In my campaign to wrap the world in Python, I might eventually (okay, I'm probably too lazy...) try to see if I can wrap the underlying C++ API in Python. 

If your collision algorithm simply reports whether two objects are overlapping, it hampers the ability to code proper collision responses. You at least need to report back the location of the collision (for doing stuff like rendering explosion sprites where a bullet hits) the amount of penetration, so that when something hits something else and neither of them are supposed to disappear, you can reposition them so they are flush with one another.

Unless I'm missing some ability to disable functionality piecemeal, going with Box2D might add extra response and processing that might not be desired. Not all games want their objects to act physically correct.

[Warning]

Just saw this little bit of coding on Hacker News. I figure people here would like it as well. If you want to see even more detail, there are links to an article and a paper in the story.

http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-quakes-fast-inverse-square-root/

Warning: this might look like a cool optimization, but if you don't know better, never prematurely optimize your code.

The way I usually deal with sqrt is to avoid it; I store a squared distance along with every distance and just compare the squared ones unless I need to display the actual distance or something. If I need the inverse, I just bite the bullet and compute the inverse.

Does anyone think X-COM is overhyped as the ultimate strategy game?

I feel it has a very strange mixture of elements that fit together amazingly well. The quality of the game and its insistence to be a little hard to place (it's a tactical strategy game... but also sort of real-time business management) makes me feel that it's somewhat timeless.

Platform Shmup (You are forced to keep running in one direction, basically)

Eh?

One of the common elements in a scrolling shmup is the forced-scrolling part. Basically, it would be like any platformer but you are forced to move in a certain direction. You could move forward and back and jump and such, but you could not come to a complete stop. This is actually accomplished in a lot of platformers during a chase / vehicle section. Basically, it's a rail shooter.

Gunstar Heroes gets pretty close. There are vehicle sections and other bits where you're pushed through, but other bits where you can stop. It is probably more fun than pushing you around constantly, though.

Also, I'm just now realizing no one has made Warning Forever in a platformer. It would basically be Black's level over and over again, which would be pretty cool. 

Actually, has anyone heard of a game that takes pretty direct influence from Gunstar Heroes? I've heard of The Red Star for the PS2 but haven't tried it yet (but probably should).

Guys, guys...

We're all internet people here. If you don't want to register: http://www.bugmenot.com



edit: Alternatively, you can be internet gumshoes and get it here: http://www.blendogames.com/files/gravitybone.zip

I wonder why we don't see people implement lots of different game genres within a platformer perspective.

Platform RTS
Platform MuMORPuGer (Maple Story is the only one I've heard of)
Grand Theft Platform (sandboxy real-world game)
Platform Shmup (You are forced to keep running in one direction, basically)
Platform Sims (or Sim City or any other sim game... you could argue that Sim Tower vaguely fits this)
Platform survival sim
Platform roguelike (I wonder how you would jump given a turn-based environment...)
and so on...

Just that line. You age through an entire lifetime in the space of about 5 minutes, but there's no fighting anything or clones or whatever.

2.) A game where you rapidly age.

Passage did this.

I made a really rough spacewar clone a few months ago.

obligatory Wilhelm Scream at around 0:38 on the Pyrats video. 

CRTs give me a warm, glowy feeling that LCDs cannot.

Python works fine for me when I installed Construct while already having Python 2.5 installed on my system. I should probably look at it again tonight, I think it can get confused if you install a seperate Python installation after Construct, or maybe it doesn't work if you don't already have your own Python install. The latter sounds like it's something that the developers might overlook, as I'm betting they've all got Python installed on their machines and it doesn't seem like anything is wrong.

Basically, if the Python support is keeping you on the fence, try it out and it might work.

Not being a pixel artist, I have no idea how you could make so much high-quality animated content in the space of only a few days.

It looks like you have just recently joined, and I'm sure that everyone else agrees that you are a welcome addition, good sir.  

Trying to port something from mac to windows.

Not having any experience with that particular port (I'm a little more familiar with linux<->windows) I might suggest trying to use the MingW compiler instead of Visual C++. Depending on the compiler you are using in OS X, there might be a lot less stupid porting issues that don't have much to do with your code itself or the libraries you're using.

[model]

This has made me feel a little like putting a tutorial together about the actor model and/or using event systems and message passing in general. It's one of the things which I hadn't learned very much of in programming classes or from online tutorials, but the clarity of the metaphor for the sake of games is almost on par with object-orientation.

My first games, after I had learned enough to draw things on the screen and push them around, didn't use any events at all and decided on things like counting score and respawning enemies by hard-coding behavior into the main program loop. Things are a lot more clean if you have a seperate message-passing system in place, and I don't think current educational material highlights this enough.

Played it up to Svalbard, it's a pretty fun game ! Even though there are points and unlocks and stuff like that involved, it doesn't feel too grindy because obtaining those points is usually the result of a planned series of actions: freeze ground in winter, place berries and make rabbits, wolves reproduce, unfreeze ground in summer to reveal grass, disease rabbits in autumn, and finally reap all of the Spring points from the dead rabbits in winter. A whole lot less repetitive than 'target mob, press button, kill mob, grab loot' .

It would probably be pretty cool to play this as a kid. I remember playing Sim Life and finding it too hard to keep alive, plus I had problems digesting the humongous number of variables you could play with. This game keeps things pretty simple but still gives you the feeling that you need to carefully orchestrate the ecosystem to achieve goals.

It feels like a game I wouldn't play through more than once, though. I am seeing more stuff get unlocked and accomplish goals and such, and I feel like the novelty would wear off once I achieved everything there is too achieve.

oh yeah.
iv dreamed of this before.
imagine an engine like that, with proper physics everywhere.

Given OpenGL drawing in triangles or triangle-strip mode,
plus a physics engine with some code to translate from trixel(?) to a set of convex shapes,
it sounds like it wouldn't be too hard to implement.

If you wanted EVERYTHING to fit within the trixel grid, and thus stuff would interpolate within the grid properly when it rotated, then stuff would get a little more complicated. You would need to add some extra processing/memory overhead by translating things from your trixel-world onto the 2d pixel-world every time something changed state. There might be a simpler method, though.

You could also just make your actor log notable messages it's sent/recieved, and thus keep these references via the actor abstraction rather than through a language-level pointer.

http://members.verizon.net/olsongt/stackless/why_stackless.html#actors

I might be misusing the term if it's not properly the Actor model.

My understanding is that they are basically just objects that can send or receive messages and perform actions based on those messages. The more I manage to program "everything else" into my games (audio, GUI, networking) the more I realize that message-passing between objects, via an event subsystem or via the Actor model or whatever you feel like, is probably one of the best ways of doing things. It does a great job of separating actions from all of the reactions that other objects need to make based on that action.

Instead of having to code complex behavior into the function that handles when something happens (like when a bullet hits a dude) you can just send a message out to some third party (like the World in this example) or to those directly involved, and they can figure out what needs to get done.