So, my mind has been poking away at the idea of making a “tinypy2″ that would be a bit less like python, so probably even more confusing for end users. Being only one sentence into my proposal here, and it already sounds bad. Well, here goes:

-1 All objects would be assigned and passed by value instead of by reference
=0 There would be a dictionary of global variables
+1 The VM state could be saved to readable JSON
+1 The VM state could be loaded from JSON
=0 The VM would be written in C++
+1 The VM would have super-easy interoperability with C++ code
-1 The VM would be on the slow side

Tallying up the pros and cons, we get to a +1 for this idea. I don’t suppose there’s much way for anyone to comment on if this sounds like a good idea or not, but thos are some of the thoughts going around in my head right now. It seems like it would be an interesting rudimentary scripting language. The load / save of VM state and C++ interoperability are the key points.

#badideas ??

-Phil

Hey, it’s been a long time in coming, but finally we’re having a battle of programming prowess for Galcon!!

Go rev up your coding skills and let’s do this!

.. You might be interested to know that I ported the iPhone bot from C code over to python code for the contest. It is currently hanging out in the upper portion of the ranks as “galcon”. Making a bot is a ton of fun! And I’m highly pleased that they have a kit available for python devs So get started and have fun!

-Phil

See the Ludum Dare 2010 Keynote:

Inviting all python game-devs! Even if this notice is coming too late, we’ve got a compo coming in August, December, and mini-compos every month! Just check out the website and join the fun!

-Phil

So Galcon Fusion is available for the iPad.

Here’s a bit of tech stuff for ya! The port itself took about 3 days. If you check out the screenshots, you can see I letterboxed the desktop version of Galcon Fusion, and used that extra area to put the iPad specific controls (the pause button, the chat activation button, and the ships % “mouse wheel”)

I don’t have an iPad yet, but I think it’s going to work pretty well. The multi-touch interface design was all done ages ago for the iPhone, so I just used that code for this. It should work great!

The biggest challenge in porting was dealing with OpenGL stack limits on the iPad which appear to be 16 levels. My GUI used quite a few Push/Pop’s to achieve various theme effects and whatnot, but that was blowing the stack. It took me a bit, but I was able to find a number of places where I was able to remove those uses of the stack and things seemed to work fine. (There are some edge cases where my changes wouldn’t be safe, but none of my code uses those, so no harm!)

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to getting an iPad and seeing how the iPad users stack up against the mouse users. This will really pit two different interfaces against each other, which should be really neat. Both interfaces have their own advantages!

As always, python proved useful in this project as I had to update all my graphical assets for the game to work with the iPad. Since my asset pipeline was written in python and pygame, it only took a couple minutes to add in the code I needed to fix a few issues. And thankfully these fixes will go forward and improve my desktop version as well, so all and all, a good deal.

-Phil

P.S. In other news, I’ve been playing with django lately for my non-games business. It’s slick!

Update: Since I was unable to test Galcon Fusion on a REAL iPad it has bugs Apparently the multi-player game crashes and the framerate is low. I’ll be getting my iPad on Monday and fixing those issues ASAP! There’s probably some kind of “testing on real hardware is smart” kind of lesson in this somewhere …

Me making a 15 second speech at some crazy political thing.

So, wow .. I’m going to be speaking during the iPhone summit at GDC in two weeks. The last few months have been a whirlwind of activity for me as I’ve been churning out Galcon Fusion. So now it’s time to get to business getting my talk ready.

Part of the GDC talk process is sending them a title and a draft version of your talk a month or so in advance. I did this with my talk, which was titled, “Nuts & Bolts of Internet Multiplayer iPhone Game Testing” .. The feedback I got from the iPhone summit advisors was (to summarize): “This talk looks short, and maybe a bit boring.”

After a week of soul searching and considering my options, I had to agree. I wouldn’t want to go to my talk, it didn’t sound that great. Having nowhere else to turn to, I turned to PyCon. I knew that at PyCon people gave talks about how to give talks almost every year. I’ve missed the last two PyCons, so thankfully they’ve been posting them online!

I watched Andrew Kuchling’s How to Give a Python Talk which gave me some insight. The three points he made that really struck me were:

• Think About Your Audience

  This means I need to give my audience a reason to be at my talk.  What are they interested in?  What do they want to accomplish?  What can I give them so they are empowered to accomplish this goal?

• Too Short > Too Long

  Andrew related that it’s better to cover too much material in too little time, then to cover too little material in too much time.  If I can cover a blazing amount of information, but at least hit some key points with a strong note, the audience will come away with something.  If I drone away about nothing for 30 minutes, they’ll come away bored.

• Rehearse your talk!

  I knew this one.  But, it’s good to be reminded.  To those who are coming to GDC and plan on seeing my talk, fear not.  I’ve got this week and next week with NOTHING planned, so I’ll be rehearsing my talk MANY times.  I plan on delivering this one with a bit more style than last time.  Last time was at 360iDev, my first “long” talk at a conference.  I  rehearsed my talk about 1.5 times, and I think it showed.

I think for me the first two points answer my question really quickly.  Why does a dev want to hear me talk?  They want to learn how to make a multi-player game.  As for length, I can cover a bunch of keys to creating a multi-player game and maybe people will latch onto a few key points.  If I only cover testing (as was my original plan) the people at my talk would walk away completely unable to use that information if they don’t have any idea where to start.  Instead, if I give the whole picture, and include testing as part of it, they’ll have enough to go on to get started creating iPhone multi-player games.

-Phil

P.S. Yeah, if anyone wants to give me tips on talking, feel free.  Oh, and I think my talk is going to be re-titled to: “How GALCON Conquered the Universe of Online Multiplayer Games”

“Yay, it’s finally here! Check out Galcon Fusion today! We’ve got a free demo and it works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Steam! It features some crazy nice hi-res graphics and soundtrack. And epic multi-player battles like you’ve never seen ‘em before! Have fun!” <– marketing blurb

Okay, for some dev thoughts. Man, it was a long week! Adding the “demo” feature to the build was a ton of work. And then doing all that other ‘stuff’ that sort of comes up. I think the one serious lesson I’ve learned in this whole process is that beta-testers are awesome.

Really awesome. I had about 50 people who I passed out 10 builds of the game to over the past 3 months. Some of these people put in several dozen hours of play time. All this was a huge help for me, as this was my first desktop ’3D’ game, so I had a lot of learning to do in terms of graphics capabilities. As in, I was able to get the game to run on my computer which is a pretty nice MacBook Pro .. but not everyone else’s.

The beta tester feedback was huge, I was able to get the game running on old PPC macs, various linux netbooks, and who knows what else .. as long as it had a somewhat reasonable 3D card. I changed the memory requirement for graphics from about 200 MB down to < 64MB. Without any noticeable reduction in graphics quality even in HD video modes. In fact, that reduction changed the loading time on my computer from 5-8 seconds down to about 1 second

Anyway, I think I’m going to take a nap. It’s been a long week, and I really appreciate everyone who helped me get this game put together. Give it a whirl, and thank the beta testers!

Hey,

I’ve been spending some time checking out lua, because I’m thinking about using it for scripting in games.  I’m looking at it instead of tinypy because tinypy is slow and really needs some more TLC to be totally useful to me.  However, after looking at lua for a while, I’m finding the things that make it feel awkward to me.

1. List indexes starting at 1.
2. For loops use [a,b] intervals
3. No += operator.
4. do / end keywords instead of { }
5. List and Dict types combined into one

At the same time, I’ve found that lua is totally awesome.  I mean, wow.  Really slick stuff!  Here’s 5 awesome things:

1. Small codebase
2. Faster than other dynamic languages
3. Easy API integration
4. Coroutines <- these are neat!
5. State is serializable

So here are my thoughts:

• The first 4 awkward things are superficial, I could probably hack those into shape in a day or two.  The 5th item (List + Dict) as one item is probably not something I can fix, but I could probably live with it.
• If I changed the language like that, and provided it for users to create mods for my games I would not be able to give them a link to the lua documentation, since it would not be accurate anymore.

Not quite sure what to do here.  Lua seems great, though a few language design decisions seem awkward to me.  I could change the language easily enough, but then I would be breaking all the lua documentation for my users.

Anyone got some language-design thoughts on this one?

-Phil

Well, something about this xkcd comic drew me in …

The 3rd panel reminded me of a study I did in college on iterated function system fractals.  These fractals are known for creating ferns, trees, and the Sierpinski triangle.  There are a number of ways of creating these fractals, but one of them is called (something like) the reducing photo copier method.  Where you can start with ANY starting image on your photo copier, and just shrink the images, make a few copies, position them on the copier, and repeat.  Eventually your image converges towards the fern / triangle / whatever if you are precise.  (This can be done with a ‘Real Life’ photo copier for simple IFS like the Sierpinski triangle.)

So as a way to avoid work that I’m supposed to be doing this evening, I figured I’d see how “accurate” this comic was.  Here’s my pygame code that checks it out.  If you run main.py it will start with an image (the xkcd logo) and each time you press a key it will do an iteration of re-creating the comic.  You can see it flashing between the current iteration and the original strip.  After about 4-5 iterations the images converge (pretty closely.)

The most interesting bit was trying different starting images and seeing how long it took to converge.  Starting with all black  it takes 6 iterations.  Starting with all white takes 5 iterations.  And starting with the xkcd logo takes 4 iterations.  The logo probably goes the quickest because it has some black and white in it (like this image) so it converges faster.  (You can edit main.py towards the bottom page to try these different starting points.)

So .. there ya go!  Enjoy!

-Phil

In tinypyC++ every variable is a certain type.  In some cases I may have an int x = None;  But I’m not sure what that should mean?

What’s the most pythonic? Here’s some anecdotal evidence:

>>> None,None==None,None==-1,None==0,None==1,None==False,None==True,bool(None)
(None, True, False, False, False, False, False, False)
>>> -1,-1==None,-1==-1,-1==0,-1==1,-1==False,-1==True,bool(-1)
(-1, False, True, False, False, False, False, True)
>>> 0,0==None,0==-1,0==0,0==1,0==False,0==True,bool(0)
(0, False, False, True, False, True, False, False)
>>> 1,1==None,1==-1,1==0,1==1,1==False,1==True,bool(1)
(1, False, False, False, True, False, True, True)

So .. you can see -1 gets 4/7.  0 also gets 4/7.  (1 gets a mere 3/7, so it’s out.)

Anyone care to tilt the scales to -1 or 0?

Here’s a screenshot.  This is my Ubuntu desktop of my work on a new iPhone game.  Take a look at it nice and big.  Below I’ll explain all of what is going on …

In short, I’m working on porting my pyweek#3 team entry to the iPhone.  Here’s the details:

• Top left, you see Kate, my text editor.  You’ll notice I’ve got -what appears- to be python.  But that’s actually tinypyC++ code!  My converter still has some rough edges, but it’s starting to get pretty good.  If you weren’t looking to closely you might mistake that for ordinary python code!  (In fact, it should be 100% python parser friendly.)  You can see how I have to use a touch of annotation to make it all go.  But for the most part, the types get inferred.  (The C++ outputted is about 2x as long, so I’m saving a ton of keystrokes!)
• Top right, you see the level being painted.  It isn’t all working yet, but those are the basic tiles.  Interesting bit about loading the level, when I created this game I used my own level editor and library I made with pygame.  To save on disk and time I save all the levels to .tga files.  Since I’m targeting the iPhone I need an easy way to read the data from .tga files.  I don’t have SDL_image available, so a friend pointed me towards this great site.  It appears to have some awesome bits of code, including very simple and easy to use image loader that can load tga/png/jpg/etc.  I think it has the most painless interface I’ve ever seen for a C-based image-loader.
• Bottom right you can see me working on tinypyC++.  As I’m working on BSA, I’m always finding new bugs in it.  Lately most of the bugs have been of the “add more graceful error handling” nature.  tinypy will point out what line (and character) an error happened on, but with a bit of extra work I’m able to add in some coherent error messages to tell the user what is going on.  In this case it was to inform the user of an undefined module name.
• Bottom left you can see the startup of the game.  I’m using irrKlang for all my  game audio now.  It is not open source, but it’s “free” to use for free games, and the price is quite reasonable for commercial projects.  irrKlang is not portable to the iPhone yet, so I have to have a separate driver for my iPhone audio.

And that’s it for today’s report!

-Phil