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

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

I’m actually happy to make use of KonsolScript with the scenes involving close-up shots of Tony Stark and compositing pre-rendered Ironman against a background image.

Blender was used to animate a 3D Ironman, and have it rendered on a sequence of 1920×1080 PNG files.

Audacity was used for dubbing.

GIMP was used in an attempt to match the background with the pre-rendered Ironman.

Finally, FFMPEG was used to create an HD AVI from the sequence of PNGs.

The rest was done by my co-Visual FX artist, using the software he’s good at — needless to say, it was all proprietary software.

Anyway, enjoy!

I’d soon be releasing the modifications made on Quixie to support 1080p PNG-dumps. As well as experimental particle effects I did, hoping to have it included on the mini-movie above.

~creek23

Yes, is some ways it still is game-related — kind of like scripting an explosion when the player throws a bomb or something. But this use case is basically pre-rendering FX then saving it as frames to be used as a clip on a video.

No, KonsolScript doesn’t have the capability to create an image file on your disk. Yet. But with a few modifications, it does now.

Introducing Screen:Capture(filename) command!

I figured, this function can also be used when you want your players help you debug your game.

Visual FX does sound like an exaggeration to describe my experiment. It’s actually more of automating my task of doing a simple animation for a skateboarding video ad. But still, any one can always script a particle system and use it as a Visual FX of a fire, smoke, or explosion for a clip — and I believe KonsolScript can do that as well.

You may not know this but I’ve long been restraining myself from using proprietary tools (except for Windows so I could make sure Quixie does run on Windows as it does on GNU/Linux, and except for Windows Movie Maker — let’s face it, there really is no other good Free and Open Source video editing software that runs right out of the box and is easy to use).

So I’ve created a 30-second video using only Free and Open Source software namely GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity, FFMPEG, and KonsolScript — with Windows Movie Maker being the only non-FOSS software involved (and Windows, of course).

So where did KonsolScript came in to the view? It was when I needed a transition of the following photo below.

I’m pretty sure that no other ready-made open source video editing tool (not even Movie Maker) could do this simple animation.

With time running out, there’s no way I could learn Blender’s Video Sequence editor and do this simple less-than-two-seconds animation. In less than 5 minutes, I updated Quixie, wrote the script for the animation and I’m done!

It’s not officially out yet — I’m still working on the release-process like committing it on SVN, updating the installer, etc.

Just a side note, we currently have a company activity that includes video editing — I’m excited to see how KonsolScript will help in generating some of the effects/animation.

~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

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

Previously, launching Smack! was taking 35sec, but that was brought down to 7sec without changing anything on the script — that’s five times faster. Although we still want to have it trimmed down to 1~3 seconds.

Installer for Debian/Ubuntu to follow.

Update: Installer for Debian/Ubuntu is now available. Also a generic tar.gz for other GNU/Linux distro.

~creek23

Photos below are what Mark, Uriel and I drew for the planning of Smack! If you’ve been checking the SVN repository, you now know that Smack is already in it’s 10th revision (disregarding commit counts on art/sound assets).

If you are interested in playing a very early alpha version of the game, you will have to compile Quixie from the repository or the game won’t run smoothly as we have been fixing Quixie as we bump into random bugs — in short, KonsolScript v0.3.1110 is still buggy. Eek!

This first photo is where we were deciding if falling off the platform would penalize for life — given that what’s currently implemented is that there’s seconds of delay before respawning. Btw, wrap-around world has been implemented. This means the exiting from the left side of the screen will make you reappear on the right side of the screen. Final decision, life is penalized.

This next photo shows our agreed Stats distribution among the five main characters of the game — using the pseudo-planning poker.

Sorry for the quality of the pictures. These were taken from my 2 Mega Pixel company phone.

In case you haven’t met them here’s the pre-final look of Kisi, Wilber, Tux, Kit, and Gnu — the mascots from KonsolScript, GIMP, Linux, Firefox, and GNU. Although Kisi and Tux has long been finalized with the help of my colleagues and MoikMellah from OpenGameArt.org community.

One of the decisions made was to make the first pre-release by mid November. Just in time for KonsolScript’s 6th birthday. The release would consist of 2 playable characters, mainly Kisi and Tux. Possibly on 2 available maps and a couple of basic Melee weapons.

~creek23

So why release a premature build, you ask. This is because several string-handling related bugs were fixed. From String properties of a UDT, to arrays of String, to passing String values to a function, to string-equations. These bugs were uncovered by our friends at Nueva Vizcaya State University, Philippines — more to this later this month.

Available downloads are installers for Ubuntu and Windows. Again, Ubuntu 10.04/10.10 users should have no problem installing it but 11.04 users will have to install it via terminal.
sudo dpkg -i quixie_0.3.111009_i386.deb

Again, this is kind of a preview release so if you find bugs, please report it to help us fix them.

~creek23

Make sure that “Save color values from transparent pixels” is checked and transparent pixels are “magenta” (#FF00FF) if opaque.

The new build also features event-handling, where the included demo in the installer showcases its use. A tutorial will be made for this new feature later. To complement this feature, we have to add Mouse:IsInside(), and Mouse:OnImage for easier checking of mouse location.

For this release, we offer installer for Ubuntu and Windows. Ubuntu 10.04/10.10 users should have no problem installing it but 11.04 users will have to install it via terminal.

sudo dpkg -i quixie_0.3.110724_i386.deb

Again, this is kind of a preview release (post-alpha, pre-beta) so if you find bugs, please report it to help us fix them.

Now download the update and enjoy!

~creek23