I use Arduino AVRs a lot for work recently to fire off LEDs in sequence or measure the temperature of PRTs etc. They are a really good entry point for anyone with a basic electronics background to begin interfacing electronics with code via digital and analogue inputs and outputs. If you don't know any electronics then they are a good place to start learning and breaking things also.
 
It occurred to me when playing thecatamites' jam entry that it would be cool to develop a small gaming device using an Arduino and a 3D printer. So what I mean is that you'd have the following list of components for your basic handheld:
 
<ol><li>The Arduino board (Arduino UNO or smaller)</li>
   <li>Battery module</li>
   <li>Screen and SD card module (so possibly a KS108 128x64 monochrome display)</li>
   <li>Buttons</li>
   <li>Power switch</li>
   <li>Buzzer/Speaker</li>
   <li>Casing</li>
</ol> 
There is also the recent addition of the Arduino Esplora board (pics here) which is an Arduino with several gaming-related peripherals pre-soldered on to a circuit board that resembles a SNES controller. A 160x128 colour TFT can be purchased separately and it slots into the headers on the board. This is appealing for anyone who wants to make a gaming device that is mostly spatial with four digital buttons and one analogue stick. I would get one but I would feel restricted by the pre-designed form factor. I might like to turn my console into a bit of a TARDIS.
 
If any of you have ever had a game against someone using a Bop-it Extreme then you can see how you could make a dedicated device for a game or a set of games using unconventional inputs with 3D printed knobs and bezels. There's nothing to stop someone with an Arduino Mega (lots of inputs and outputs) from making a miniature space control deck the size of a laptop and narrating an exploration epic through those means.
 
That last example appeals to me greatly and although I have a lot of irons in the fire, (PhD, Adventure Game, 3D printing etc) I would like to try and bring it into fruition.
 
I know there's a lot of you who are techy and creative, perhaps some of you who are technophobes but doubly imaginative. What I am proposing (down on one knee here) is that we should get together and make a ridiculous contraption and share it around between SW'ers.
 
If you're interested lemme know.
 
 

I recently learnt a few things about my Vaio CW Core i3-330m laptop using the program CPU-Z:

• My laptop processor is a socket 989 rPGA and is thus not soldered onto the motherboard.
• My laptop's chipset is PM55 - not good enough to support SATA3 speeds but will take a SATAII SSD easily.
• My laptop's optical drive can be replaced with a caddy to support more storage.

So understanding the above, I bought:

• A refurbished OCZ Vertex 2 160GB Sata2 SSD ~ £43 (Scan's eBay outlet)
• A HDD caddy to replace my optical drive ~£7 (eBay)
• A Core i7 620M processor ~£60 (Some student on eBay)
• New thermal paste £3 on Amazon.

Today I put the thing all together. I ran a new installation of windows using a programme that saves your previous windows activation to a file. This is crucial if you have a laptop that came with windows pre-installed. You can just re-download the iso for the edition of windows you have from Microsoft and then reactivate when you're done.
 
I had to open the whole thing but this was easy after seeing a few Chinese tech workshop magicians on YouTube doing mods to replace the power connector. There's about 25 screws worth of work to be done. I had recently cleaned out the fan/heatsink assembly using compressed air and I was surprised how clean it was when I opened the actual casing. No work needed to be done.
 
The thermal paste that Sony used to put it together could be described as a microscopic blob so I am not surprised the device has been blowing out superheated air recently. As I write this there is cool air issuing from the vent and the battery is draining at a reasonable amount.
 
The fresh install of windows, coupled with a SSD and a processor that's about 150% of the previous one makes programs such as unity boot up in 7 seconds whereas before I would be waiting nearly a minute. Monodevelop is the worst for this. It was really frustrating. I have my old HDD in the optical drive replacement caddy so if this install goes tits up I can just switch my boot order in the bios (Good for when you have to give a presentation...).
 
So, for £113 I avoided buying a new laptop and serviced one I bought in 2010 to be actually usable. it feels brand new. I am going to make SO MUCH COOL SHIT SO MUCH FASTER.
 
 
~Technical Crow
 
 

Two great games, but who wins? The first round of voting was too close so now we must have The Decider!
 
Can I please ask: only vote if you have played both of the games!
 
 
 OR 
 
[4-Lung Boy] Download
[Mystery Channel] Download
 
And also if you're late to the party and would like to consume even more games: a comprehensive list in the first post of this thread.
 
Voting will close on Friday night after I have eaten my dinner, so about 7.30pm GMT. Make sure you have a tasty beverage ready to celebrate!
 
Afterwards we shall begin the planning for the Christmas 2013 #SWJAM and maybe I'll have a chance at winning the next one!  ​ 
 
Thanks!
 
~Carrion Crow
 
 
Addendum
The creators of the three runner-up games will receive a mystery item should they choose to. Currently the top runners up are:
<ol><li><em>Unknown second place entry in above poll</em></li>
   <li>(Joint second) The Witch King of Decadencia</li>
   <li> (Joint second) Pumpkin Moonshine</li>
</ol>

Hey you! Sunday lazybum.

 

It is the last day of the period in which the games can be reviewed. The prize has now been manufactured and is ready to be customised with the title(s) of the winners. A brief tally of the votes thus far has shown that two games are the drawing front-runners but with a few more voters things may swing or change. If not then there will be a showdown vote-off between the two winning entries.
 
If you haven't done so already I urge you to go check out what's been made and have a play. It would take you 90 minutes at worst to sample (and possibly complete depending on your supreme skill) all the entries. 

Click here for a game list and voting instructions!

 

 
Hello Developer!
 
You've stumbled upon this topic, so I'll assume you're here for the game jam although some brilliant artists and game development personalities post here too. Here's the meat of what you need to know:
 
The Details

• It's from Saturday 14th to Sunday 22nd September.
• You can work by yourself or with as many pals as you like.
• Submissions more substantial than gimmick-games are encouraged but not mandatory.
• We encourage you to post screenshots of your work in progress to this thread.
• Make as many original resources as you can whilst using an honorably minimal amount of pre-competition content.
• Sign up by posting to this thread:

• Who you are and where you hail from (if you're new!)
• How many of you are working on your game
• What engine you intend to use

 
The winning submission will be decided by forum vote when people have had long enough to play enough games to vote fairly.
 
The winner or winning team will receive a 3D-printed Foget skull trophy and of course; the pride of winning!
 
Foget ( ​) was long the mascot of Gaming World, a website which eventually disappeared into the Matrix, leaving behind the salty residue of a website you're currently perusing (Reason for site name: 404 file not found).
 
If you're new to SW and you're a creative type then you should stick around. The team who developed Barkley and are developing Barkley 2 rose from their humble RPG Maker beginnings here in years past and we are host to some other wonderful lurking oddities. We figured we would attempt a community revival through the art of game-jam so we hope you approve!
 
 
Theme Announcement Video
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJTq_PymNbQ&hd=1
 
 
.... a list of racehorse names, courtesy of the brilliant denzquix.
 

Spread the Word!
 
We'd be grateful if you'd let your friends and followers in on the deal so feel free to direct them to our splash page or this thread in the run-up to the competition.
 


Thanks!  ​ 

 
I'm off work from the 14-22 of September and I am missing Ludum Dare to go to a conference so I figured it would be a good idea to suggest we hold a game jam either on the weekend of the 14th, or perhaps even have a week-long jam in which we liven this place up a bit and get the creative juices flowing.
 
We have an active user base of roughly 15 members and a whole lot more lurking in the background. We have our RPGmaker veterans who are still, a decade later, sticking to their trade but also others who have moved on to other interesting areas of gamedev and art.  
 
It would be really great if we could bring some of our oldies out of retirement and somehow promote this on the main page/forum header and make a real event out of it.
 
So who's up for it and what do you think?
 
Some ideas (Edit!);
 

 
The winner, decided by community vote, will receive (should they want to) a 3D printed foget skull, modelled and assembled in my living room. I may also make a runner's up trophy that is printed in "robot silver". I have yet to own gold filament.

In this thread I am just going to post things I am making with an eye to making some cyberpunk trash in Unity.  I'm not taking it seriously at all, my main aim at the moment is just to learn how to make decent assets in Blender and pop them into Unity.


Two identical planes (not instanced) in blender.





Model one using edit mode and subdivision with extrusion.





UV map the simple model, it essentially becomes a cube against the BG image.





Place one on top of the other, move the simple one slightly above, bake normals with selected to active checkbox ticked.



Open normal map in another program and increase contrast a little, this makes it more bumpy.



Create a plane, apply as bumped diffuse with a concrete texture as the diffuse and your normal map as normal.

And there you have a complex-looking floor tile using only two polygons per tile (in my system). I had a little problem with rotation when I exported to FBX but that was solved by rotating by -90 degrees in object mode in blender, Ctrl+A, Apply rotation. Export selected object.


The car is something else I have been working on in my creation of cyberpunk assets. Being able to paint decay onto things with texture painting pleases me.

I've never entered one but I am considering doing it considering I will probably be taking a fair amount of time off around Christmas as all my colleagues do and it's impossible to get anything done at work.


The questions are:


Have any of you entered before and if so what did you submit and what could your recommend in terms of not just starting a submission and then burning out or losing motivation? I guess you have to set a reasonable expectation for yourself.


Hope you SW'ers are all doing alright for yourselves.

I think I have an addiction to Facebook, Twitter and whatever can be beamed through the tiny rectangle I keep in my pocket. It's got to the stage now where the last thing I do in bed at night won't be reading my book, it will be uncomfortably browsing whatever social network because my brain just can't turn off yet.

When I'm at work and I'm programming the temptation is too great.

I don't want to disable my accounts or change my hosts file as that seems a bit extreme. It seems like it's become a habit akin to sucking my thumb.  There's some inexplicable reason that I *need* to use social networks but I can't figure out why.


Has/does anyone else have this problem and if so have you done anything about it?


Ten points for the first member to fly into this thread, ruffling their cape denoting their superhuman nature and accuse me of having poor self control. I... I'm aware of this?

I think that if I can stifle this social networking problem I will become creative as I once was in 2005/2006 and the emphasis was a lot more on personal discovery and introversion than sharing everything that happens all the time.

It's like we're all objects sending out events in a message loop. Barf.

N.B. I gave up sucking my thumb when I was 12. That's 50% of life ago.

Next 2 and a bit weeks are gonna be hell!

I constantly eat and put my wireless mouse on the other side of the room to avoid glowing distractions.

What do you guys do to survive your finals? Do you have any concentration tips? _{(Apart from going to concentration camp - heard that one before).}

I must FOCUS.

Hey,

I am interested to hear what you, the site users would want as features in a future GW. You might be completely passive or you might be someone very creative. You could be an RM2k oldbie or someone who experiments with 3D. Perhaps you just make music! If you reply with a feature I haven't thought of there's a good chance I'll write it into the design.

This thread is just to help me cover any bases that I might not have covered yet.

I am designing a community to be the spiritual successor to GW. You've all probably seen this mockup at some stage or other. I'm not going to be posting any more information about it until it's done so as to avoid progress thread syndrome.

There is also the vote above which is basically asking if the project would be viable if none of the existing posts were carried over. Accounts and posts could probably be migrated with little difficulty (a user validation scheme) but I feel it would be disrespectful to the site administrator to do so. I am divided on my opinion as to whether the posts belong to the site or to the posters themselves.

I don't want a discussion over whether GW itself is viable, that's a decision I have already made - I intend to make it a community. It's not a business venture, there will be no adverts. I am doing this for the community which deserves a greater level of respect.

So please, lets hear your suggestions. They're all welcome even if they're wacky or outdated.

There is a plan in place but I am not going to waste my time posting about it. There are doers and sayers.

I broke up with my girl a couple of months ago and ever since I have been re-evaluating my view on the above. I am interested to know how you deal with the desire to be with someone else. I am about to graduate university and start a research position somewhere completely different in winter so I am in some sort of lonely no-man's land between the losing one set of people and meeting another.

I feel that I need to train my feelings to not want to be with a girl. There is something in-built in me that always seems to be looking and pursuing the interest of other people when really I need to be self-sufficient.

Is this realistic though?

Surely some of you guys have similar feelings during your day. Maybe some of you have really good control and the lonliness doesn't affect you.

What I am looking for this thread is some sort of comparison of outlooks. Perhaps if I see the way some of you view this situation it might give me ideas to adjust. Perhaps you don't really care for other people and you are happy.

It's dumb to look for a serious relationship at such a young age. We're moving around too much. I guess when it happens, it finds you and there's not a lot you can do but play along.

I have this concept in my brain that reduces humans down to biological computers programmed by life influences. The reasons we act this way just seems so ridiculous. Part of me wants to just accept the way we are programmed to act and play along but there is the other part of me watching and being incredibly critical and cynical.

What's your programming? How do you resist this idiotic impulse. I'm sure Psycho Mantis says something about the same stupid desire to pass on one's seed dominating human actions. I think I got it bad because I inherited super-hormones or something. It is blinding.

How blind are you?

I had to make an MGS reference for the lulz but this is a serious thread. Let's hear it.

Hello,

For my final year project I am creating a motion capture system.  In order to display the current positions of the infrared markers in the camera scope I am performing triangulation and this returns 3D coordinates of their locations.

I would like to be able to display them in a 3D viewport but I am unsure over which route to take so that I can get a nice embedded 3D window in my Windows Form App.

Have any of you put a 3D view in a forms app before? Was it easy?

I have looked at XNA and some OpenGL wrappers but I am none the wiser as to which is going to be the biggest pain in the bum.

Hi,

I suffer from chronic eczema, some of the time I have random difficulty breathing (Sometimes after drinking beer). My sinuses and eyes are inflamed pretty much all the time and I have to take a spray up my nose twice a day to stop the thing from closing up. To remedy this the doctors basically throw steroid this and steroid at me which is annoying as they are not a long-term solution and can lead to side effects such as skin thinning or resistance to the effect and no healing.

I have never had any conclusive allergy tests done and reading up on it on the web there doesn't seem to be a 100% certain way of diagnosing them so I am trying out a food elimination diet. It's probably going to fail though as I am not very good at feeding myself at the best of times.

Currently I am eliminating dairy. Next up would be wheat, gluten etc.

I created this thread to ask you guys if you have ever had to do anything like this. If so, did you find anything out about yourself and has avoiding the food/allergen helped you out significantly? Could any of you offer me any advice?

I have considered doing something extreme like only eating meat and rice (that's all my flatmates seem to eat) but really I am clueless. I am going to see a derma doctor soon but I realise that my skin + sinuses seem to flare up in unison which tends to indicate it could be diet.

The demo's up on Steam. I pre-ordered it after playing as I was impressed however I placed my order with Play.com as it seems PC games cost £5 more on Steam? Ridicularse.

I played it last night on my semi-ancient rig and it ran in full settings (minus the PhyX BS) and it seems a lot prettier than the Rockstar competition.

I don't think the demo really does the game justice as you only get a small area of the city and it's out of context with the rest of the game. It is very similar to GTA4, it's just presented a lot better. The style and general feeling from the game is great.

I worry though as I am pretty sure no open-world-sandbox game will ever live up to the bar that was set my Mafia 1. I doubt the sequel will be as good but we'll see.

I spoke to Dr Ears on Steam and he seemed pretty impressed by it. Any of you guys going to be playing this on release day?

Demo gameplay vid:


The first trailer that was like uuhhhh *sploooooge*

There once was a time when I was young. I find it hard to believe myself sometimes but that is the truth I was once a boy and my dad had a room that was out of bounds with a big beige apple mac in it. One day I learnt my times tables off by heart (all the way up to 12 times 12) and as a reward my dad bought me a game called Monkey Shines, developed by a company called Fantasoft.


This was the first colour platformer I ever played. Before then I played prince of persia on a Powerbook 100 (black and white). I wasn't allowed a games console and I didn't manage to get my hands on one until they agreed to let me buy one with my savings in 1998 (I got a PSX with Soviet Strike and Gran Turismo). I was allowed to play games if I did well in my homework and the only games available to me were mac ones.

I think I did well at parents evening one day and they got me Harry The Handsome Executive (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/harry/)


This game revolves around the concept that you are bound to a swivel chair and you have to find the end of each level in a sprawling office complex that becomes more and more surreal as time goes on. The video above doesn't do it justive due to the sound lag in the emulation and the fact that it's the first level but I could upload a better video in future.

I emailed the creators of this game today to see if they could send me my product key so I can register it on the emulated Mac PowerPC I am running on Windows 7 at the moment. It's like stepping back in time to a period where there was no MSN, no social networking and I pretty much went on the computer to create animations or create/play games. We got a PC in 2002 and it all went downhill from there.

Did any of you ever play games on an Apple Macintosh back in the day? Care to share?

I am high on nostalgia.

p.s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eNrXtSqXYU is how I set up my computer to run OS9.

I just got a HTC hero recently, I figure some of your leftie types might have an android phone - any apps you can recommend to me?

I only have Android 1.5 atm because my carrier is a poop and they have been concentrating on the iphone4's release. Should have 2.1 soon though.

I am doing a project where I'd like to render some information in a 3d viewport and I'd like to know how to draw points in that kinda way.

The only thing is that whilst I am familiar with Windows Forms Apps I am not so familiar with DX or OpenGL or where to start when plugging it in to my app's interface.

Anyone point me in the easiest (right) direction?

I am upgrading my current PC. As it stands it is this:

8800 GTS 320MB
AMD 5000+ X2 ~ 2.6Ghz
2 GB DDR2 800
NForce 4 Chip
700W PSU

I would like to purchase:

ATI Radeon 5770 1GB (With the eye to purchase another one in future for cheaper)
AMD Phenom II 555 Black Edition (With 2 cores but 1 guaranteed unlockable core, possibly 2 if I am lucky as my dad was when he got his)
2 GB DDR3 1600
ASUS Motherboard that supports core unlocking and has a 790GX chipset supporting Crossfire.

It would suit me to purchase the GPU first for £130 and then upgrade the rest at a later date, if there is any point in that. I am not sure the bottlenecking effect will be of my other existing components so I would like advice on this.

Another option is to purchase the Motherboard, CPU and RAM and stick with the 8800 I have until a later date but my main priority is just to be able to play New Vegas and Deus Ex 3 at reasonable settings when they come out.

The total of the 4 components is £365.08 Inc Delivery.

It would require £231 for the set up minus the GPU and £134 for the GPU on it's own.

My argument for the 5770 is that it is a good card (My dad has one) and it should come down in price when I start feeling the need to upgrade and if I decide to crossfire it after some time I will have spent a lot less than the £250 for a top of the range card with good longevity (Say the 5870 costs a ridiculous amount).

A factor to take into account is my screen resolution that is 1920x1200. I took my monitor downstairs and tested Crysis Warhead, Red Faction 2 and Just Cause 2 on my dad's rig and it seemed to be ~ 30fps for all tests on high settings for his 5770/555/2Gig system set up.

Let's hear your nerd wisdom then!

I've been a stupid ed and I clocked my 2.6Ghz processor to 2.8 with the stock cooler and it was fine for a couple of days but now I have changed it back as the machine is no longer perfectly stable. For instance once every 10 minutes or so an application will crash out or "stop working" as Windows likes to put it.

My question is simple, have I fucked my processor? If so it's no great loss as this machine is getting rather old now anyway and I get paid soon.