Saturday 29 May 2010

Super-Secret Game: Revealed

As tweeted earlier today by @thezombiecow, the super-secret AGS -> XAGE conversion project is Time Gentlemen, Please. Obviously this is massively exciting for a number of reasons:
More accurately, I'm actually working on the demo as a feasibility study and it's going pretty well. The ultimate aim is to get the full game onto Xbox Live. It's a huge amount off work but I'm confident it can be done.

Zombie Cow Studios are currently venturing into the third dimension, with some hand-holding from Channel4, in Privates (read the eye-opening press release here).

Oceanspirit Dennis:

I've actively been working on a few others things that have helped development across the board (finicky things like handling GUI transparency). One is Ben304's mock RPG, Oceanspirit Dennis: Scourge of the Underworld. It's essentially a satire on JRPGs (at least, that was my interpretation). It has since spawned a number of increasingly peculiar sequels, all of which are brain-achingly canon.

An interesting diversion and XAGE's second full conversion - play it online here: http://www.clarvalon.com/XAGE/games/ODennis/

To quote the author: 'Don't play if you're looking for a rewarding experience!'

Ben has also recently open-sourced '!', his well-received comic-panelled, robotic rap-athon. You should all follow @ben_304 and ask him when he finds time to sleep.

Other Stuff:
  • Expressions are supported, in that XAGE now copes with things like cChar.Walk(cChar.X + 10, cChar.Y - 20).
  • RenderTargets are no longer used when no scaling is required, improving performance in certain instances.
  • Silverlight now uses png textures instead of xnb, improving load times and further reducing the xap filesize.
  • Internal Dictionaries are generated in-game during initialisation. This means that, if a room has 300 objects, the engine no longer needs to loop through 299 to retrieve the last object when it is referenced via scripting. Certain methods that were previously using 4-5% of all processor time now use a tiny fraction.

5 comments:

thezombiecow said...

Bollocks! Was this a secret?? Sorry :D

Clarvalon said...

Not just a secret, a super-secret.

Ben304 said...

Hah, I thought this might have been it :D

Cool news, wish you the best of luck with it all.

Clarvalon said...

Cheers!

P.S. I'm using '!' to help me overcome the thorny issue of arrays. Traversing the panels already works a treat.

Ben304 said...

Ah, I wondered if you were going to ever add support for arrays into XAGE. I know they go against the "minimal coding" philosophy you started with... but they are really nice to use!

Hope it doesn't cause too many headaches :D