BrenDevLog
Follow along as Brennan attempts to bootstrap a 1-man software company/indie game studio.
What is this blog about?

What I'm workin' on

wifight is a free online multi-player multi-game turn-based game service. Is that enough hyphens? It's fun. I'm basu. Say hi in the chat room!
WINDOWS/PALMOS

Debris Visual Art: A long-running art project. It generates surrealistic paintinglike displays from random imagery accumulated from the Internet. The image continually shifts, but just barely too slowly to see. Someday you'll have a dedicated LCD picture frame in your house running this. I have been working on this off and on since about 2001.
WINDOWS

bmem: A simple (very simple) HUD for your PC, showing memory/CPU/disk use. In win32 the disk cache memory and free memory are kind of the same thing but they are reported separately, which is a huge pain. So I was inspired to write bmem. I also tried to make it as tiny and efficient as possible.
WINDOWS

RSXE: This is my RSS/Atom/whatever newsreader. It's kind of approaching alpha 1.0. I use it every day and code up a feature or two when I find something I miss. The goal here is simplicity, efficiency, and speed.
WINDOWS

Hlscript: When a programmer starts a blog, he can either use a pre-existing software package, or write one himself. Guess which option I picked. Hint: this blog runs on it! The design goals here are once again simplicity and speed. And easy hackability/customization. And not requiring a SQL engine. And not requiring too recent a version of PHP. Or browser.
PHP

Listo: A PHP-based personal streaming mp3 server. I wrote this to use with my Treo 650. It has a Web page interface to queue up songs while you stream them via PocketTunes or similar. It uses LAME to transcode songs to a usable bitrate. I use 32-40kbit mono variable bit rate over GPRS/EDGE.
PHP

 




 

24-jun-2010

thursday
 
wifight dev: animated screenshots
Check it out! Wifight in motion!

There are a couple more shots in this forum thread.

These images were auto-generated by the same server-side screenshot app I had previously made that writes out PNG files from turns, except now it supports writing animated GIFs.

I used the animated GIF API from Cockos WDL, the same API used by Cockos' new screen-capture tool, Licecap.

WDL's GIF writing support is nice and easy to use. I added an extra layer of optimization on top that detects unchanged areas between frames and encodes only the smallest single changed rectangle (shown here in gray):

And here is the size-optimized final shot (for reference):

This optimization seems to typically save as much as 50% of the filesize when I've tested it, so not bad I say. Also, kind of fun to code.

 linkme
 

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12-jun-2010

saturday
 
new build: debris visual art build 48
Hi folks, just a note that you can now download the latest and possibly(?) greatest Debris Visual Art build of all time, #48. Here's some of what's new:
  • random images now the default image source
  • drag-and-drop images bypass image min/max size checks (still can't be bigger than canvas tho)
  • a button to add files directly to the image cache (like drag-and-drop)
  • options to randomly flip final rendered frame h/v (before accum buf)
  • rid of fullscreen frame option
  • rotation option now sticks to 90degree increments
  • faster image edge smoothing. 10ms or so per iteration.
  • up windowed display border to 2 pixels
  • image placement algorithm (more CPU needed now but it's worth it)
  • about converting from sRGB (jpg/png/lcd monitor native format) to linear colorspace
  • to linear colorspace for placement (from default sRGB)
  • colorspace for frame crossfade, way more solid/smooth now (used to slightly dim)
  • contrast for linear color space
  • saturation for linear color space
  • more :)

    Debris is an automatic generative art project. Check it out at its homepage, badmofo.org/debris/.

 linkme
 

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24-may-2010

monday
 
some wifight dev what needs bloggin': prototype avatar editor
Here are some pics of my prototype wifight avatar editor that I started on today. Just testing out a couple simple concepts.

Default face, nothing selected.

How bout we try on those shades?

Or a smoove-stylin' goatee?

Promising, I think. But it raises more questions than it answers. Time to re-read Making Comics by Scott McCloud, especially the facial expressions chapter.

and check out the client game list lately

Freshly revamped with version 1.16!

 linkme
 

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21-mar-2010

sunday
 
new bmem! 2.8.11
I just posted a new version of bmem, 2.8.11. What happened to 2.8.10? I'm not really sure. Anyway, here's what's new:
New in 2.8.11:
- bmem no longer puts itself on top when a full-screen app is detected
- small change in CPU counting code to consider cores as physical CPUs

New in 2.8.10:
- OS detection code improved, thanks Anders
Enjoy! (bmem is a tiny, free memory/disk/cpu monitor for PCs.)
 linkme
 

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16-feb-2010

tuesday
 
wifight: a nifty milestone
screen capture of wifight.com stats box showing 500 logins created
Lucky 500! Congratulations (and welcome) to wifight's newest player, Hewadamith! And thanks to all the players for helping to make wifight awesome. You guys rock, and someday I will beat one of you at Chess. Someday.
 linkme
 

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03-dec-2009

thursday
 
new wifight feature! gamelist filtering
Check it out! The wifight client now features a spiffy new feature: gamelist filtering. With a little switcher bar that works with the Treo/Centro 5-way nav even.

screenshot of wifight client with new filtering feature

The 'Your turn' tab really streamlines the play process. I'm pretty happy with how this feature turned out.

 linkme
 

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30-oct-2009

friday
 
new wifight game: Drop 4!
Drop 4 is a clone of a classic boardgame. Take turns dropping coins onto a 7x6 grid of positions and try to get 4 coins of your color in a row before your opponent does.

Screenshot of Drop 4 in play

That makes 6 game types now playable on wifight! And with 6 more variations on the main games. All of which are multiplayer, online, spectatable, and yummy-licious.

Play Drop 4, right now, for free, on wifight! You can play on PalmOS or Windows (or both!)

Thanks very much to players Nithya, Trgeoff, L1quid, and Edes for their extremely helpful pre-launch feedback on Drop 4 in this forum thread.

 linkme
 

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25-aug-2009

tuesday
 
hlscript 0.5.6 posted
After about 2 years, it's time for another version of hlscript, the uberminimalist PHP blog engine that powers this blog. (And quite a few others.)

Here's what's new:

  • added call to addslashes() when writing a comment so DOS paths will display properly
  • added a bunch of isset() calls to reduce warnings in error log
  • added automatic Feedburner redirecting. Set $hls_rss_feedburner_redirect="MyFeedId" in config.php
  • added per-article comments enabling. Put "@@enable comments" on its own line somewhere in the article.

    And also probably a good amount of tweaks and fixes that weren't big enough to notate at the time.

  •  linkme
     

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    20-aug-2009

    thursday
     
    and in the fullness of time, wifight client 1.06
    I just posted wifight client version 1.06. Lots of bug fixes, and some changes under the hood.
  • all: optimized purge old games operation, should be much faster now
  • all: improved selection code, clicking on a secondarily selected entity will toggle the selection, handles overlapping selection rects better
  • win32: hitting enter on login screen screename field jumps cursor to password field (like palm)
  • win32: hitting enter on login screen password field begins login process (like palm)
  • all: client now stores turn metadata, which will allow neat features like time limits and such in the future
  • palm: fixed a bug when new game creation returns an error
  • all: debugged initial fps display reading (try hitting the . key sometime)

    Hot off the compiler!

    And now, some work-in-progress, not-very-staged screenshots of two original games I'm developing for wifight. These games are kind of still in the prototype stage.


    This shot was taken in the windows client's double-size mode. Vectory graphics rule! Dungeon's object-oriented environment is coming along. Lua is really nice for this. Dig my programmer art! I drew that demon dude in Inkscape.


    Also double-sized. You can see the dudes are toting ridiculously oversized M16s, and that they have empty health. In fact they seem to be each losing one health point. Still programmer art, except the M16s, which are based on a decent clip art collection of guns I found on the web (Somewhere on clker.com I believe.)

  •  linkme
     

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    04-aug-2009

    tuesday
     
    wifight 1.05
    Actually it's been out for a little while already, but wifight 1.05 is available for download. The biggest/bestest change is probably that the winclient now updates nice and quick like the Palm client does. And lots of bug fixes. Oh, and running in Classic Apps on the Pre is (basically) supported!

    Here's Whats New in 1.05:

  • win32: optimized disk access during updating, much faster now
  • win32: '!' was being interpreted as arrow-up, fixed
  • all: cancelling game browser gamelist fetch didn't close the game browser, fixed
  • all: network code cleanup, fixed some potential bugs that might explain some weirdness
  • all: game screen jumps to latest turn end when tapped even if it is not your turn
  • palm: Pre Classic mode. And I thought supporting treo600s was a pain
  • all: after accepting a draw in the game details screen, the quit button now disappears as it should
  • all: made Disconnect menu option in Game Room screen do confirm popup like other screens
  • win32: added little ? help buttons to show user guide pages like PalmOS has

    See you in the chat room!

  •  linkme
     

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    08-jul-2009

    wednesday
     
    wifight is 1.04 already!
    screenshot of games list Well, I have been elbow-deep in C++ land and cranking out client builds since 1.0, and following naturally upon the release of 1.01, 1.02, and 1.03 (which apparently I forgot to blog about, but were certainly worthy builds), we have... 1.04! I'm pretty happy with this build. Especially the new game title font in the game list. Check it out:
    Download the latest wifight client (currently version 1.04) for Windows and PalmOS at get.wifight.com.

    Here's Whats New in 1.04:

  • palm: fixed rare crash bug in progress popup
  • all: inverted text on hilited item for game browser too
  • all: "Delete game" option in gamescreen menu for completed games (instead of "Resign game")
  • win32: enabled keyboard shortcuts in menus like palm has
  • all: new chunkilicious font for game titles in game room screen
  • win32: window stays centered over old position when double-size is toggled
  • all: moved "PLAYER/SPECTATING" indicator in games archive list to the lower right
  • all: fixed game details popup bgcolor not matching color theme bgcolor
  • palm: fixed GPRS login popup coming up before progress popup paints
  • palm: game icon drop shadow wasn't showing up, fixed
  • palm: problem where once you turned off the screen it didn't want to come back on should be much better
  • all: updated inbuilt user guide to latest online version
  • all: fixed memory leak in select game screen

    Thanks for all the feedback in the chat room! You can also read the past release notes for all versions.

    screenshot of dungeon And here's a random peek at how Dungeon's doing lately. Remember this one's a work in progress. I've just been working on it here and there while I work out some design ideas on paper. But you can see the room rendered in the background there, and how about those graph-paper-esque lines? What do you think?

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    26-may-2009

    tuesday
     
    wifight at 1.0: at long last
    After actually-I-forgot-how-many-months-at-this-point, wifight is now at 1.0(!) AND supported on BOTH PalmOS and Win32. I ended up porting the port back to PalmOS, so now I have a nice portable OS-independent client app that compiles on both platforms. UI changes (most of them) just show up in both. It's nice.

    Hooray! Now I can finally start moving people off good old 0.36, so I can Break Stuff again.

    And, I'd like to invite you to wifight! Yes, you! The client is now posted to the front page. See you in the chat!

     linkme
     

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