Friday, January 17, 2014

Beta Testers Wanted for GNU/Linux buggy combat simulator game.

So... I've done a lot of work to port my game Six Wheels and a Gun from Android to ASM.JS javascript in a browser. Just when everything was working, and only networking was left, I found out that Javascript cannot do UDP communication. This means that online play in a browser is not going to work. TCP is too high latency and too slow for running a distributed physics simulation.

I don't want my porting effort go to waste, so I made a derivative port to the 64 bit linux platform. (The Javascript version is built on SDL1.2 and the linux version on SDL2.) Everything works just fine as far as I can tell, and I am preparing a release on the itch.io portal. Before I release it, I could use some testing and feedback. Grab a copy of the game here: swaag-1.5-linux64.tar.gz or swaag-1.5-linux32.tar.gz

No installation necessary, just run ./swaag on the command line. It is dynamically linked and requires libSDL2 to be installed on your machine. (apt-get install libsdl2-2.0 on Ubuntu 13.10) In case of problems, please send me the console output.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Rendering flags for online users.

So I've ported my Buggy Bang! Bang! game to Android, and released it under the name Six Wheels and a Gun or SWAAG for short. While doing this port I wrote a multiplayer networking system from scratch, including the lobby server. When doing online multiplayer, I thought it would be nice to render flags for the players based on the country associated with the IP number. I've open sourced this piece of technology as ip2ensign which is available at GitHub.