Ovine by Design » Andy

iPhone graphics

Andy H — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 22:47:38 +0000

Finished my part of the graphics on the second iPhone game we have in development with Ric, Andrew and Stu so I’m now back on the first, that mysterious Rex character. Hopefully we’ll have both games available soon. For now, here’s a sneaky peak of what’s to come…

Two different games, can you guess what they are?

Bernieres-sur-mer map

Andy H — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:21:49 +0000

Going through my Grandads old papers we came across this interesting map dated May 1944.

Retro Gamer – Remake of the month

Andy H — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:11:25 +0000

In case you missed it, Stu’s remake of Armalyte is out now and very good it is too.

Also out now is the new Retro Gamer and it’s deservidly been given the Remake of the Month award … no surprise considering it also has the excellent graphics from Smila and tunes from Infamous.

Go and buy both now!

Two states of Jaffa Cakes

Andy H — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:20:21 +0000

New shader for MMF2

Andy H — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 20:18:44 +0000

I’ve dipped a toe into pixel shaders after looking at Looki’s lens shader and modified it to work on an objects surface rather than on the background beneath the object. Both Looki’s and Ovine’s version have their own advantages and are useful for certain situations:

Ovine Lens shader

Uses an image (stored in MMF) for the lens distortion effect (can not be modified at runtime)
Applies the lens effect only to the contents of the object (this could be an MMF object, Frame or Layer) so allows several independant lens effects to be applied

Looki Lens shader

Uses the contents of the object for the lens distortion and applies the effect to everything in the background underneath. Therefore the lens can be changed at runtime
Everything beneath it will have the distortion applied, everything above it will not

You can download it from the Clickteam forums.

MMF2 can now create Flash games

Andy H — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:55:47 +0000

Earlier this week Clickteam announced the release of the MMF2 Flash exporter … this allows you to create games that run through Flash in your browser. Requires version 10 of the flash browser plug-in…I’m well impressed

From Clickteam’s website:

Finally, the MMF2 & TGF2 SWF File Exporter that will allow you to create applications compatible with Adobe® Flash® Player is available !

Currently there is no demo version for this runtime, you can get it in our online store only (price = $69, 59€, or £49). It is a download only option (60 Mb), and an Internet connection is required to register it. Also Java is required to build SWF files (if it’s not installed, or if you have an old version, the installer will ask you if you want to install it).

We’ll probably create a demo version that shows the Flash features without build ability so that you can see if your applications can be built as SWF file, but in the meantime, here is a “features & limitations” list :

Features

- New build type : “SWF File for Adobe Flash Player”
- Sounds are automatically compressed to MP3
- Options to include a preloader :

TGF2 -> fixed image + circle progress bar
MMF2 -> customizable image + customizable circle progress bar
MMF2 Developer -> either customizable image + customizable circle progress bar, or other MMF (simple) application

- Options to include MochiAds in your SWF file at start or end of the application, or between frames
- New Flash Player object, similar to the Vitalize! Plugin object, that allows you to send Javascript commands, open an url, retrieve html parameters, etc
- New FLV object that allows you to play FLV files in a SWF application.

Limitations and differences with EXE apps

- SWF apps run in a sandbox, they have no access to the system, they cannot load or save file.
- Some properties are disabled:

you can’t change the style of the window and applications have no menu
you can’t switch to full screen and the “resize display to fill window size” option is disabled
the “machine independent speed” option is disabled
frames have no transitions and objects have only one type of transition (Fade)
half the runtime properties of frames are disabled, as they have no use in the Flash player
only one Ink Effect for objects, Semi-transparency

- Events:

MIDI musics are not supported by the Flash player
You cannot play sample files (only internal samples)
You cannot save or load the frame position
You cannot clear the screen
You cannot change the frame rate at runtime (but you can change it in the properties)

- Right mouse clicks can’t be intercepted
- You cannot make holes in the background collision mask
- String objects are clipped vertically
- Objects out of the frame area may be visible
- Here is the current list of extensions that work in SWF apps (more will be converted in the future) :

All the movements
Active System Box
Advanced Direction
Advanced Game Board
Advanced Path Movement
Array
Background System Box
Button
Clickteam Movement Controller
Combo Box
Date & Time
Direction Calculator
Double Precision Calculator
Edit Box
Get
Hi-Score
Immediate IF
Ini
Flash Player
FLV
Layer
List Box
Move Safely 2
Platform
Rectangle Calculator
Static Text
String Parser
String Tokenizer
Wargame Map

Examples

There seem to be a number of limitations, but this runtime works great. Some examples :

CrazyCrab
Treasures
Chicken Wings
Gem Fusion
Spacer
Lobotomy
Vincere Totus Astrum
Gracillis – still here
Elementum, example of Facebook application with score integrated in Facebook page
Simple educational game

More to come…

Ashen’s Tech Dump Retro Games

Andy H — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:23:23 +0000

Had this funny Retro game related snippet passed on to us today … if only more games existed like this back in the day who knows where we would be now.

Merry Christmas

Andy H — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 11:32:38 +0000

Merry Christmas everyone from Ovine towers!

Hope Santa brought you everything you wanted.

The new Logo

Andy H — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 11:05:12 +0000

The observant amongst you may have noticed something has changed on the top of every page … the new logo is GO!

Expect to see the Ovine swirl in all future Ovine flavoured productions

The Ovine Swirl

Super Secret

Andy H — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:36:22 +0000

About time I posted something about what I’m up to. Testing something super secret at the moment, very exciting, can’t say anything more about it … yet (so much for posting what I’m up to then ). Also been drawing some cartoon style doodles while playing around with neat things in the HWA version of MMF2. It sounds like HWA will be out of beta and integrated in to the main program soon … keeping fingers crossed. I might see if I can use them in something one day, along with the UGG graphics I found the other day (a game me and Stu started a long time ago).

I’ve also found a new look for the Ovine logo I like. Been something I have been playing with for the last couple of months, will unveil it shortly.

Finally, please bear with us if you experience connection issues to the web site this week. We had an email from the host about some server maintenance, hopefully it will be quick and painless. Till next time …

Simple question, complex answer…

Andy H — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:45:01 +0000

Our tumble dryer packed in recently and we had to buy a new one. A nice shiney new model arrived the other day and reading the instructions there is no mention of a feature that all the websites and reviews have been saying it has. So I send a question off to the well known company (name witheld to protect the eccentric) and get this reply. See if you can guess what the question was and if you know what the answer is, please let me know!

Thank you for your recent email,

The user controls consist of a programme selection knob, option buttons;
start reset button and a stand-by button.
The control system consists of a user interface and control module, a
thermistor mounted at the top of the front air duct and one mounted on
the heater assembly and a conductivity sensor.

The conductivity sensor is mounted in the front air duct. A single wire
connects the sensor to the control module. The thermistors and
conductivity sensor send values back to the control module. The control
module then determines the programme duration and required dryness of
the load in a set of values for a particular programme held within the
control module software.

The control module is located behind the right hand side panel and there
is a service port behind the plinth cover that allows attachment of a
computer to programme the EEPROM or test the control module. The control
module can be programmed with the relevant eeprom file if the control
module is replaced, the eeprom file becomes corrupted or if an updated
file becomes available.

Any ideas what the question was? I asked “Has the tumble dryer got a drying sensor to reduce drying times?”. I think they are saying it does…possibly…

Retro Goodies for Sale

Andy H — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:50:28 +0000

I’ve some old Retro Gamer magazines for sale on eBay if anyone is interested. They’re all early volume 1 issues from 3 to 9 (but not 8 for some reason). These duplicate copies have been lying around for ages I thought I’d better get rid of them…no point in having two lots.

If you’re short of a few early issues, here’s your chance to get them at a bargin price!

Norton is dead, Long live ESET

Andy H — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:11:26 +0000

Norton Antivirus finally gave up today after my subscription expired. If you’ve been following our blogs recently, you’d have read that I had some comical Norton customer support that went no where. Well today it looks like the actual product is no better.

No sooner as it told me I had one day left on my subscription (which was correct) it then decided that I couldn’t have that and immediately expired. What was worse was that Windows then alerted me that my Antivirus protection was disabled, shortly followed by an unpleasant Norton window saying renew my subscription now or the kitten gets it … well perhaps not the kitten, but it was holding me up for ransom and would no longer protect my PC until I paid up.

In the past, when Norton’s subscription expired it meant you got no new updates, but your PC was still protected and the Antivirus still functioned. Eventually I’d upgrade to the newer version of Norton or renew my subscription. It seems now you are paying for the right to use Norton protection during the subscription period and bad luck when that’s over! I can’t say I respond well to bullying tactics like this, and with my poor experiences of Norton in general this year I chose to uninstall and go with something else.

Thankfully ESET AntiVirus has come to the rescue. I’m very impressed so far. It’s giving me plenty of stats about what it’s doing to protect me, yet better still my PC loads much, much quicker and sort of feels a bit faster while using it in general. I’ll ofcourse let you know if my opinion of it changes over time, but Stu has been using it for some time and he’s a happy camper…but that’s another story

Teserae Amiga game dug up

Andy H — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 23:22:43 +0000

I recently found an old Amiga game I made back in 1992 called Teserae and put it on the downloads list. The game was a remake of Teserae on the Atari ST which in turn was a remake of Tetris. You’ll need an Amiga or Amiga Emulator to play it. I’ve not created a disk image yet, so you’ll need to transfer it to your Amiga/Emulator first.

JAVA version of Echo the Mouse

Andy H — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:32:14 +0000

I made a game with Multimedia Fusion 2’s (MMF) new JAVA export around this time last year using my Echo The Mouse character. The game was to be used in a special JAVA version for BluRay players which had pretty low hardware specifications. As such the game had to be fairly simple. That said I still tried to make something a little bigger to see how far I could push it.

The viewable display on a standard TV meant that my origanal Echo graphics were a bit on the small side. I decided to double their size and to change the game to be a flick-scrolling affair. This took a couple of weeks to build, most of that time was spent drawing the larger graphics. Thankfully, MMF makes the business of building games easy so in the last few days I was able to get everything working.

The final version, done in two weeks due to the time frame I was given, features a large single level to explore. The object of the game is to find and collect all the cheese. There’s no music and very limited sound effects due to the limitations of the target machines. This version has been compiled in JAVA for playing in a web browser and has only had the window size changed to fit better on Windows, Macs and Linux machines.

Click here to PLAY!

Spriter animation tool

Andy H — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:20:56 +0000

I’ve picked spriter up again after a long rest. I started Spriter (i think) in 2004 when it looked more like DPaint. I decided to change it a few months later to look more Windows-ey which was a good idea as I could make use of the standard controls and windows. I kind of got side tracked with various games and it’s been a long time since I last worked on it. So with with less workload and distractions I figure it’s about time to do something with it again.

I’ll post more screenshots as time goes on, and would welcome any feedback, comments or requests either here or on Twitter. I’ll try to get a beta version to download in the next couple of weeks once the load/save functionality is in.

In the mean time here’s a screenshot on Twitpic.

Microsites working

Andy H — Sun, 10 May 2009 19:50:29 +0000

All the Ovine microsites (see the links in the footer of this page) should be working ok now, including the download links. Let us know if you have any problems with either the high score uploads or the pages.

Happy Birthday!

Andy H — Sat, 09 May 2009 08:40:51 +0000

Happy Birthday ROSS!

C/C++ section added

Andy H — Sat, 09 May 2009 08:35:32 +0000

Just found a nice article on Cymon’s Games website about setting up a nice free C/C++ IDE, compiler and a selection of essential libraries so have added some information and further links under the Development menu. Thanks Cymon, pay him a visit if you are interested in learning more … some great stuff there!

Forums open for business

Andy H — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:06:17 +0000

The Ovine forums are now open for business. Go to http://forum.ovinebydesign.com/ if you want to join up.

Ovine by Design » Andy

iPhone graphics

See also ...

Bernieres-sur-mer map

See also ...

Retro Gamer – Remake of the month

See also ...

Two states of Jaffa Cakes

See also ...

New shader for MMF2

See also ...

MMF2 can now create Flash games

See also ...

Ashen’s Tech Dump Retro Games

See also ...

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone from Ovine towers!

See also ...

The new Logo

See also ...

Super Secret

See also ...

Simple question, complex answer…

See also ...

Retro Goodies for Sale

See also ...

Norton is dead, Long live ESET

See also ...

Teserae Amiga game dug up

See also ...

JAVA version of Echo the Mouse

See also ...

Spriter animation tool

See also ...

Microsites working

See also ...

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday ROSS!

See also ...

C/C++ section added

See also ...

Forums open for business

See also ...