His forums are pretty sad and scary at the same time. It's like a cult. A bunch of people repeating the same "don't stop the party" phrase over and over.

This seems to be the perfect example of wasted internet attention and good will. He managed to drum up a whole lot of attention, but then nothing happened for months and now nobody seem to care. And it seems he's also pissing off some of his loyal supporters now. I've checked his site a couple of times today and it's always been "ETA 2 hours". Reading through some of the threads (or at least trying to - the average user age must be 10), his fans seem to be pretty annoyed by him constantly not delivering.

Does anybody know if all the talk of lawsuits from various parties has actually amounted to anything? Future Publishing made a statement that their legal department was looking into it, the developers of Mythora said that they did not have a deal with Langdell, the Carlton Holder guy seemed pretty pissed, and of course Mobigame has been talking about lawsuits. None of this seems to have actually happened. Or is it all just happening behind the scenes?

I'm just afraid that Tim Langdell will have suffered a great deal of ridicule, but won't have lost his trademark, won't have been sued, and will be able to continue on with his "business" as usual...

Is it wrong of me to wish that Bob had named the game "Bob's Edge"?

Listen up guys:

No offence, but I think everyone is well aware of that. That's kinda what this whole thing is about: a trademark dispute.

Why the hell doesn't he just use a picture of himself? It's so blurred and distorted anyway!

Strange that he hasn't changed the Firebirds image yet. Could he perhaps be trying to contact the artist in an effort to get/buy retroactive rights to the image, as being caught twice stealing art would be too embarrassing? Or has he given up? Oh, the suspense!

Not to go completely off topic, but I hadn't heard about Limbo of the Lost before someone mentioned it in this thread. I've been reading up on the insanity surrounding that game and everything just seems to stop in July of last year. Has there been any news on this since? Lawsuits?

Ya really, they could make a movie out of it, and people would be like "Wow that's pretty messed up. Thank god there aren't people like that in real life. How DO they come up with characters like that anyway?"

Yeah, if this was made into a movie, audiences would consider in too far-fetched and unrealistic. Truth is definitely stranger than fiction.

This thread has been going for 3 months now and new stuff has almost continually been uncovered. Just when you think he can't go any lower, there he is digging deeper! It's absolutely mind-boggling. There's just sooo much stuff!

Hey, maybe this is his new game: Tim posts some kind of "evidence" or "game", and the games community searches the internet for the place he stole it from. It's a treasure hunt! Fun! And free!

Fail upon fail upon fail upon fail...

Spot-on!

I imagine it would be a lot slower. For squares you just check that the object is within the square. No calculations required, as it's just comparing X and Y coordinates. With a circle, you have to calculate the distance from object to circle center. A lot slower.

I've managed to make my own program to generate collision boxes. Works pretty well:

I'm glad he's gone from the IGDA, but I was kinda hoping he wouldn't step down, but would have been voted off. I can easily imagine him in the future spinning stepping down into "not having enough time for the IGDA", or some similar nonsense nowhere related to his trademark trolling and the Mobigames case. If he had been voted off by the members there would've been no way for him to spin it.

The guy is way beyond reason or logic. First he's claiming that he has never asked anybody for money, then he's claiming that he never threatened Mobigames, even though he himself in the Cease and Desist letter refers to his "threatening intentions" and asks for money.

When people ask where they can buy all these games that Edge are "famous" for, he won't post a link, but just keeps saying that the Edge Store will soon be up again, even though internet archives prove that all the Edge Store has ever "sold" is photoshopped (sorry, images altered with the PhotoShop(TM) software!) jackets and mugs. Never mind why a so-called game development company, which allegedly earns money from selling games and whose games cannot be bought anywhere else, hasn't got its store up and running in the first place -- and haven't had it up and running for god knows how long!

If it weren't so absolutely pathetic and sad, I might actually have found it somewhat amusing...

I made this by gradually evolving a picture using only quads, but it doesn't help you at all  :D

In all seriousness though, your problem may be a variation of the packing problem which is, I think, NP-hard.

edit: You should probably just try to implement pixel perfect collisions.

I actually remember reading about this in another thread and actually went looking for it before posting my original message. Looks very nice!

I'm currently trying to make a program to do what I want. The algorithm I'm currently pursuing is dividing the image into a bunch of squares (4x4 pixels, as that's the collision movement resolution I'm using), then mark all squares that only have pixels with alpha > 0.5, and then connecting these marked squares into larger squares. I think this should work in theory, but time will tell.

As to pixel perfect collision: that will be too slow for what I have in mind (I'll have to do a lot of collision checking). My multiple squares approach worked really well in the test I did (where I manually calculated the squares). It's really fast and I actually like it better than pixel perfect collision, as it doesn't always register the hit as soon as the bullet reaches a pixel, but sometimes further "inside" the image -- this almost gives it a 3D effect, as you seem to not just be hitting the edges of the sprite, but stuff on the sprite.

It's not exactly what you're after, but I've previously had luck exporting a path from GIMP to svg and using the svg data to build collision geometry.

Sounds interesting, but also sounds slower than just checking the bullet X,Y coordinates against 10-12 squares...?

I'm working on a 2D game using sprites. Instead of making exact collision masks for each sprite, I just want to assign a number of rectangles to each sprite, so that if the object that I'm checking for collision is within any of these squares, it's colliding with my sprite. I've tried drawing the squares on top of my sprite image manually and then inputing the coordinates of each square into my code, but drawing these squares takes a lot of time, so I was wondering if there's a program that can convert an image into X number of squares (all of them within the edges of the image sprite), or a plugin/script for GIMP that can do that?

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(Hope this makes sense!)