USA Games News July 25, 2008
Introduction Hello everyone, and welcome to the July issue of the USA Games news letter. As always I hope to bring everyone up to the latest news we have available at this time. Before I can get into the real news for this month I must confess I have been suffering a lot of turmoil in my personal and professional life. Worse there has been little I can do to deal with the situation I am faced with, and USA Games has suffered as well. With this in mind I haven’t had much time or energy to devote to any of our products like Raceway, STFC 2.0, etc.At this point it doesn’t look like anything will return to normal until mid August or early September if I am lucky. Back on April 23 of this year my wife and I were forced to move out of our apartment building while our apartment management had contractors come in and renovate our apartment building. As a part of the new renovations we are getting a completely new kitchen, bath room, new doors, updated electrical outlets, you name it. Unfortunately, instead of doing one apartment at a time or at least one apartment building at a time they do a little here and a little there. As a result a project we expected to be over in a month has so far lasted a total of three months, and we don’t have any clue as to when these contractors will complete the renovations. Though, the contract dead line was suppose to be September for all the apartment buildings so my wife and I are hoping that they will have everything done then. As a side effect of all the renovations being done to our apartment I don’t currently have access to my home office network. Like anyone else in business all of my primary records, documentation, notes, whatever is stored on a Linux desktop PC I use as a file server which is currently disassembled. In fact, my entire office network is disassembled and I have no access to any of the materials on those computers at home. The only bright spot in all of this is I do have one of my laptops with me, a Compaq Presario C500 series notebook, which does allow me to get on the net, read my email, and do some programming. The problem is when I left home I was ill prepared for an extended stay and my in-laws house. If I wanted to look up some notes for a project I am working on I needed my notes which happens to be on my central file server which is down. If I want to use some code I wrote six months ago that is on that file server I can’t access it. If I want to look for a certain sound effect I know I have, that isn’t on my laptop, again it is on the file server or backed up on a disk which I can’t currently access. In short, I don’t have everything I need with me, and I don’t know when it will be before I can access those materials. Weather we like it or not USA games has been essentially closed until we can get settled back in our home, I can get my home office back in working order, and we don’t have continued disruptions from the contractors renovating this or that. There is not a whole lot I or anyone else can do until the contractors have completed all the renovations that need to be done before we can move back in. the situation frankly stinks, but it is out of our control for the moment. With all that said there is a little good news that we would like to share with you which we have been working on during our untimely exile. This new development may well change the way USA games handles the development of our products and open up new markets with Mac OS and Linux specific users as well. We are very happy about our recent research. So read on to get the scoop. Multiplatform Gaming Like many others out there I have slowly been moving away from traditional Windows based PC software, and have been moving towards applications made for Mac and Linux. Thanks to Section 508, which was passed in the United States in 2001, accessibility has drastically improved for the Mac and Linux operating systems. Both operating systems ship with built in screen reading, magnification, and Braille reading software that normally costs the average Windows PC user hundreds of dollars to own and upgrade. If a blind computer user owns a Mac or Linux system the screen reader and magnification software is free. The free screen reader and magnification software isn’t the only bonuses to using an operating system such as Ubuntu Linux 8.04. A Linux user can download and use several free high quality applications such as Open Office 2.4, Mozilla firefox 3.0, Pigeon Instant messenger, Evolution Email/calendar client, and more. Many of these applications are now accessible out of the box, and work very well with the built in Orca screen reader/magnifier software that ships with Linux. As a result of all these accessibility improvements Windows is no longer the only option for a blind computer user. We have a choice between using a Mac with Mac OS Leopard, a PC running Ubuntu Linux 8.04, or a Pc running Windows Vista. However, like a lot of our sighted counterparts, many blind computer users do like to play games in our free time. Unfortunately the majority of accessible games have been specifically designed for Microsoft Windows only. Like many mainstream game developers most blind game programmers don’t want to learn new programming languages, find new development tools, and learn new software development kits in order to write games for Mac and Linux. Fortunately, USA games has just finished some research that may make this much easier for the average blind game developer to make games that will run smoothly on Mac OS, windows, and Linux without a lot of changes in the game’s source code. Very recently I have downloaded the SDK for SDL.net that is specifically designed for Visual Basic 2005 and C-sharp 2005 developers. SDL is a cross platform game development API similar to Microsoft’s DirectX API. SDL is a core API for Mac OS Leopard and Ubuntu Linux 8.04, and there is an easy install for Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, and vista. With SDL.net and the open source .Net framework, mono, games can easily be written in Visual basic or C-Sharp, and then run on systems running Mac OS, Linux, windows, and any other operating system with mono and SDL installed. During our testing of SDL.net we found the API should be pretty decent for the game developer wishing to create side-scrollers, arcade games, board games, etc. the sDL Mixer features are good enough for most practical uses, but does seam to lack full 3D audio which is really the only drawback I have found to using SDL instead of DirectX. In addition, SDL.net does support joysticks, mice, and keyboards so there is a universal way to handle all of these devices on every operating system out there without too much hassle for the game developer. Finally, since I have written the majority of my games in Visual C# 2005 I won’t have to rewrite all of my games from scratch in order to make them multiplatform compatible. I merely have to rewrite the sections of code that currently use DirectX and replace it with SDL. That is thankfully a process that may take weeks instead of months to accomplish. In order to insure full cross platform accessibility we have decided to officially drop Sapi 5.x support in all of our new titles. Instead we will use prerecorded wav files to speak game messages like Draconis Entertainment, GMA Games, PCS Games, etc are already doing in their game products. This really is the only practical way for doing speech on several different platforms without having to write a new text to speech interface to support Sapi, Gnome-Speech, and Apple speech drivers all at once. Each operating system has its own way for handling text to speech output, and often it is like comparing apples to oranges. So we feel creating our own sudo speech system is the best way to do this effectively. In our research we did a bench mark test between the built in Java Javax.Sampled.Sound API and the SDL Mixer API and SDL with C# was much more processor efficient in loading and unloading sampled wav file data. What this means is something that would be much more processor intensive like using prerecorded speech was much smoother using C# with SDL than using Java with its own built in sound mixer API. So this too is a good reason to go the SDL route. In the end we added up all the reasons to drop DirectX and Sapi and have discovered it is worth the effort to go to SDL for all of our new game titles. Yes, there will be some drawbacks to switching to the new technology such as we won’t be able to use force feedback controllers, but those are problematic anyway with Microsoft’s DirectInput and .Net Framework languages. SDL doesn’t have native 3d audio support, but it can be added by writing a custom 3D processor that adjusts the SDL volume and panning controls. This might require some additional research and experimentation, but it looks like it should be easy enough to do. Mysteries of the Aztecs (formerly Montezuma’s Revenge) Over the passed month or so there have been a number of you requesting information about this title from our sales department. We would like to publicly state I certainly have not forgotten you. As someone who has taken money for a product you have not yet received we do think you have a right to know what we are doing in regards to this product Over the passed few weeks I have been rereading all of James North’s original development notes for Montezuma’s Revenge, and in many respects it was going to be quite a bit different from the classic side-scroller for the Atari Entertainment System. We now know, a little too late, he was probably not sticking to a completely identical product to avoid copyright issues with the original companies who produced that game. It was basically Montezuma’s Revenge in name only, but did have a similar style of game play. In all not a bad rough draft of the game concept. So what we plan to do is follow James North’s original development logs and notes as a basic format of the new game. It is similar enough to Montezuma’s Revenge to make it as fun as the original game, and different enough to avoid any copyright entanglements. It also is the game you would have gotten if you had gotten it from Alchemy instead of USA Games. We feel this is the most fair solution to the issue of weather or not we should give you what you paid for verses our own desire to write something totally new. As mentioned in our previous article above MOTA is going to now use SDL instead of Microsoft’s DirectX. This is going to take a little while to update the side-scroller engine since it was not designed with cross platform considerations in mind. We hope to have a new Alpha ready for our beta testers by fall if everything goes to plan, and a new demo ready for Christmas. However, this is only projections, and not a guaranteed release time frame given our rather unique living arrangements and work schedule. Final Conflict One of the games we are currently working on in our free time is the long awaited STFC II. The new version of STFC is going to be more along the lines of the Star Trek Next Generation television series. There is still going to be the typical rogue Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians but we have decided to base all of the Federation ships and stations on the Galaxy-Class starships and the starbases seen in that television series. There are several reasons as to why we decided to use STNG as our basis for the new game, but the main one is problems encountered in developing STFC 1.x and the U.S.S. Defiant. Another reason we decided to stick to a more traditional Star Trek strategy game is it is much easier to use starships that are very similar than trying to create several different types of starships and starbases in one game. It is easier to program, the work can get done quicker, and in our home testing the game is in many ways more challenging. Without Defiant’s very useful cloaking device there is really no way to run and hide from enemy starships. You also can’t sneak up and attack an enemy starship or starbase without being detected in advance. This is arguably much harder to do now. That said, we are thinking up new ways to strategically hide your starships from enemies. One way is to add nebulas and asteroid fields to the game were you might be able to hide your starships. You might be able to hide one or two ships in a nebula where you might ambush an enemy fleet from your hidden position when they pass by. If you are damaged drawing an enemy fleet into a nebula would make their weapons and sensors less effective, and may allow you to give them the slip. As I said it offers a new range of strategic possibilities neither STFC or Trek 2000 currently offers the gamer. Another new feature we are introducing in STFC is the ability to evade fire while under attack. In the newest version of STFC there will be times when you fire upon an enemy or an enemy fires on one of your starships and the ship will be able to evade the attack. As a result attacks can take longer than one or two moves to complete thus making the out come of the battle much more unpredictable. One of the very best features of STFC II is an actual primary hull. In STFC 1.2 if your shields dropped below 0 that ship was dead. Now, if you lose primary shielding you won’t be destroyed. Instead your starship will sustain heavy damage to the primary hull. If you doc with a starbase your starbase crews will be able to repair damage done to your hull, but it will take several moves to complete. This will make the games much longer to play, and gives all ships and stations in the games a better than average chance to survive. Finally, one new feature I personally find exciting is the ability to rebuild destroyed starships lost in combat. Assuming you still have the use of your shipyards you can reconstruct any starship that was destroyed in combat, but it will take several moves to complete. As a result of this your primary objective in the new version of STFC is to destroy all of the enemy shipyards in order to cut off their ability to construct new ships and stations. If you are unable to do this effectively you are going to be quickly overwhelmed with enemy forces and be destroyed. This is a whole new strategic element that will improve the game’s replay value and more worries for the would be fleet commander. On the upside you should not have to worry about running out of ships and torpedoes as long as you can keep your starbases and shipyards alive to do their jobs. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
