ON THE MOVE

The Rokon Game Engine Blog has moved, there will be no more posts here.

stickycoding.com

Almost Done!

Okay, so my game demo has been out a couple of weeks.

I got the full version on the market the other day, and it's doing well. I am fixing up the last few bugs that have appeared, and then we are back to the engine!

The engine should be updated online, by the end of next week.

Thanks all for being patient! :D

My game release

So, I've been beavering away, and finally got the demo version of my game out. Things are taking longer than expected - and unfortunately that means even more delays for the game engine :(

I'm almost there with the full version, once I've got this out of my system I can leave it for a little while and concentrate on updating the engine online, and beefing it up ready for my next project.

If you fancy having a play, or want to see what the engine is capable of...

[shamelessplug]http://www.cyrket.com/package/com.stickycoding.FlyingAcesLite[/shamelessplug]

Not given up!

Hello all. It's been a little while since the last update, but don't worry, lots of things are happening.

I've been working on my game - which has brought many new things into the engine that it needs.

A lot of the vertex / texture handling has changed, to speed things up a bit. Memory leaks have been completely wiped out now.

I've also worked in a loading screen, a very easy to handle game pausing system, and a way of making sure that a group of your commands are handled at the same time by the engine (freezing/unfreezing the drawing loop). Key and trackball events are now handled. I have also implemented a few functions to handle someone pressing the Home button, and keeping your game alive in the background.

The major feature of the next update will be an XML-driven menu system. It isn't finished yet, so is what is holding the update back, but it will be worth it. You can create very polished, very easy to manage game menu's - the transitions between menu's are handled by setting a single XML attribute. I decided to build this feature in because of the trouble I had in building my own sexy-looking menu system, I realised that if I needed to change it significantly, it would be a LOT of code to rework. By handling it all in the engine, new menu systems can be built in, literally, minutes!

Also, thanks to those of you who have been emailing in little bug fixes and alterations, I really appreciate it, and your code will be included in future version :)

Work in progress

So, I've made a few changes to our lovely game engine, and I've been working on my own game.

I'm not going to reveal all my secrets just yet, but I wanted to share some things I've been working.

I have created quite a decent a path following SpriteModifier. It takes an array of points, and your sprite will follow smoothly along it, rotating if necessary. I made this because it's the biggest part of the game I'm working on.

And, as proof of how easy the engine is. I went from no game, to where I am now (working on nicer graphics, bug testing) in just over a day.

Keep checking for my game release, and remember, get all the engine source code yourself free!

http://code.google.com/p/rokon/

Rokon 0.11A

Well, it's been a whopping great 2 days of work and we've certainly made some progress here.

Below is a quick clip of the new features, as they are included in the new example's. A list of changes since the last version is also below. Please do comment or email in with your suggestions and bug reports. Thanks!

0.11A 19/09/2009

New Features

* Added the Particle engine

* Added Fixed and Scrolling Background classes

* Added Rokon.setBackgroundColor method

* Added Rokon.getTime method

* Added Rokon.makeFloatBuffer method

* Added Sprite.setOffset method

* Added Sprite.setVelocityRelative method

* Added the BasicHandler class

* Added the Blink SpriteModifier

* Added the Colorize SpriteModifer

* Added the Fade SpriteModifier

* Added the Grow SpriteModifier

* Added the Shrink SpriteModifier

* Added Example 10, a demonstration of particle effects

Changes

* Dramatically improved performance, removing many GC causes.

* Example 7 was updated to include the new SpriteModifier's

* Gravity SpriteModifier uses the Sprite's velocity rather than its own

* Many calls to System.currentTimeMillis have been replace by Rokon.getTime

Bug Fixes

* Sprite's without a Texture would raise exception when drawing

* SpriteModifier's would not update if Sprite is invisible

Shiny particles

First off, the code has only been online for a day and I've already had a couple of people get in touch with suggestions, so thanks!

Another hard days working on the engine, I've fixed a few bugs, added a number of SpriteModifier's. Most noticably, I have began work on the particle engine.

The code is available right now in the unstable build section, and is due to be improved significantly. But as a proof of concept, I've taken a little video to show what's going on.

Unfortunately, I only have a crappy camera, and while it looks jerky I can assure you the demo averaged around 45fps, and looked significantly better in the flesh.

Take a look, and let me know what you think!

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