Monthly Archives: July 2008

Twilight Hack is Go!

Posted by on July 29, 2008 No comments

The “Twilight Hack” has been out for quite a while now (a carefully mangled zelda: twilight princess save game that causes a buffer overflow, giving you access to the wii hardware), but I hadn’t used it. It was a cool thing, but it was such a pain! Previously you needed some extra hardware, an SD card, the save game, and some homebrew. You would copy the homebrew you wanted onto the SD card (along with the hack, if necessary), plug it into the wii, copy the save over, run twilight princess, and execute the problem to get to the game you want to play. Every time you want to play that you need to go through that process, and switching games requires going to the wii, getting the SD card, taking it to the computer, putting a new game on it, and so on. This placed it firmly into the ‘novelty’ category for me so I appreciated it from afar.

Now, things have changed. Someone finally created ‘the homebrew channel’ which installs a channel onto the wii that arranges all your homebrew and allows you to boot them without the twilight hack. Furthermore, using a program called wiiload you can now stream games from your computer to the wii over wireless, so no more switching that SD card all the time.

With these (fairly) new releases, I finally got excited enough to try them out on my wii. To be honest, I haven’t even installed the homebrew channel yet, but I successfully ran the hack and played a few test runs of majhong with a giddy smile on my face. Exciting! I can’t wait to get the homebrew chanel up and running and start playing everyone’s games and apps.

Maybe, just maybe, this could be the thing that FINALLY pushes me over the edge to learn C. Ewwww, I hope not… But I would love to homebrew… Guh!

Are you kidding me?

Posted by on July 17, 2008 2 comments

Last night I installed Ubuntu on my other machine via Wubi so I could test and package CGL on *nix. Today has been nothing but trouble.

Actually that isn’t true. It started out well – CGL runs beautifully on linux, no tweaks required. Huzzah! Making an executable, however, is an entirely different story. Let’s all be honest with each other — I know nothing about C++. It’s my biggest downfall as a programmer. I just can never stick with it enough to learn it — so many crappy, pain in the ass things to hold it back. This is not an excuse – I should learn it. Especially if I want to be in game development. Anyhoo…

I finally broke down and asked for help getting pyinstaller to compile. Apparently it isn’t finding some important libs that even I know about, like string.h and the like. Much searching, much failing, until I finally stumble on this link – http://www.spiration.co.uk/post/1291. Apparently, ubuntu ships with gcc and make, but no include files necessary for, well, everything.

Yes. Read it again.

I’m still recovering from the anger/bewilderment combo.

Compo Game Loader

Posted by on July 16, 2008 3 comments

There is talk during each pyweek and ludumdare about a program that manages the playing and judging of the games. Apparently Unnheulu made a bash script last pyweek, but I’ve been wanting a GUI solution that works on any (or almost any) game, not just ones set up using the pyweek skellington, so I started the Compo Game Loader project.

The project is hosted at google code and you can see it here: http://code.google.com/p/compogameloader/

Here is a list of some interesting features:

  • Load a directory and CGL creates a list of all the games inside
  • CGL tracks which games you have already played so you can see what still needs to be judged
  • CGL can track games in an unlimited number of folders in case there is an overlapping compo or similar situation
  • Authors can add a lot of extra info by adding a simple CGL config file to their game folder. CGL can show author info and links, screenshots, dependencies, and a link to the judging page for that game
  • Searches for a readme and displays it in CGL for your reference
  • In python applications, CGL can test if the required dependencies are already installed
  • Play games from inside CGL with console output shown at the bottom. No need to open consoles to get error info and trackbacks

Right now CGL is about 95% complete: Almost all the code is in, but it needs some testing and I’d like to get some user feedback. That’s where you come in.

First and foremost I need some sample games. I will download old pyweek games from the site if necessary, but I really would rather have games given to me by the authors. This allows me to

  1. test lots of different game structures
  2. get feedback on the config XML setup

I think the config file is extremely easy to use, but if nobody else thinks so the project will fail. Don’t be afraid though – you simple add your game info to the relevant tags in an already created file, as described here.

I also need some beta testers to find any bugs I missed and to test on linux and mac boxes.

If you want to help, leave me a comment here or find me on IRC in the ludumdare (irc.afternet.org #ludumdare) or pyweek (irc.freenode.net #pyweek) channels. LD #12 is just over 2 weeks away – with your help we can have CGL ready for it.

One down, LOTS to go

Posted by on July 14, 2008 No comments

This weekend I poured a lot of time into finishing the pyedpypers website. The webserver is acting up right now, but I have the code for all the features done and ready to upload. I’m actually pretty proud of how it works — the projects section is really snazzy. It puts my project pages here to shame… sigh.

I’ll put up a link when the server is back up and ready for traffic.

Well, one project down, a load more to go… I think next I’ll work on the competition game loader since pyweek is coming up soon (we hope). The pyweek channel has been essentially dead since the last competition, but hopefully I can get CGL done and it will be a hit.

Fin

Posted by on July 6, 2008 No comments

Well, I’m not super proud of it, but I’m out of time. I didn’t get to music or sound, and there are still some nasty bugs with some of the bee numbers. You can play all the way through though — the levels suck and the art is worse.

Unfortunately, it just isnt that fun. I’ll have to get some feedback from everyone to see what can make it better.

Here is the LD version.

And a screenshot:
Bees LD Version Screenshot