Here’s a sneak peek of the beloved character of Mr Berlin Manalaysay.

Just to be clear, rather than screencast of me drawing Combatron, the video above is a screencast of me doing Edit->Redo after Undo-ing — over 380 Redo. That’s because I haven’t placed a limit yet to the number of Undo Stacks that Kage Studio will have — that’s purpose of this stress testing. Although, I’m testing it under a 12GB RAM laptop. So, if someone can test it on lower RAM, please provide feedback.

With the technical topic over, so, what do you think of my retake on Combatron — I know the first one is a bust.

Also, you may have noticed the website indicated at the end of the video. Yes, it’s true. More on that later.

~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

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

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

While two-day game development has become a phenomenon, the Smack! dev team is taking two-months to go from prototype to this and still the game is not quite finish, yet. But we’re getting close to releasing it, although one can always checkout our SVN repo — you just have to install the latest KonsolScript engine (0.3.111117 as of this post).

(I wonder if we can finish a game if we join the Global Game Jam later this month)

~creek23

What you get to play in the HTML5 port is basically the same to what we currently have for KonsolScript edition. Except for the difference in the feel of the Jump controls, everything else feels the same (to me, at least :P).

Click this image below to try it out. Please note that it’s currently NOT WORKING on Internet Explorer. It was tested on Google Chrome 15 and Mozilla Firefox 8.0.

Controls are:

• A – move left
• S – jump down
• D – move right
• SPACE– jump (make sure the browser is maximized or the browser will Scroll Down instead, making the game un-playable)
• G – punch
• H – kick/shuriken

Expecting a comment on my very first HTML5 game!

~creek23

We still don’t have a real cross-platform editor with the same behavior as that of KSE. I myself is still using Geany on Ubuntu — same open source editor I’m looking to custom fit for KonsolScript.

So what I did was to patch up the old KSE — remove code-hints/code-complete on deprecated functions and add new ones. Seems to work fine with latest (unreleased) Quixie. I haven’t created an installer since patching is still in progress, so I’ve setup a Test Builds page which requires anyone to install the old KSE (for FreeKE) installer before patching.

To test KSE, one will have to build the latest Quixie from SVN — if you could wait, I’ll be releasing the latest Quixie next week. Still to try if KSE still works under WINE.

I tried using KSE to further develop Smack!. Screenshot shows how it displays debugging messages from Konsol:Log.

Please note that this is not the same with KAGE Studio, which was promised to be pre-released this month.

~creek23

Yes. What you see above is the long awaited animation tool for the KAGE platform, called Kage Studio. It was planned to be released this month sadly there’s nothing much of a functionality except for drawing rectangles. Kage Studio will use the Cairo-rendering KonsolScript engine, Quixie_Cairo. Like Quixie, FreeKE, and KonsolScript Editor, Kage Studio will also be open source. Still deciding over which license to use. GPL, LGPL, or MIT.

Just for fun, I added another functionality — the ability to generate HTML5 code. The screenshot below is a non-animating example generated from the screenshot above. Not sure if there are others that already exists, but hopefully Kage Studio will be one of the open source HTML5 tool that Professional Web Designers/Developers use. Click the image to see the generated HTML5 run in your browser.

But until then, this tool will require a lot of work. Hopefully a first release will be available by November — KonsolScript’s sixth birthday.

Would love to hear your opinion.

~creek23

As much as I’d like to implement it in C, String-handling with dynamic memory allocation kept me from any progress.

Having been convinced by Gnash developer Rob Savoye, I decided to use C++ instead, which indeed made the progress to move forward.

Still wanting to support C, I designed the C++ code to be easily ported/adapted by C programmers. But having been working on-and-off on libQuixie with C++ for about 4 months, the whole code seems to be a mess. So I decided to draw a diagram of how things work inside libQuixie, which would hopefully help get a better visualization of its inner workings.

Above is the architecture (if you may) of libQuxie’s variable handling, showing how it will support Object-Oriented Programming.

A quick walk through: If a user declares an instance of a class (given that it’s pre-existing), this new instance will be handled by ClassInstancesArray where the index is kept in VariablesArray; then all reference to the newly created class-instance will have an ID of the VariablesArray-index, that points to which ClassInstanceArray-index it’s kept.

Basically, the {whatever-type}Arrays are the Manager class of each {whatever-}type, which would handle the checking of variable-duplicates and such.

This might be confusing, and it is, but this design is made with easy C-porting/adaptation in mind. Also, this is a prototype — and so arises the question “will it be performing fast?” that is answered with “I’m not sure but I hope so”.

If you have any concern about the design, feel free to discuss it below — I do need your inputs on this.

Still working on the code. Everything is way too preliminary, so an announcement of an alpha release is way too early.

Will try to SVN-commit the draft and messy-prototypic code this week.

~creek23

After implementing Quadratic Bezier curve, I tried creating a heart and a circle for a simple Valentine’s Day demo, until I noticed something. The image below displays the progress made to Quixie to draw a vector curve that is similar to how Flash renders a curve.

Go and click the image to view larger.

Not sure if it’s just me but it’s only know that I realize that using cubic over quadratic seem to produce better shapes. Don’t know about you guys, but I think the previous implementation of curve-rendering draws the heart and the circle much better.

As expected, looks like Quixie will have to employ both Quadtratic and Cubic Bezier curves, using CurveTo and a new Draw function CubicCurveTo.

Also, Cairo doesn’t seem to negate (can’t pick out the right word here) to overlapping shapes. Notice the hole where the heart and circle collided on Flash’s implementation?

You might be wondering why is it so important that Quixie will render vectors the way Flash do. The simple answer is, “easy adaptation” — the same reason DOC, XLS and PPT files can be opened with OpenOffice. Still, Quixie is not being developed to be an open source alternative to the Flash Player — Gnash development team has already been working on it.

By the way, the quadratic beziers are converted into Cairo’s cubic bezier by an algorithm from Mono project — the Moonlight’s moon_curve_to function.

~creek23