Here’s a full list.
Imperial Crewman Low-Poly Model
Imperial Crewman Hi-Poly Model Progress
APEX SDK and Project Broadside (an Intro to APEX and how it will work in the game)
APEX Integration – The First Steps
APEX Integration – Creating The (APEX)World

Imperial Crewman Low-Poly Front View

 

Imperial Crewman Hi-Poly Progress Front View

 

 

Cross-Post: Broadside Imperial Crewman Concept Update

Ortho concept for the Imperial Crewman character. Click for a larger version.

Cross-Post: Small Concept Art Update at Broadside

Click to go to the Broadside blog for a larger version!

Another update at Project Broadside.

Cross-Post: Project Broadside Update

Work has been going along steadily on my main development project, Project Broadside. A team-based multiplayer FPS set in the skies, Broadside pits two teams against eachother in physics based airship combat. Captain the ship while your team mans the cannons, or fight it out as a crewman against the enemy team using pistol, sword or cannon. The first team to destroy the enemy ship and send it plummeting from the heavens wins! More info about Broadside here.

And now, the part everyone always waits for: art!

The final pistol model changed quite a bit from this initial concept.

As you can see, the evolution of the pistol from concept to model introduced a lot of design changes. The original design was much less traditional.

For more development art shots of Broadside, check here.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

For US readers, you are no doubt celebrating Thanksgiving today with your families. For those of you that (for some reason) decide to visit my very modest blog on this holiday, Happy Thanksgiving.

To my international readers (if any) Happy Consolation Pseudo-Holiday. Or something.

This post really brought to light something for me, which is that I don’t really understand the readership of this blog. When I checked the stats today, and noticed there were 31 views across the blog, I was somewhat perplexed.

What I *do* know is that it seems my OpenVG/SVG related posts are easily the most popular, which isn’t a surprise to me. There is very little information about how to properly get SVGs loaded and rendered fast enough for interactive framerates (needed for games or other simulations involving rapidly changing path data). It took me about a month, spread over a couple of years to really find the best ways of doing these things, and there was almost no information, and what there was is very outdated.

Anyway, Happy Turkey-Day to those of you celebrating, and happy reading to the rest.

Reading Comprehension Fail and Windows Phone 7 Games

An orthogonal map in Tiled.

This was originally going to be a post on my Facebook page, but it became a little too long. It’s been a while since I posted on the blog here, and I’ve mostly been working on things other than the SVG Game Engine. Although I’ve back burnered that for now, I will definitely revisit it when I stabilize my job situation somewhat. I’ve been mostly working on contract projects with some tinkering on the side for the past few months.

I’ve started working on a Windows Phone 7 game to hone my C# skills and I found a loader class for the map files that Tiled (a FOSS 2d tile map editor) spits out.

I decided to use the “Object Layers” feature of Tiled to place the fortresses on my map. I go into the code and look for how to access the objects loaded in…oh, it doesn’t handle them. Shit.

So I go in and look at the map file (it’s just an XML file) and figure out the structure and start expanding the loader to load in Object Layers and objects, and their properties (which are key=value pairs, essentially). I write it all up, I’m basically ready to test it. As a courtesy to the author and other people using the class, I post on the blog saying I’ll go ahead and release my changes to incorporate the new feature.

But wait…what’s this? The post has a link *in the first sentence* to someone that already fixed the loader to have the features I just wrote. And *that* post has a link to a CodePlex page where someone took the loader and properly fixed it up into a XNA Content Pipeline library. Goddamnit.

Now I am going off to completely rejigger my project to use the proper lib, which is all set up nice and neat the right way.

Blah, reading comprehension fail.

—

If you missed the links in the body of the post, here they are again:
Tiled: A F/OSS 2D tilemap editor.
TiledLib: A C#/XNA library for processing maps from Tiled.

Project Broadside Site Design Update

Tom and I (co-creators of Project Broadside) have recently spent some time updating the site’s Drupal theme to be more in line with the game’s style.  The new theme elements are a combination of our ideas and Tom’s quick Photoshop skillz.  Check it out!

Project Broadside

Wow, it’s been a while!

I haven’t posted here in a while, so firstly, apologies to everyone that checks this blog regularly.  SVG Game Engine project is definitely not dead, I will still work on it at some point. In this first post of a several more to come, I want to just update everyone onwhat I’ve been doing and why this blog has gone without an update in a while.

The past couple of months I have been scraping by via some contract programming work for BrokeAss Games, LLC, doing some very cool stuff with the Torque 3D engine. I can’t reveal what they have in store but it’s definitely cool tech and will be worth every penny. BrokeAss is an awesome team full of great guys and they are a blast to work with!

Speaking of BrokeAss Games, I recently met up with them at SIGGRAPH (thanks guys for the pass!) 2010 and hung out for a couple hours on the show floor. While I was there, BrokeAss Jon (heheh) was telling me I should just prototype the hell out of Project Broadside, and not sweat the art so much (I was spoiled by Matt giving me so much cool art!). I took his advice to heart and two weeks later, a VERY rough version of all the tech I need for my dream game, Project Broadside, was done. There are still some mighty bugs to work out and a lot of art assets are needed (something like 12 models per faction, which is pretty modest, but quickly adds up).

I’ll be showing off some more info about Project Broadside soon, and also introducing the project site and a couple of REALLY big announcements.

And a shot of the first ship (unfinished, heavily alpha state, but you can run around on it while it moves and go between decks, and pilot it).

SGE – Alternate Cloud Style

Last night I was experimenting some with a different cloud style at the behest of my girlfriend.  I’m not really sure which I like best at the moment, but I figured I’d go ahead and post a screenshot and see if anyone had any thoughts.

These clouds look more "cloud-like" certainly, but do they fit with the miminalistic style of the other elements?