What’s in it? It’s CPP-port of Quixie 0.4 series. Is it faster? Well, I haven’t fully benchmarked it yet but more than being faster than FreeBASIC-port, I’m aiming for Chrome/Firefox plug-in for Web-deployment capability. So, “Why?” …well, why not?

I plan to officially release it once we are on one to one porting of capabilities as current Quixie is heavily dependent on FreeBASIC’s functionality which could ideally be translated to CPP as well but it may take time which is rather scarce — like playing MP3, WAV, OGG — as well as loading BMP, JPG, TGA. Not to mention, the pixel-perfect collision detection. So, yeah, the current state of Quixie 0.5 is somewhat crippled but what a milestone that we actually have a CPP-ported Quixie in the repository that can load and display PNG and vectors, eh? I was actually able to play Smack with it! See screenshot below (just don’t mind the frame rate as my current build has lots of debug prints)

I’m planning to drop BMP/JPG/TGA support and instead, focus my limited free time on enabling Network functionality of CPP-ported Quixie.

If you can’t wait for the release, you can always checkout the current code and compile it yourself. Current code was tested to compile and work on a 64-bit Windows using MSYS2.

Happy hacking!
~creek23

If all goes well, you should already see the tech demo’s main menu as shown below.

That’s it! If you want to run a game written in KonsolScript, simply look for a (dot) KS file and double-click it!

On the next tutorial, I will show you what you need to make your own game using KonsolScript.

~creek23

Was gonna resume working on it again last week until I bumped into the root cause of what I thought was a bug in Smack’s code. Apparently, I need to update my GCC for Windows (MinGW) as I currently don’t have a GNU/Linux box. I’m currently using GCC 4.8.1, and 4.8 series is currently in 4.8.5. Sadly, MinGW isn’t offering it. So when I tried to compile GCC 4.8.5 it myself, it doesn’t seem to work properly on Windows — or I suck at compiling compilers. -_-

~creek23

So, I tried bringing the concern to FreeBASIC developers, that “fbc should be added in Ubuntu’s and/or Debian’s upstream”, but they don’t see this as an issue. I think they only see FreeBASIC as a hobbyist’s tool. I waited years for them to actually have it submitted to no avail.

Quixie’s dependency on FreeBASIC is an anchor for the project. It’s about time to move forward and leave the BAS source codes behind.

I’m currently porting Smack in C++ with IrrLicht as the graphics engine. Carefully building what would be a Kage Library, then add the scripting capability along with the game to finally have a brand new Quixie, in the hopes of making Quixie more portable, and available to Ubuntu Software Center. Fingers crossed.

With IrrLicht, 3D would be available in Kage as well.

I’m quite happy that it’s actually easy to port the game itself given the similarity of KonsolScript and C++ in syntax. Pretty much proves that KonsolScript/Quixie is a very good prototyping tool for any gamers with brewing idea. I only had to write the functionalities of loading and rendering of PNG files. Handing mouse and keyboard inputs are okay. Some others are still not implemented, especially handling sound. If you know a free and open source sound library that is compatible with IrrLicht’s license, please comment below.

~creek23

No, it’s not an official game from our team. The developer simply borrowed our characters and politely added me on credits as well as mentioning Smack! — well, the better should as the art’s license of Smack tells them to do so.

The game’s pretty decent, actually. My kid enjoys it.

The game was developed by a one-man team from around UK, codename TheInvader360. The dude already has 9 game on Play as of this post.

If we could only get some sponsorship so we can finally ship Smack! in Google Play before the year ends — it’s long over due.

~creek23

No, this is not from the Android-port of our game, Smack! but a game of TVN Mobile, whose first Android app is a more of a tool.

Still to try the game to test it myself — looks fun from the screencast.

Screenshot below shows the game is not quite polished yet but it’s already playable as shown in the screencast. It is still on BETA — so yes, it’s free. …for now, I guess.

Not sure if Gnu will be joined later by the rest of the gang, maybe it’s on App Store.

~creek23

This is due to String:Split bug which we haven’t fixed and a latency and/or fidelity problem with Quixie’s network capability. This fidelity issue is noticed when a server is trying to send a string content to a client in a fast, real-time-like manner. The message is not properly received on the client that some of the text contents are missing.

It is, however, possible to make turn-based game since polling would take lesser processing. With this, I was wondering if it’s actually possible to make a multiplayer poker game like the ones available at partycasino.com. Although one would need a huge amount of moola to operate the server.

We’ve almost released the third installment of v0.4 series during the last week of March but sadly, we can’t. We didn’t have time to fix the problem since we got busy writing libkage for Android last April.

If only we have enough funding so this project’s progress would go smoothly as planned. Like, how expensive is it to buy one of our Smack mugs? Each mug you buy would help fund KonsolScript game programming competition, which would in turn make the competitors-to-be a possible member of the community who would help finish tutorials and document other stuff while I get busy developing the engine.

By the way, a quick shout-out to a friend who has been in Spain for quite some time now, Ghie Esporton, who — in her own little way — spreads the word about KonsolScript — yes, she did talk about it in español.

Hasta pronto, Ghie!

~creek23

So to realize a KonsolScript for Android, on 7th of April, we started writing libKage for Android which is pure Java (again, Java for Android — not the standard Java).

libKage is a framework which would require you to extend upon to create your Android games. It contains functions and function names as if you’re still writing KonsolScript game for Quixie. This way, you can still retain the game logic you wrote for KonsolScript and run it on Android. And vice versa.

Mouse events, or Touch events rather, are already handled for you — except for keyboard inputs. Only the built-in buttons Up, Down, Left, and Right (also known as BU BD BL and BR) are available.

As a demonstration, we did a test on Smack! and here are the screenshots of the result.

Filipino’s pride, Pacman, on deck.

What better way to test Smack on Android than fighting Droid himself? (him or it? :P)

As part of libKage, we will be writing a KonsolScript to Android translator to make it even simpler to write Android Games. And possibly make use of Android SDK to automagically generate an APK of your KonsolScript game. Fingers crossed.

libKage will be available when it’s ready. It will be ready onced we release Smack for Android on Google Play.

~creek23

Last February, a member of Open Game Art community was awed by the cuteness of the gang posted on Open Game Art’s site, that he asked permission to use the sprites (same sprites used in Smack) for his game being developed on iOS.

As the sprites are licensed to be freely used by others commercially or educational purposes, he did get my approval.

So that same month, the game Fearless Cubs was released, though I was not notified.

The game looks cute, sadly I can’t test it as I don’t own any iDevice (I own an Android, btw). If you do, kindly try his free-trial game and see what you think.

If you think the game is worthy of a $0.99, you might want to support him and buy the full version of the game. By doing so, he might be interested to donate a portion of his revenue to the Smack! project, where all would be winning.

~creek23

With the release of Smack! v0.1, people have been lenient with except for the very low FPS — a comment which we took seriously.

Quixie’s source code have always had conditional compilation for Cairo as an alternative render engine since July 2010 but we were having problem rotating the image from the center. So I’ve decided to finally sit down and search the Internet for proper usage of rotation. It took a longer while searching only to realize that the answer has been staring back at us all along.

Upon implementation, discrepancies occurred with the expected way rendering from the previous renderer — some don’t even render at all. But these are the easy parts to fix. The hard part was to identify why in the world would Cairo crash on an almost random event. Few more days of testing, we nailed the problem down. And now it’s available for everyone’s consumption — yes, we’re deprecating the old renderer for Cairo.

We’ve release installers for Ubuntu and Windows, as usual.

Ubuntu users will have to use GDebi or simply use dpkg from the terminal as Ubuntu Software Center has become a pain in the a$$.

Now we can go back working on Smack v0.2. Please support us by purchasing some Smack! mugs.

~creek23