DSP Update – 12th January

Nothing much to report this week….

I put all of the enemies in order for the level and have begun balancing them, the rough cut I have so far is looking fairly good, if maybe a little difficult.
Over the next week I’ll be playing and replaying until I am happy with the difficulty.

I have a massive spreadsheet for enemies and another one for towers.
One of the things I’ve found with the current development version is that there is no reason to build anything except laser towers.. So I’m trying to combat this, which is turning out to be a lot more difficult than I expected!

DSP Update time!

Its time for another weekly(ish) update on DSP progress.
The last week I have been mainly focused on content creation.

  • Change XML so that levels can have multiple maps, similar to Vector TD
  • Surreal contributed 3 new maps for River TD, so you can fight on different (harder!) rivers.
  • River TD now has 46 enemies, all hand crafted by myself.
  • Fixed 100% CPU usage in windows.
  • Range ring improvements – Draw them Anti-Aliased, don’t show both when upgrading if you don’t need to.
  • Graphics to go behind the top numbers in mouse_ui
  • Gave the window a title in windows/linux builds 🙂
  • Added health bars to enemies
  • Fixed towers not shooting on long maps, or shooting off map on short ones
DSP R249

DSP R249

Another DSP Update

Since Marcel complained, here is an update 😛

I’ve added laser weapons and replaced the harpoon gun with a laser instead.

I’ve reduced the size of RiverTD to 480×480 px so that it will fit perfectly on the MouseUI. I plan to redo the Gamepad/PSP interface so it will fit on there too.

I’ve added a fast forward feature, so you can zip through the waves.

Added the ability to sell towers.

Added descriptions to tower upgrades.

Made the existing tower descriptions more descriptive.

And a screenshot:

DSP R196

DSP R196

The Gamepad (PSP) UI is broken at the moment, I plan to rejiggle it so that it is more like the Mouse UI, so I’ll fix it then.

DSP Progress (With Screenshots!)

So progress has been coming along fairly well on DSP.

I’ve moved the text renderer over to a variable width font, which looks much nicer and gives more room for useful text.

The Mouse UI is coming along quite well, the core game can be played through including tower research, wave details, etc.
The only bits missing for an individual level to be properly playable is the ability to upgrade/sell towers, which I’m currently working on.

Here is a totally uninteresting looking screenshot of the current mouse UI:

DSP R118 Mouse UI

DSP R118 Mouse UI

The Gamepad (PSP) UI has fallen into disarray a bit. I plan to clean it up and port over some of the nice UI improvements from the Mouse UI to bring it up to scratch.

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/dsp/r118gp.png

DSP R118 Gamepad UI

Anyway, I just felt like posting an update since I’ve come down with a cold and am having difficulty coding 🙂

Once I get the Mouse UI to a properly playable state, I’ll post a build for windows/linux/mac (and update the sourceforge SVN) which will let level devs (finally) try out the XML based level format.

DSP Mouse UI

If you have been watching the DSP SVN logs recently you will of noticed I checked in a draft for what the Mouse Interface for DSP might look like.
You can check it online here: http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/dsp/draft3.png
I’ve started implementing it in a private SVN, I’ll sync up to SF.net when I’m done with it.
Expect also to see a new level or 2 from myself when this happens 😉

So far the implementation has only changed slightly from the draft, once it gets further along I’ll post an updated draft and maybe some screenshots 🙂

You’ll notice in the draft image that tower upgrades have a textual description. This will effect the gamepad UI also, I’ll check this into the SF.net SVN once it is done.

DSP Update…

If you’ve watched SVN lately(ish) you would of seen that I’ve abstracted almost all the system dependent parts.

I’ve decided I need to do the same with GLBits too, but my linux desktop is currently in the lounge…. so I won’t be working on that for a bit 🙂

I’m going to have a go at compiling the SDL version on my Mac and then I’ll port RiverTD to XML.

Update: Support to build on mac committed 🙂

Update2: RiverTD is now ported to XML, I haven’t fully tested it but it seems to work.

DSP isn’t dead!

I’ve started doing some work on DSP again for…. my own purposes 🙂

First up was separating the UI from the Game logic code (which it should of been in the first place!)
I’m mostly done with this, but still have to clean up the sdl_psp/GameMenu interactions with Game.

Once I’m done with this, SDL_Mixer needs to be abstracted away, glbits2 needs to be improved (remove immediate mode, get opengl to do maths, rectangle sprites, etc)

Then….. Finishing off the XML integration, porting RiverTD to XML, and more… we’ll see 🙂

Check the SVN here for the current todo list

Vodafone NZ iPhone 3G

I bought a 16G iPhone today <3

We tried it with a pre-paid SIM card (after activating it through iTunes with my SIM which is on account – not an iPhone plan) and it worked fine for phone and txt.

VFNZ data will work while on pre-paid. It doesn’t even work on corporate APNs, believe me I have tried! Even the Apple Corporate configuration utility didn’t help 🙁

After talking to the Vodafone NZ iPhone help desk, they mentioned that iPhone has its own APN (like a blackberry on the special blackberry plan), so that would explain it.

Don’t let the store people convince you that you need a data plan to activate it, you definitely don’t! iTunes does it all.

WiFi works of course, If you are in Hamilton then drop an email to shane@velocitynetworks.co.nz – they have set up a WiFi network in the CBD and are providing free access to iPhone users!

Hopefully when the jailbreak arrives we’ll be able to use non iPhone APNs on it like people with hacked 1st Generation iPhones can now!

Update: Talked to the iPhone support team again today, they might be able to set up the corporate APN on my iPhone, they need to talk to level 2 support who don’t work on the weekend of course!

The person I talked to confirmed that they lock down the APN so that people on pre-paid can’t access data. (Bastards!)

Update 2: Got a call back, apparently I need the iPhone APN set up on my SIM to be able to access my corporate APN (which didn’t even make sense to the person I was talking to). Of course to have the iPhone APN set up you need a data plan on your SIM, which negates the whole point of a corporate APN!

Back to waiting for the hacks….

Update 3: You can get data to work on prepay (and apparently corporate APNs, just not mine… 🙁 ), details:

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=76&TopicId=24033

http://www.unlockit.co.nz/

CTorrentPSP – Torrent client for PSP (obv!)

ey All, Neoflash time again!
This time I’m entering a torrent client for PSP, because I thought we need one.
Turns out we don’t really need one, but it is nice to have it anyway 🙂

CTorrentPSP
Download CTorrentPSP Executable
Download CTorrentPSP Source

Read the README.PSP for more details and the list of bugs 😉
Delete the resources/splash.png to get rid of the splash screen.
Let me know what you download with it! lol! 🙂

Developed under M33 3.90-2, using PSPLINK (of course), run under 3.XX Kernel. 1.5 not supported (Use the code, you can make it work on 1.5 if you want it to)