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Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed

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Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed
PC Game | Crack | 6.75 GB | Lang : English

Need for Speed Shift 2 is the direct sequel to the generally favorable review 2009 video game Need for Speed: Shift and expands on the gameplay and features introduced with the original. Shift 2: Unleashed will feature 145 cars from 37 manufacturers and 36 different tracks, which players can compete in several types of races. Players will also be able to compete online. The game will also feature three new main additions, an in-helmet cam, night-time racing and the Autolog feature introduced with Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. EA has promise that it’ll "redefine the racing simulator genre" and has been called "the most realistic racer ever".

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Dev-corner: 48-hour Reddit Game Jam Postmortem

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Last weekend, I had the distinct pleasure of "leading" a large (20+) team of dedicated artists, coders, and writers in the creation of a wonderful (if a bit rough around the edges) 2D platform game called Last Escape. I put "leading" in quotes, because my position was more of organizer and first-among-equals (save for a couple of executive vetoes, mostly to save time and keep things moving). It was an amazing experience, and I'm very proud to have been a part of it. It was also highly educational, so I'm going to try and take stock of what we did right and what we did wrong, and write about it here, in hopes that it helps other teams develop games later on.



First off, a little more about the project. Last Escape was ambitious from the outset. Before the project began, we decided that we were going to work with C++ instead of Flash or JavaScript. This decision was of a practical nature; the two coders who had committed the largest amount of time to the project ahead of time (myself and FLARE creator Clint Bellanger) were the most comfortable with game development on C++.

The art in Last Escape is a combination of digital painting and pixel art. This effect is a bit jarring, but given the 48-hour time constraint, we had to make full use of all the artistic talent that was available to us. By and large, the vast majority of the art in the game is brand new, although we used existing assets where we could.

The basic premise behind Last Escape is that you're a person who has made a forced landing on an alien world due to your space ship being out of energy. The object of the game is to collect enough energy to power your ship, and, in the process, you run into some interesting alien ruins as well as some giant insects.

We started out by planning certain things beforehand. Since we didn't know what the prompt would be, we were somewhat limited in the planning we were able to do, but we did create a rough road map and timeline in advance to give us some indication of where we should aim. You can see these on the OGA forums. While we eventually fell a bit behind schedule on certain milestones, these documents were absolutely essential to keeping everyone motivated and on track, and I would not recommend undertaking a team based game design project without them, no matter how small.

When the contest theme was announced (it turned out to be "Energy"), we got the group together and immediately started brainstorming. I set the time limit on brainstorming for game ideas to 45 minutes, and we created a google document and began typing up a list of ideas as they came up. I attempted to steer the ideas in various directions to get a wide variety of suggestions, because I noticed that the discussion tended to get hung up on whatever game genre we were talking about at the time. We had to deliberately move things from puzzles to action to strategy, etc, and this is one place where I put on my "leader" hat in order to make that happen.

Following the brainstorming session, we put things to a vote. We went through a two-step voting process -- the first step was to ask for an approval vote, and just have everyone list all the ideas they liked. We used this to narrow the choices down to five. After that, we had a second vote and everyone picked their favorite. As an aside, it's interesting to note that in the craziness of brainstorming, I accidentally copied an idea from the main #opengameart IRC channel into the list, and that was the idea that was chosen. We discovered later on that the person who's idea we used was submitting their own entry into the game jam, so we ended up with two games that had a very similar premise. Fortunately, Xiphias3 (the originator of the idea) was cool with this, and said that we didn't have to mention it. We did anyway. :)

After the voting was finished, we put together a brief todo list and started frantically coding and doing art. This is where the real learning kicked in, and, knowing what I know now, there are some things I would probably handle differently.

First off, probably the biggest issue I ran into personally were merge conflicts. We hosted our project on GitHub and gave a number of people commit access. This was all well and good, but we were poorly organized (IRC can be a double-edged sword, since at any given time you have no way of knowing who is paying attention). Consequently, there were several situations where more than one person ended up working independently on the same feature or bugfix. I personally spent at least five hours cleaning up merge problems brought about by pieces of perfectly reasonable code interacting in unexpected ways.

As such, I would strongly advise anyone working on a large, rapid team project such as this one to have a web-based task tracking program ready to go at the outset. Google Docs proved inadequate for this.

Another related thing that I learned is that when you're managing a team of 20 people, the director doesn't really have time to code. This made things difficult for me, because I had already budgeted most of my time for coding, but as the project lead, people looked to me to know what was going on. On a large team, people generally need to be broken into smaller groups and given tasks; as such, you need someone whose job it is to know exactly who is doing what at any given time, and that's one area where I would make an effort to improve on if I were to ever undertake something like this again. Real task tracking software -- something simple with a quick and easy learning curve -- would have been very helpful for this.

One place where I would consider myself fairly successful is keeping a large group of people with differing interests and talents moving and motivated through a stressful project. Here's the advice I would give to anyone needing to do this:
  • First off, have a leader. You need someone with veto power in order to keep things moving in a good direction.
  • As the leader, understand that it's not "your" project -- it's everyone's. This means that it's not your job to tell people what the direction of the project is; rather, your job is to facilitate the team finding a direction and keep things from getting sidetracked.
  • Democracy rules. The main direction of your project is often best decided on by brainstorming and then a vote. This gives everyone a chance to make their case and have their idea judged by the entire team, and not just the leader.
  • Large groups of people can tend to get sidetracked very easily in discussions. As such, it is very important that you limit discussion time in advance and make sure that you designate a time by which brainstorming is over, and a time shortly thereafter when you have to reach a final decision. If you don't set up these times in advance, people who are trying to make their case may assume that you want to silence them. Plus, it's not particularly fair to people if they're not aware when their time to speak is going to be over. To avoid putting yourself in the position of even appearing partial, it's best to set time limits in advance.
  • If possible, keep votes in the open. When I took a vote, I asked everyone to send me a private message with their vote (because it was easiest to keep track of), but also vote publicly, and then verify my count.
  • Remember, your project depends on your team. People will come and go, as is natural with any project, but people will be a lot more likely to leave if they feel that their input has no chance of being heard. This is to some extent reiterating what was said above, but I cannot stress enough that leading is about facilitating and not ruling with an iron fist!
Another thing that I think we did well (with certain caveats) was the selection and use of tools. If you're developing a game, even "from scratch" as we were, there are a lot of tools out there that you can and should use to make things easier. Here are my thoughts:
  • Where possible, be tool-agnostic. Not everyone is comfortable in the same software. Some people may prefer to use closed-source tools, and it's important to accommodate these folks if you want to keep your dev team happy.
  • You should not be format-agnostic. You need to decide in advance what formats are acceptable for your media files. Stick to well implemented open standards, and make sure people understand that they are responsible for providing their files in these formats. This means that media editors that can't output to these formats are essentially out, unless the people using them have a quick and clean way of converting both to and from their proprietary formats. The rest of the team should not be burdened with these conversions.
  • Version control is an absolute must. As much as I complained about merge conflicts, things are a lot worse if you're sharing a code base without version control. I recommend using a system with web-based tools that as many people as possible are comfortable with. Most coders prefer Git, and by and large GitHub turned out to be a good choice for us (with one major caveat that I'll get into below).
  • Tiled (the Qt-based FOSS tile map editor) was absolutely excellent for putting tile maps together quickly. I strongly recommend it to any project considering making a 2D tile-based game.
  • Try to avoid reinventing the wheel when possible when writing your code. You may have specific requirements that no existing game engine meets, but there are plenty of frameworks you can build your engine on that provide things like easy, cross-platform graphics, sound, and I/O. We used SFML to great effect, but there are plenty of other good choices.
I mentioned above that we had a major caveat with Git; namely, version control is complicated. I don't have any good solution for this. Artists don't always think like coders, and a lot of version control systems require a certain level of comfort at the command line. This is particularly true of Git, which can work with several different protocols, some of which have issues when going through web proxies and the like. We also had confusion about how to generate public keys for connecting to GitHub.

While it may not be possible to avoid these sorts of issues completely, I would strongly recommend setting up your team with version control before you start coding.

Another issue we ran into with Git is that it tried to merge Tiled's XML map files. It did surprisingly well at this in most cases, but machine-generated XML isn't always the best thing for code merges, since it often needs to be in a very specific format. I'm guessing there's some way of turning this off for certain filetypes and forcing the merge to be resolved manually, as you would with a binary file.

Finally, some thoughts on coding. On one hand, you're trying to develop code quickly. On the other hand, you need to make your code easy to expand. Generally, you have two types of people -- the ones who want to code as quickly as possible due to the time limit, and the ones who want to code as cleanly as possible, time limits be damned. You need to be prepared to listen to both these sorts of people. Sometimes going off half-cocked can end up wasting a lot of your precious hours because you end up having to replace code or work around nasty hacks. On the other hand, when someone wants to take a while to do something the "right" way, you need to take stock of how long it will actually take them to finish what they're trying to do. If they can't do it within the allotted time, there's not much of a point, and they may as well have been working on something else.

What's important is that you be practical and strike a balance between the two. Your code needs to be at least somewhat maintainable and readable, or else you'll run into roadblocks long before your time is up.

So there you have it. No doubt some other folks from Team OGA will read this -- if you do, please chime in in the comments, and I'll try to work your thoughts into this post. As always, if anyone has any comments or questions, please feel free to post them. I tend to reply to almost everything. :)

A final, encouraging note: Last Escape has taken on a life of its own, and the project is continuing. You can follow our work (and download the latest version) on GitHub, although for the moment you'll need to compile it yourself. Here's the link:

https://github.com/lendrick/Last-Escape

Bart K.
OpenGameArt.org

Airport Mania: First Flight

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There aren't many games that I've played from beginning to end. Usually something better comes along and steals my attention or I simply get bored. What have I played to the end? A few such games include StarCraft (PC), Magic the Gathering: Battlegrounds (Xbox), and the original US release of King's Field (PSX). So, despite eating it up, I haven't been able to review Airport Mania because I

Azada

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Genre : Puzzle
Developer : bigfishgames

Trapped in a haunted room by his great-uncle, the adventurous Titus has asked you to help release him from the magical spell. To do this, you must solve the most mysterious puzzles of Azada. Crack the series of puzzles and fill in the missing pages of the enchanted book to free Titus from his prison.

* Over 40 unique puzzles
* 5 master-level puzzles
* Hidden clues unlock levels!

System Requirements :

* OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7
* CPU: 600 Mhz
* RAM: 128 MB
* DirectX: 6.0
* Hard Drive: 65 MB

Size : 43.5 MB

Download

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PewPew

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Go get this! PewPew is a fantastic Geometry Wars clone and its... fantastic! It's also free and clearly a game that I'd pay a couple of bucks for. If you're so inclined to support the author there is PewPew 2. But now that I've given away the ending to this review let's jump back to the middle.
PewPew features retro style vector (line) graphics. It offers a nice, quick tutorial to get you started

Tiny game: Stop the Zombies!

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I'm so proud of saving more than killing...

I discovered a tiny and minimal Java/Processing game through future superstar game designer William:   Stop the Zombies!

Launch nuke circles. Save human pixels. Kill zombie pixels. Or just kill everything.

The code is under a "Do whatever you want with it" license as far as I'm concerned, as it says in the code, it was based on someone else's code already.

It should be noted that that code will no longer compile due to changes in the Processing environment over the years.

Shadowrun (ENG/RIP)

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Genre: First-Person Shooter
Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: FASA Studio Microsoft Game Studios

Based on the revered paper-and-pen RPG (and short run of game releases), this next-gen Shadowrun combines first-person shooter gameplay with the complications of the RPG series.

In Shadowrun players vie for supremacy in an intense first-person shooter (FPS) experience that rewards cleverness, cunning and split-second improvisation through a unique combination of modern weapons, ancient magic and advanced technology. Up to 16 players can battle together across Xbox 360 and Windows Vista through the Xbox LIVE and Games for Windows -- LIVE gaming and entertainment network.

Features :

* Tech first-person shooter, who grew up in the famous role-playing game of the last century
* The main feature of the game - one for PC and Xbox 360 Multiplayer
* The story about the confrontation of the two corporations,
* Amazing graphics and lots of weapons
* The game is introduce to a revolutionary blend of modern weaponry and ancient magic

Features RIP'a :

* For the basis the original version of the game
* Cut out credits, and all languages ??except English (voice interface and English)
* Nothing is converted
* Installation is not required
* Author rip - dopeman


System requirements :

* Operating system: Microsoft ® Windows ® XP / Windows ® Vista
Processor: Intel Core Duo 1.8 GHz or AMD FX Dual Core
* RAM: 2 GB (Windows XP) / 2 GB (Windows Vista)
* Video: 3D-graphics adapter with 256 MB memory, compatible with DirectX ® 9.0 and supports Pixel Shader 3.0 (Nvidia ® GeForce ® 7800 / ATI ® X1800 or better)
* Sound: Sound card compatible with DirectX 9.0c
* Free hard drive space: 3 GB
* Additional software: DirectX 9.0c
* Controls: A keyboard and mouse

Size : 923 MB

Download

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OR

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IndyCar Series

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Genre: Racing Simulation
Publisher: Codemasters
Developer: Brain in a Jar

The IndyCar Series, is a 15-race, single-seat championship that competes on speedways throughout the USA, including California and Texas, with the historic and world-famous Indy 500 the highlight of its racing calendar. Fast and furious, the 650 bhp cars reach 0-100 mph in less than three seconds and can race at speeds over 225 mph on the larger oval circuits.

Realistic driver AI and team tactics modelled on real IndyCar Series drivers and teams brings authenticity and tenacity to the racing gameplay, while Indianapolis 500 winner Eddie Cheever Jr. teaches you about real IndyCar Series tactics for both the game and the real event in the Masterclass learning center

System Requirements :

* System: 3/4 or Athlon 1.4GHz or equivalent
* RAM: 512 MB
* Video Memory: 64 MB

Size : 137 MB

Download


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OR

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Amazon Appstore for Android

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In what could be the best news for Android gamers in a while, Amazon has finally got their Appstore for Android launched. I've complained about many shortcomings with Google's Android Market ever since this blog went live and while Google has addressed some of those issues there has always been plenty of room for improvement.

So, what does the Amazon Appstore do for you other than create market

Neon Racer - Press Release

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Neon Racer is brand new arcade style, precision-of-motion game!

 Dodge and weave your way through neon walls, utilizing the touch motion control to navigate in real time!10 completely unique level types.
Easy, Normal, Hardcore and Epic game modes!
More than 100 stars to collect!
At least one planned expansion - included upon release for FREE to those with the full game!
Try to beat Neon Racer

Dev-corner: Making unlicensed fan games -- why your time is better spent elsewhere

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If you're reading this blog, you're probably like me in that you feel that current copyright law vastly overreaches in favor of the "content industry" and at the expense of culture as a whole. You may or may not also enjoy playing unlicensed fan-made games -- games that make use of IP from other games without the original owner's permission.

Today I'm going to talk about a little game company named Squaresoft(*). I liked Squaresoft -- a lot. I never cared for the company Squaresoft all that much one way or the other, but I loved their games (as you may have figured out from my previous blog entries). Chrono Trigger, in particular, is a game that frequently shows up in the ubiquitous "Top 10 video games of all time" lists and polls that gaming magazines like to do from time to time -- and it's also one of my personal favorites.

Among Chrono Trigger fans, the Chrono Trigger franchise is generally considered to have been treated very poorly by Squaresoft (now Square Enix). After a dissatisfying sequel, the only attention Chrono Trigger has received at all has been in the form of multiple re-releases, none of which have changed or added very much to the game.

Arguably, when a company can release the same thing over and over with minimal modification and keep selling it to people, it's become part of popular culture and the copyright ought to have expired, seeing as how the stated intent of copyright is to encourage innovation and progress as opposed to cultural stagnation. If you look at the original intent of copyright as stated in the U.S. Consitution (To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries), fan games actually look like a fairly good idea. If copyright is leading to cultural stagnation (remakes of remakes of remakes), maybe it's time to take culture into our own hands and follow the intent of copyright, rather than the letter of copyright, which exists in its present form entirely because of the lobbying efforts of the content industry [author's note: the intent of this blog entry is not to advocate violating copyright law -- there are other ways to fight bad laws. Please read to the end for the full context of this article before reaching any conclusions about what I'm writing here. Thanks!].

So yeah, I have nothing against fan games. Given that Chrono Trigger has received precisely zero attention from Square in recent years, I would have loved to have played Chrono Resurrection or Crimson Echoes, both of which looked very promising. If Square had purchased those games from the developers and sold them, I would have happily paid for them. Instead, Square hit them (and their fans, indirectly) with legal threats, shutting both projects down (a week before conclusion, in the latter case). By the letter of the law, this is entirely their right.

Now I don't know about anyone else, but this really cheezes me off. Square has taken something that I like and turned it into a cheap cash cow, and I'd really like to stick it to them, which is why I'm advocating against spending time making more fan games. Allow me to explain.

Fan games, like it or not, do these big fan-hating companies a favor by creating buzz about their games. Chrono Trigger is 12 years old now. I think maybe it's time that, instead of talking about it and spending our time adding to the Chrono Trigger mythos, we ought to relegate it to the black hole of dead copyrights. That's right, I think we ought to move on and stop doing Square a favor by spending time and effort promoting their games only to be slapped in the face for it. Instead, take that massive effort that you wanted to pour into a Chrono Trigger fan sequel (or whatever other game you want to make a fan sequel of) and use it instead to take the buzz away from big, fan-hating companies by either making something original or expanding on some content that's already available in the Creative Commons (like the many different Wesnoth campaigns).

Wouldn't it be nice to have some open franchises that people can expand on without fear of being sued? This is something that I think the Creative Commons needs more of, and there's nothing stopping us from doing it.

Bart K.
OpenGameArt.org

P.S. Feel like working on a game this weekend (3/25-3/28)? Join Team OGA and in the 48-hour Reddit Game Jam!

----

* Now Square Enix

Pocket Soccer

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I became acquainted with Button Soccer about a year ago in a math trade. I was able to negotiate a set when my efforts to get it in the trade itself failed, but after all that I still have yet to play the game. One of the reasons I haven't been able to play the game is because I live in the USA and soccer isn't exactly the most popular sport over here. And it only gets worse when you try to turn

Dev-corner: Bart K. explains (and rants about) C/C++ pointers

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C pointer syntax is an egregious design flaw. It's so bad, in fact, that it's solely responsible for multiple generations of programmers struggling with pointers, which frankly aren't that hard of a concept. I'm going to take some time today to explain pointers and, in the process, point out exactly what it is I can't stand about C/C++ pointer syntax. If you've never been able to wrap your head around pointers up until now, please give this a read, and hopefully you'll have a better understanding of them by the time you get to the end. I'll start with the basics (which you probably already know, but please bear with me).

Conceptually, a pointer is a variable that points to a location in memory, generally another variable. In C and C++, the actual data stored in a pointer is a memory address, which is just a number that signifies a particular location in memory. You can interact with a pointer in two ways. You can either look at the actual value of the pointer, which as I said is a memory address, or you can
dereference the pointer (I'll explain this in a bit) and look at the value stored in the memory address that it's pointing to. A pointer can point to any type of variable. What's important to remember, though, is that pointers are their own type, distinct from the type of variable they're pointing to. A pointer to a character is not the same type as a character, which brings me to my first major beef with C/C++ pointer syntax. I'd like to introduce you to our recurring villain: the asterisk (*). The asterisk is a villain because he does two completely different things that both have to do with pointers, and he does them in a way that's very confusing. I'll address the first of these things now. Let's say you're declaring an integer.
int i;
Now you want to declare an integer pointer:
int *i;
When you're declaring variables, the asterisk signifies that the variable is a pointer. Easy enough, right?

Ha! If only.

A pointer is a type, the same way that character and integer are types. And yet, you don't declare them the same way as you declare other types. In fact, you can mix them in with declarations for different types, which is horribly inconsistent. C doesn't let you declare a mix of integers and characters on the same line -- so why can you declare a mix of integers and integer pointers on the same line?

Here's a better way to think of pointer declarations:
int* i;
Note that the space is now between the asterisk and the variable, so you're seeing "int*" instead of "int". This is conceptually a much better way to declare your pointers, because it stresses the fact that pointers are a distinct type. Unfortunately, here is where the evil asterisk rears his ugly head. Let's say now I want to declare two integers:
int a, b;
Good so far. Now I'm going to declare two integer pointers:
int* a, b;
Simple, right? No! The above code is wrong, even though it should be correct. What the above line of code actually does is declare 'a' as in int pointer and 'b' as a regular old integer, making it very difficult to treat pointers the way they ought to be treated -- as a separate type.

You either have to declare them one per line or declare them in a way that's conceptually misleading:
int *a, *b;
The above code correctly declares two pointers but makes the evil asterisk appear to be in his other role, which I'll get to in a bit. First, one other important note about declaring pointers: Never leave them uninitialized. It's 2011 at the time of this post -- the overhead of initializing a pointer is utterly minuscule compared to the amount of time it will save you later on when it's time to debug your code. The real way to declare a pointer is like this:
int* i = 0;
So, what am I doing here? Remember that a pointer is its own type, and it holds a memory address that points to a location in memory. When I set a pointer equal to something, I'm actually changing that memory address itself, not what's stored in the memory address. Hence, the above variable declaration is creating a pointer that points to memory address zero, which is invalid.

Now why on earth would I want to do that? Simple! When C looks at a pointer, it has no idea if the number contained in that pointer is a valid piece of allocated memory or just some random number that points off to Tux-only-knows-where. So what does C do? It just trusts you. It assumes, sometimes wrongly, that the number that's sitting inside that pointer is a valid memory address, and will happily write to that address if you tell it to, regardless of whether you've actually allocated memory there. Often times this will overwrite some of your code or another variable, and your program will continue humming happily along with no idea that it just made a huge mess of itself, only to mysteriously crash later on in a way that's very difficult to trace.

The thing about zero is the C knows it's not a valid address, so when you try to do something to memory address zero, your program will crash in an immediate, clean, and traceable way, which makes debugging a lot easier. If you're super hardcore and you're writing code on an embedded system where processor power is expensive, you can always remove the "= 0" bit later, although I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.

Another perfectly valid thing that you can do is just allocate the memory immediately when you declare the pointer instead of setting it to zero (or null, as they call it). In C, you'd do this with the malloc() function, and in C++, you'd use the 'new' operator. Here's how that looks:
/* In C: */
#include <stdlib.h>
int* i = (int*) malloc(sizeof(int));

/* In C++: */
int *i = new int;
Egad, what's all that craziness in the C version?

Let's look at the C declaration again, this time in glorious technicolor!
#include <stdlib.h>
int* i = (int*) malloc(sizeof(int));
First we'll take a look at malloc(). Malloc is actually a function that's declare in stdlib.h, which is why we included it. What malloc() does is allocates a block of memory and returns a void pointer to the allocated memory address.

A void pointer is useless on its own, since 'void' is a type that doesn't actually store anything. The intent, in this case, is that you cast the void pointer to whatever kind of pointer you're allocating, which brings us to the (int*) bit. If you're familiar with C and C++, you've probably already seen a cast, which is where you convert one type of variable to another. What we're doing in this case is telling it to change the void pointer that malloc() returned into an int pointer, so we can then set i equal to it. [edit: There are some good arguments in favor of omitting the cast, although my own C++ habits lead me to include it (not that one ought to be using malloc() in c++ anyway. See this stackoverflow link here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/605845/do-i-cast-the-result-of-malloc (courtesy of
A2889261)]

The last part, the sizeof(int) is telling malloc() how much memory to allocate. Since we want a pointer to an integer, we're allocating enough space to store an integer. Sizeof is a function that's built into C that returns the size in memory of the given type. Hence, sizeof(int) returns the size of an integer in bytes, which can vary depending on your system architecture.

So, to summarize, the above line of code creates an integer pointer, initializes an int-sized block of memory, and sets the new pointer to point to the memory address you just initialized. Ugh.

C++ is way simpler in this regard:
int *i = new int;
When you say "new int" or "new char" or "new whatever" in C++, you're going through the same process as above, but in a much more readable way. The "new" operator looks at the type you gave it, initializes the memory for that type, and returns a pointer to it.

Hmm, now where'd that evil little bastard asterisk go? Ah, there he is! He's off dereferencing stuff!

So what does dereference mean, exactly? Well, remember how we when we initialized the pointer to zero, we were actually setting the address to zero, and not the contents of the address. One has to wonder at that point, how do we interact with the stuff contained within the address the pointer is pointing at? You dereference the pointer.

Dereferencing is an operator. An operator works essentially like a function, in that it takes a value and returns a different value. When you dereference an integer pointer, you get the integer that the pointer is pointing to in memory. When you dereference a character pointer, you get the character that the pointer is pointing to in memory. What's important to remember here is that when you dereference a pointer, it returns a different type than the pointer itself. This is because a pointer isn't the same type as the item that it points to -- a pointer to an integer is a pointer, not an integer.

So how do we actually dereference a pointer? We use... the asterisk! (dun dun DUNNNNN!)

This brings us to my other big problem with the asterisk. It does two completely different things. In one case, it signifies a type. In the other case, it's an operator. Let's look at this little piece of C++ code:
int* i = new int; // Here, I'm using * to signify
// a type.
(*i) = 100; // Here I'm using * as the dereference
// operator. I'm setting the value of the
// memory address that i points to to 100.

cout << "This is a memory address: " << i << "\n";
cout << "This is the value of that memory address: " << (*i) << "\n";
Notice that when I'm dereferencing i, I write (*i). The parentheses aren't strictly necessary, but they're another way to differentiate between using the asterisk to declare a pointer type and using it to dereference a pointer. In this case, the asterisk is an operator that operates on the pointer i and returns an integer variable that's located at the memory address i points to. I can then treat the result of that operation the same way I would treat any other integer.

Now, some more explanation on why I like to write my pointer declarations the way I do ("int* i;" instead of "int *i;"). Look at this code here:
int i = 0;
i = 0;
These above two lines of code do the same thing, the only difference being that the first line also declares i as an integer before it sets it to zero. Now look at this code:
int *i = 0;
*i = 0;
Any reasonable person would assume (wrongly) that the two above lines of code do exactly the same thing, with the exception that the first line also declares i as a pointer. In actuality, the first line ("int *i = 0;") creates a pointer an initializes the address that the pointer points to to zero. The second line dereferences the pointer and sets the value stored at the address to zero. In any case, if you try running the above two lines of code in immediate succession, you'll get a null pointer error, because you've set the pointer to a null address.

Instead, consider writing your code this way:
int* i = 0;
(*i) = 0;
Now, it's a lot more clear, despite the efforts of that thrice-damned asterisk, that the first line is initializing a pointer and the second line is dereferencing a pointer and setting the value of its address. (Note that running these two lines in immediate succession would still cause a null pointer error, for the same reason as above).

Finally, there's one last thing that you need to know about pointers: C and C++ don't care when pointers fall out of scope, which means that you need to explicitly get rid of them when you're finished with them. If you don't, the memory will never be de-allocated even once the pointer falls out of scope, so you won't know where it is to be able to de-allocate it or reference to it. This is what's called a memory leak, and it can cause your code to run slowly and eventually crash when it tries to allocate more memory than the machine has available. Delving deeply into memory allocation is beyond the scope of this blog entry, but here's a quick note about how to do it:
/* In C: */
#include <stdlib.h>
free(i);
i = 0;

/* In C++: */
delete i;
i = 0;
The free() function is essentially the reverse of the malloc() function, in that it tells the computer you're no longer using the memory that the pointer points to. The computer then releases the memory back into the pool so that it can be allocated again. The C++ delete operator does the same thing. The only catch here is that if you're writing in C++, even though it's possible to use malloc() and free(), you can't mix malloc() with delete and new with free(), since internally they work in different ways. In C++, it's best practice to avoid malloc() and free altogether, and you should never delete a pointer allocated with malloc(), or free() a pointer allocated with new.

The other thing you'll notice here is that I say "i = 0;" after I deallocate the pointer in both cases. This is just so that C and C++ will know in the future that the pointer no longer points to a valid address. If (as is often the case) you're deallocating a pointer at the end of a function, it's generally okay to skip this step, since it's just going to fall out of scope anyway. However, if you want to be as safe and clean as possible, it doesn't hurt to just leave it in.

So there you have it. My pointers rant. I predict that there will be at least some comments below saying that you don't have to do it my way, and that it's shorter to mix your pointer and non-pointer declarations or that it's better to not initialize your pointers. If you're new to pointers, ignore those people. Once you've gained a solid understanding of them, you can start breaking the rules a little bit. What I've written here isn't necessary in terms of language syntax; it's simply a good set of habits for beginners to get into in order to keep their understanding of pointers as clear as possible and also ease debugging.

If you have questions, feel free to ask in the comments. If you see any real, actual errors in my code, please point them out.

Peace,

Bart K.
OpenGameArt.org

Dev-corner: Primer to texture creation

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So you got this shiny 25 megapixel camera from your grandma last Xmas, and are getting bored making photos of your cat with it? Put it too a good use and make some environmental pictures and upload them to the burning well!
Wait, you don't have a rich grandma?... well take some photos from the website above (all public domain) and convert them to some nice textures to use in games ;)

And of course FOSS is to the rescue and provides you with all the tools you need:


Most importantly THE GIMP of course! Which is the premier open-source image manipulation software, that doesn't need to hide behind other commercial programs starting with Photo and ending with Shop (the other major FOSS contenders being Krita and MyPaint both in that order aiming more at digital paining then image manipulation. Oh and check out Alchemy for a funny sketching app.).

Creating a seamless texture


So what you will normally want to do is take a picture that shows a relatively flat surface with an interesting pattern and not too strong shadows (a cloudy day with a lot of diffuse lightning is best is you want to take photos yourself).

Based on this you take a small part and try to make it seamless, e.g. make the edges fit to each other so that it can be tiled endlessly on a 3D surface in a game.


The guys at OpenClonk have a pretty nice tutorial about the manual process.
However nowadays there are also some smart algorithms available as GIMP plug-ins that try to do the job for you (with better or worse results, but it is for sure a lot faster). Here is an example with a short tutorial of what I did in less then 5 minutes with the perhaps most advanced of these plug-ins: Resynthesizer. Another, which looks good too but I have not tried is Texturize. However the latter does not remove your ex-girlfriend from your favorite holiday shots, so 1:0 for Resynthesizer :)

Making a normal map for your texture


So your are working on the next super MMORPGFPS super Counterstrike killer with next-next-next-gen graphics? Well then your texture (don't go for anything lower that 10,240 x 10,240 for your toilet door textures!) needs a normal map of course!



But don't worry, there is a GIMP plug-in for that too!

So there you have it... start making some texture packs and upload them to OpenGameArt!

Rabbit's Magic Adventures ( Final )

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Genre: Puzzle
Published by: Big Fish Games
Developed by: Big Fish Games

Travel to a world of Magic and help a brave rabbit defeat an evil wizard in Rabbit’s Magic Adventures, a fun Action & Arcade game. Save the hero’s girlfriend and restore peace to the entire world. Bring down the evil wizard as you travel to different levels, remove spooky spells, collect powerful bonuses and solve secret puzzles and save the day!

Features :

* Unique gameplay
* Intense action
* Defeat an evil wizard!

System Requirements :

* OS: Windows XP/Vista/7
* CPU: 1.6 GHz
* RAM: 256 MB
* DirectX: 9.0
* Hard Drive: 184 MB

Size : 42 MB

Download

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QGV6W4KU

OR

http://www.fileserve.com/file/TwWPspV/Rabbits.Magic.Adventures.v1.0-TE.rar

Tumble Jumble (FINAL)

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Publisher: Avanquest Software
Developer: Avanquest Software
Genre: Puzzle

Tumble Jumble : Intergalactic Rodent Removals is a fantastic new physics-based puzzle game from Utopian Games. As an employee of the Intergalactic Rodent Removal Company, you must rotate and drop a specified number of block-shaped rodents into containers while avoiding a variety of obstacles, including lasers and evil platforms.

Features :

* Powerful physics engine.
* Stylish high quality vector graphics and animations.
* Catchy original music and sfx.
* Addictive and challenging gameplay.
* 64 amazing levels.
* Online worldwide leaderboard.
* Level editor, make, play and share your own creations.
* Download and play other players levels free of charge.
* Story book tutorials and cut scenes
* Unique gameplay.
* Amazing power-ups.
* Lasers and dangerous obstacles to avoid.
* 5 medals to collect on every level including the ultimate “beat the developer”.

Size : 33 MB

Download

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SGCY3NFE

OR

http://rapidshare.com/#!download|634l35|447902691|Tumble_Jumble-.rar|34395

Tower Builder (FINAL)

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Genre: Puzzle
Published by: Big Fish Games
Developed by: Big Fish Games

Help save a young Pebble that has fallen from the heavens! You will climb the mountains, cross the abysses and build up intricate constructions of stone. It all depends on your imagination in Tower Builder! Work your way over tricky obstacles and help the young Pebble make it back to his friends and family in this exciting Builder game!

Features :

* Awesome gameplay
* Fantastic physics
* Build towers to the clouds!

System Requirements :

* OS: Windows XP/Vista
* CPU: 1.6 GHz
* RAM: 1024 MB
* DirectX: 9.0
* Hard Drive: 79 MB

Size : 60 MB

Download

http://www.fileserve.com/file/vXBHqXJ

OR

http://hotfile.com/dl/110757958/c6a75aa/TowerBuilder.rar.html

OR

http://www.filefactory.com/file/ca2bca8/n/TowerBuilder.rar

Parachute

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One of my biggest challenges lately in reviewing Android games is finding games to review. Sure, I can choose the big hit titles that everyone and his brother talks about, but we all know those will have mass appeal and are generally good games. So I tend to dig and try some of the more obscure stuff and lately there just hasn't been much worth writing about. In the end I'm left forcing out a

Emperor : Rise Of The Middle Kingdom (ENG/FINAL)

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Genre: Simulation
Publisher: Sierra
Developer: Impressions Games

Take control and build large imperial cities throughout Chinese history in several dynasties with Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. Play online with friends to enhance the experience of good, old city building and see who is the better builder. Full of awesome features including producing exotic commodities and learning several philosophies on your quest. Take the helm and fight for sole power of China in Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom.

Features :

* Build and rule dozens of cities throughout more than 1000 years of Chinese history
* Interact with every citizen in your city; Each has a name, job, and an opinion of you and how well you manage your city
* Play against the computer or go online with up to 7 other players in both cooperative and competitive scenarios
* Construct monuments and famous landmarks piece by piece
* Collaborate with other players on huge projects
* Conquer neighboring cities using catapults.

System Requirements :

* Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
* Pentium 2 400MHz
* 64 MB RAM
* 800 MB HD space
* 4 MB video card (16-bit color @ 800 x 600)
* 4x CD-ROM
* Online play requires 56K or faster connection

Size : 181 MB

Download

http://www.filesonic.com/file/252631491

OR

http://www.fileserve.com/file/dwBsc8M

OR

http://uploading.com/files/2fcd3e9e/Emperor.rar/