Why not just buy a pile of mini CD-Rs? The business card shaped ones. They're cheaper than buying a pile of flash drivers. Thinner too, so you can attach them to a card more easily. AND they're still more stylish than a normal boring CD-R. 

Although I guess if you need to distribute more than 50-100mb, they might not be an option. Dunno how expensive mini DVD-Rs are.

At least the floppy disk will always live on as the Save icon in virtually every application.

So true, I bet many young kids today scratch their heads wondering what the heck that little icon represents.

This happened to me when I was a programming tutor. The guy I was tutoring had never used a computer before and when I told him to "click on the disk to save" he hesitated for a few seconds. Then I thought about it for a moment and said "click that blue square".

Artists on the Gnome desktop project decided a few years ago that an arrow pointing to a hard disk made more sense than a floppy disk for a save button. You can see it in some of these screenshots. Keep in mind that a similarly styled hard disk is visible elsewhere in the Gnome desktop environment, so it's internally consistent and slightly less confusing than a floppy disk is.

Oh! That reminds me. My grandfather first got a computer back in 2000 or so. When I went over to his house and looked at it, I was really confused. He said he'd been using it a lot to write stuff, but I couldn't find any documents he'd made anywhere on the system. Several days later I pulled out a large drawer in the desk looking for a tool and discovered a massive cache of floppy disks, all neatly stacked and labeled. He had a 30GB hard drive, but he kept saving his files to floppy disks because that's what the save icon in Microsoft Works had on it.

Just wait until they realize that they can order presliced rectangles of cheese.

It's the most generic song I've ever heard. The poor quality on the YouTube video make it sound like something you'd hear while on hold. Just imagine it down-sampled a few more notches.

I am also curious about LOVE, SDL (I've been using C++ all semester for my classes), and ZGameEditor.

I adore LOVE. Alas, my LUA is quite weak. I wish the library had a Python port.

SDL is neat, but very "do it all yourself." Takes a while to get things rolling.

ZGameEditor is... different. Think demoscene. When I messed around with it, it looked like you created graphics by starting out with a simple 3D geometric shape, then applying a bunch of transforms to it until it actually looked like something. Similar thing with textures; start with some noise, then do a bunch of filters. Really neat; I had a hard time wrapping my head about how bend it to my will.

Am I missing something here?

If Unity games work in Chrome with NaCl, then won't they work in Linux? There is a [beta] Linux version of Chrome now.

Or are we just talking editor?
If that's the case, then I don't see a huge deal in it. Linux has huge driver issues at the moment, so I can see why most companies choose not to invest their higher-end applications into it.  

There are a few major driver issues here and there, but they're rapidly becoming less and less of an issue. At this point if a piece of hardware doesn't work properly, it's generally because the manufacturer has turned down offers from the open source community to write drivers for free and the community is reverse engineering it. Or because the proprietary drivers are crap. (Or both! )

But yeah, there are plenty of reasons why the Unity folk would be hesitant to invest resources in a editor port to Linux. Likewise, I've got plenty of reasons to avoid using game creation tools that won't run on my primary operating system.

That summary video did it for me. I've missed so much... and yet I've missed so little.

The last season was like a half dozen dudes trekking endlessly through a forest.

I traced that problem 2 years ago and ended up being some sort of global variable trying to access the OpenGL context when it was dead (I think it had to do with the default font)
The author is really stubborn, and didn't accept the reason saying that "that shouldn't happen". Anyway, removing one line solved it for me, keeping the OpenGL context alive until the process dies.

I dunno. If the author prefers to leave a visible bug in the library for two years rather than admit he was wrong... that kinda throws up some warning flags for me.

Yeah, it doesn't look like they're working together any more than a game developer using Game Maker is working with YoYoGames.

I really dislike the proprietary nature of Unity, but perhaps if they release a Linux port...

I want to take a moment to say how fantastic it’s been to collaborate with Google.  For a giant company famously populated with geniuses, the people we’ve worked with have been incredibly humble, open, and responsive. No doubt about it, this is a sharp, ambitious, and capable crew and they want to do good things for game developers.

Given how much of a pain it can be to set up NaCl and how beta it is (I still haven't gotten Chrome's built-in plugin working under Linux completely), I imagine Google approached Unity a while back and asked them to hack something up for Google I/O.

I'm not a huge fan of the Unity creation tool only running on OS X and Windows, either. On the plus side, NaCl means we'll be able to run Unity powered games on Linux.

Interesting. I wanted this to run well on low end machines, so I was just planning on generating the blur once per object type, then having it on a transparent texture underneath each object with blending. Wouldn't blurring the FBO each frame slow things down a bit? I guess I'll have to mess around and see if there's a significant difference to how well each method runs on a netbook.

I saw the first two point five seasons a few months ago. So, it pretty much gets even more convoluted and confusing, then ends without doing a great deal to resolve it?

Doh!

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you.

So, I'm making, um, a dual stick shooter that will look somewhat similar to Geometry Wars. (In my defense, it will play completely differently.)

But there's an issue. This is what I'm currently rendering.


This is what Geometry Wars looks like.


Look at where the lines intersect. In mine, they just blend to a brighter color. In Geometry Wars, they blend to white. How does it do that?

Originally, I had the color set to glColor4f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f,1.0f), and I couldn't tell that there was any blending going on at all. I'd assumed that when the two greens summed to more than 1.0f, the remainder would be distributed among the other two colors, so that the render would effectively be using glColor4f(0.5f,1.0f,0.5f,1.0f) where the lines intersected. How would one go about setting it up to work like that? Would I have to learn how to write a shader?

Here's where I initialize the relevant stuff in my code:

Code:

glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);
glDisable(GL_COLOR_MATERIAL);
glDisable(GL_CULL_FACE);
glDisable(GL_LIGHTING);

glEnable(GL_LINE_SMOOTH); //antialiasing
glEnable(GL_BLEND); // Turn Blending On
glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_SRC_ALPHA); //Additive blending

Here's my drawing function:

Code:

glColor4f(0.0f,0.7f,0.7f,1.0f); //Aqua

glLineWidth(3.0f);
glPushMatrix();
glTranslatef (x, y, 0.0);
glRotatef(angle, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
glBegin(GL_LINE_LOOP);
std::list<Coord>::iterator it;
for(it = points.begin(); it != points.end(); ++it) {
glVertex2f(it->x, it->y);
}
glEnd();
glPopMatrix();

Can you recommend me some fan games?

Sure. RetroSonic, Project Mettrix. Those two play very closely to the original Sonic games, but only have an act or two.
Sonic XG had a following, I think? The physics were a bit off when I played the demo.
Sonic Nexus had a pretty good one-act demo. I think it used the RetroSonic engine? It appears to be "On vacation" right now; you might be able to hunt it down somewhere.
There's a few other really good ones, but I'm too tired to remember them off the top of my head right now.

It's fair for engine, but level design, new gameplay, new element, new music, new scene, there is some that are still at a good level and this should not be discard as minor feat.

Sorry, but the physics engine is pretty integral to the way Sonic plays. It ties into level design and new gameplay elements. Gotta get it right. Not that I'm saying Sonic 4 has it perfect; I haven't seen enough of the game to say. Looks a lot closer than most fan games, through.

Plus there is plenty of hidef hi quality art fangame coming these later year thanks to 3D rip, cheaper 3D program and game builder engine. Sonic 2HD is an obvious one.

This is all fine and good. Let me know when Sonic 2 HD, that Unity fan game (animation is hard, by the way. Pretty sure Sonic 4 looks better. ), or anything made with Damizean's BlitzSonic engine are actually playable. Like, as a game. Preferably, as something that we can download and play through the first act with enemies and the standard gimmicks and such so that we can compare it with Sonic Unleashed or Sonic 4 when it's released in two or three months. I mean, it has to "play" to surpass Sonic 4, right?

when i say 3D i say back or front view, most sonic defined graphic elements look best from the side

This is true. It's true of a lot of (most?) characters.

you cannot translate seriously the O or the 8 run cycle in front/back view.

Did you catch it? Sonic did something pretty close to the Sonic CD-style figure 8 run in SA. It didn't look awful, either.

Sonic silhouette in 3D aside from side view like a poor smashed potatoes on a road!
When i'm designing a character i always consider the view it will be seen most, sonic was design with Side view in mind.

Gee. Maybe that's why we routinely saw Sonic from several different angles in Adventure and Unleashed. This probably also has something to do with why Sonic's quills were elongated.

Sonic 4 DOES look like a high production value FAN GAME.

No, it doesn't.

Worst, there is fan game that "play" better

There are perhaps four fan games that I'd say are even comparable to Sonic 4, and none of them have graphics better than the ~16 year old genesis games. None of them are complete. The few promising games that have graphics better than Sonic 3 are even less close to complete. Additionally, few fan game developers even try to get physics close to right.

There are some pretty nice ROM-hacks, but they're using the same ancient engines the original Sonic games used, with a few tweaks to the archaic assembly code here and there. They're closer to mods than games written using a new engine, which is what Sonic 4 is doing.

stUPID EDit: sonic has awesome iconic graphic design in 2D (roll, circle run, spine, spindash, insta shield, super peel out run). but NONE absolutly NONE, translate well in 3D!  Modern design made it worse (bad spine silhouette, character back is uninteresting to watch)

Somebody didn't play Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Or Sonic Adventure, for that matter.

Oy! (: http://steamcommunity.com/id/jamesgecko

Really fun game. But the rocket race level (and only that level; the boss level after that is fine) lags like anything. Super slow. I've got a Core 2 Duo in this laptop, and other Game Maker games run silky smooth. Might want to look at optimizing something on that level...

Edit: On my second playthrough, I noticed that some levels run ever-so-slightly faster than other levels in general. The extreme slowdown on rocket race is likely because it's just such a big room (the height of the rocket probably contributes to that a bit) and has so many objects in it. You might consider using instance_activate_region() and it's associated functions to manage the number of objects active at a time. Using instance activation would also have the bonus effect of making the whole game run at it's intended somewhat-frantic speed on slower computers. 

I vaguely remember hearing something about this game... forever ago? Like, back when I first started college four years ago? Or am I imagining things?

I'm learning Unity. So far I've learned enough to make the box spin around. Of it's own volition. Yay?

As far as terran strategies go, I can't say for Sc2 but in Sc1, I always like the "Supply depots blocking Bunkers-Turets-Tank" defense approach with mass battlecruisers. Not the best strategy I admit but quite satisfying. Especialy when blasting a building with the big laser. Racing to get a few nukes and blasting a base to radioactive bits was also quite fun.

So yeah, about strategies, as of now, I have no clues

I love how they expanded upon the supply-depots-as-walls concept by letting you retract them into the ground. One of my friends scripted something similar eons ago in a StarCraft 1 map, but it was kinda glitchy (although really neat looking).