3 millionth user on Google Play milestone cracked.

Today, the 3 millionth Google Play user installed The Little Crane That Could. The iOS user base is still quite bigger, but it's nice to note the milestone. The promotion service AppOfTheDay gave a nice bump on aug 28th. But its effect has worn off by now.

Bad ass dozer

Today, I have been adding caterpillar tracks to the dozer for Little Crane 2. Personally, I think this little dozer is pretty bad ass now. The caterpillar tracks make depressions in the ground.

Brand new PC

I've bought a brand new PC yesterday, the last time I did that was in 2005. Since 2008 or so I switched to Mac. But porting my Little Crane game to Windows was too much of a lure, and my Mac Mini with Windows installed was not cutting it.

Building your own PC from components was, and still is a lot of fun. This is what I ended up with:

Intel core i5 4570 CPU. I would have preferred a low power T or S model, but those were not in stock at NCIX.

To keep the 84W CPU heat out of the case, I went with a maintenance free water cooling kit: Corsair H100i.

To keep the system relatively compact, I chose a mATX motherboard with H87 chipset: the Asus H87M-PLUS. The more expense Z87 chipset is really only req'd if you want to do overclocking.

A premium mATX case (Corsair 350D) with a nice aluminium front on a steel casing.

Wireless network adapter PCIe from Asus.

8 Gbyte of ram from Kingston.

Samsung 840 Evo SSD, and also a very cheap DVD writer.

Scraping and Dumping

I made a new video on the development of The Little Crane That Could 2. It shows a dozer that creates tyre marks in the terrain, scrapes terrain, and dumps dirt onto the terrain.

To the Dark Side.

I've been eschewing Microsoft for a long time now. I'm in and in a UNIX guy, and despise the horrible practices of Microsoft, in what they do to standards. Also I have been totally unimpressed by the quality of their Operating Systems. So why did I buy a copy of Windows 7 today? Well, PC gaming is alive and kicking, so I want to see if I can get my hit game The Little Crane That Could to the Windows platform. Here are my trials and tribulations of installing Windows7 on a 2007 Mac Mini.

When installing 64 bit Windows on a Mac Mini, you get greeted by a cryptic message. "Select CD-ROM boot type". Whatever option you choose, 1 or 2, nothing happens. The machine is just frozen. It turns out you need to burn a new copy of your Windows installation DVD with some special options. More info on fluxbox.co.uk.

Using iPads and OSX a lot, I can now only use a mouse with "Natural Scrolling." Getting natural scrolling to work involves touching the murkiest and most vile part of the Windows Operating System: the Registry. For expert users only.

After installation, audio is not working. The driver CD that Boot Camp created does not seem to be any help with it. I still have to find a solution for this.

First order of business was to get some development going. After downloading Visual Studio Express, git, cmake and make, I was able to build GLFW3 from sources in the git repo.

UPDATE I had to reinstall windows after buying a new computer. Here are some issues to consider:

• When building gl3w, you first need to install python2.7
• When building glfw, you first need to install cmake.
• To build glfw, make sure you run vcallvars.bat from the Visual Studio program. Then you can run 'cmake .' followed by 'nmake'
• IE is super slow, and so is chrome. I fixed the slow chrome by unselecting all proxy options in the network settings.

Digging Dirt

Now spawning dirt when voxels are scraped away from the terrain. It adds a lot to the visual appeal.

Terrain Modification -- TAKE1

It is far from perfect, but at least it is a start. Dynamic terrain modification using a digger in a voxel terrain. For now I use straight voxels, and not the marching cubes surface, as it is easier to debug.

My plan is to spawn cube-lets as the terrain is modified. This single cubes will be merged back into the terrain after inactivity. It will look prettier with an iso-surface.