Bit Blot Forum
Aquaria => General => Topic started by: McLintock85 on April 10, 2007, 02:06:23 pm
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Hi everybody!
I'm dabbling in the dark arts of 2D side scroller programming myself. After taking a look at your screenshots and the awesome new "Aquaria" trailer, a few tech questions came to my mind:
1. Do you guys use AABBs or OBBs for collision detection? Maybe even a pixel-based or swept-polygon approach?
2. Why did you use DirectX instead of say, the SDL, wouldn't that have made the game more portable to other platforms (e.g. Mac)?
3. Is the blur effect of the background parallax layers created at runtime or is it pre-rendered?
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1. Circles + Grid
2. Didn't use DirectX for graphics. Used OpenGL. The game is up and running on Mac OS X as of yesterday, actually. ;)
(but of course using OpenGL will become a pain in the ass if/when we port to XBox360 or other platforms)
3. Blur for the bg is "premade". We have a pixel shader blur effect, but we don't use it very often.
What project are you working on?
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The game is up and running on Mac OS X as of yesterday, actually. ;)
Huzzah! That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Will you be publishing the Mac version yourselves, or will you be working with a publisher to get it out there (e.g. Ambrosia Software)? Also, for that matter, will you be self-publishing the Windows version, or working through some other company? I assume that, having won awards at the IGF, there are offers on the table...
xander
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We're planning to release the Windows version ourselves for now. We're likely going to go with a publisher for the Mac version. More info later. ;)
Here's a screenie (http://zaphire.ca/AQ/MOSX3.png) from my girlfriend's 13'' Mac Book. (with a crap onboard video card) Unfortunately I could only borrow her 'Book for a couple days. Hopefully I'll be able to buy my own Mac Book Pro soon...
Note: We're hoping to make the Dock Icon dynamic.
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Nice news on the Mac front (I'm more of a Linux guy myself).
I wrote a tile-based 2D sider-scroller engine a few years ago. Working on the project was fun, I also created a map editor and a bunch of other tools. A friend from highschool and myself were going to turn it into some big epic 2D RPG... which never happened, of course ;) It's quite impressive that the two of you managed to pull such a project off, and what a gorgeous looking game it is.
My coding fingers have been itching for a while to attempt this again. I'm currently in the process of writing design documents (both for a game and the engine driving it) and researching possible APIs and techniques to pull it off. So far I've chosen the SDL for input & sound (used this on my other game projects), OpenGL for video (used software rendering in the past, except for one funky 3D OpenGL demo) and C++ for the actual code magic. And of course FLTK (http://www.fltk.org (http://www.fltk.org)) for crafting the tool GUIs (easy to use cross-platform GUI API).
Oh, and getting collision detection done riiiiight can be a bitch, it's usually the hardest coding part for me ;)
I'm always interested in the tools other people write to create their game worlds and animations, so screenshots of your Aquaria tools would be much appreciated. I read that you even created a custom application for handling the 2D skeletal animation stuff. Sounds fun :)
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Here's a screenie (http://zaphire.ca/AQ/MOSX3.png) from my girlfriend's 13'' Mac Book. (with a crap onboard video card) Unfortunately I could only borrow her 'Book for a couple days. Hopefully I'll be able to buy my own Mac Book Pro soon...
/me drools
Note: We're hoping to make the Dock Icon dynamic.
That icon is really quite nice.
xander
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Nice news on the Mac front (I'm more of a Linux guy myself).
I'm a bit of a Linux guy myself. If you were able to port it to Mac OS X, would it possible to port it to Linux as well?
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McLintock85 ... I think your project is analogous to my project.
me too. making 2D tile-based Action game. it's top-view.
sorry ,I can't write in english very well.. beacuse iam asian.so I couln't explian details.very regrettable.
you can see some screen shots . -> blog.naver.com/imwill (http://blog.naver.com/imwill) (it's KOREAN)
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Nice news on the Mac front (I'm more of a Linux guy myself).
I'm a bit of a Linux guy myself. If you were able to port it to Mac OS X, would it possible to port it to Linux as well?
I don't think OpenGL on Linux is such a big problem actually, but that depends on a few things I guess ...
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would it possible to port it to Linux as well?
I know the man for the Job. His name is Ryan C. Gordon. He runs http://icculus.org (http://icculus.org). His list of ports is ridiculous. its longer than this forum page. He also does ports to Mac. He's ported Second Life to Linux, Unreal2K4, Postal2. Google Earth is the last Linux port that I'm aware of. and he's a helluva nice, cool funny guy too. I have no idea what it costs though. and am not even sure if its a cost effective thing to do.