Category: Gaming

SpaceZombies Update

Tim Stableford

I haven’t had much time to develop this lately however, I have implemented enough for it to be usable. As it stands I have the Earth, the Sun and the Earth’s moon all orbiting at there average distance from the Sun or Earth respectively with sizes to scale. However the planets jump, this is because of the way there location is updated. At the moment I’m just increasing the angle that the planets are at based on the time they should realistically take given there realistic masses.

Now, the ship. I’ve implemented a little space ship the force from its thrusters can be altered by scrolling the mouse wheel and theoretically it should be impossible for you to go faster than the speed of light. To limit the players maximum velocity I implemented simple relativity for mass and velocity. The ship is fully physics enabled towards the planets, eg it will be affected by their gravity and it’s possible to do sling-shot manoeuvres and to orbit planets.

There is currently either 2 or 3 arrows on the screen, there are 2 if you’re some distance from the Earth but as you get closer a 3rd will appear for the Earth’s moon.

I think my next development step after some thought will be to scale everything down, because although realistic I think it would be more fun if it doesn’t take hours to fly between the Earth and Sun (that’s assuming I limit certain ships thrusters, as it stands you can accelerate to the speed of light so it should only take 10 minutes.

After Christmas when I’m back at uni I’m going to add this code to my GitHub and hopefully get some time to work on it after exams, so no source code available yet.

Downloads are located here:
http://spacezombies.hyperbadger.it.cx/
They may run slowly because they’re hosted on my home server. Downloading and launching the launcher will create a folder called SpaceZombies in your home folder and download the LWJGL natives along with the games jar.

PS Hopefully before I release the source I can fix the planets by giving them velocity and also neaten by OpenGL, it’s not exactly great at the moment.

Steam for Linux

Tim Stableford

Fairly recently Valve have announced their intentions to port Steam to Linux along with a number of their games starting with Left 4 Dead 2. This is massively exciting because it could easily be the next step to Linux become more of a major player, rather than just being known for running on low-end cheap machines such as netbooks. It’s quite possible that this could lead to more game developers releasing their games for Linux in the future too. Initial results by Valve show that Left 4 Dead 2 gets a 15% higher fps on Linux than Windows.

It’s quite possible that games such as Minecraft and the Indie Bundle are what have shown that Linux is a viable gaming platform and that there is a customer base and demand. So hopefully the next Elder Scrolls will be Linux too đŸ˜€

Minecraft

Tim Stableford

I’m a massive fan of Minecraft and spend far too much time on it.

Originally I started off playing the vanilla Minecraft like everybody else back in the good old days of 1.5 before they had enchantments, potions and “The End”.
Which in my opinion are all a bunch of crap.

Then I moved on to create my own Minecraft server which was interesting for a while but really not that much fun, because lets be honest when you can cheat easily, you will.

After a while I started discovering all these new mods that add massive functionality, with tons of new blocks and items.
My favourite one being IndustrialCraft which adds electricity, ways to generate it and many ways to use it. And everyone’s favourite, the Nuclear Bomb.

My second and third favourite mods respectively are BuildCraft and RedPower. These mods are all becoming highly integrated and merging into one sort of super-mod.
But my one criticism of this is that they often instead of spending time developing integration spend their time taking the other mods idea and implementing it in a slightly different, incompatible way.
However their are plenty of Modders out there for these Mods.

Most recently I’ve come across ComputerCraft which essentially adds computers into Minecraft that are fully programmable in Lua inside the game. This mod has replaced all of the functionality from RedPower excluding the cables which can be used to link the Computers together to make a supercomputer inside of Minecraft.
Could this be the solution to Minecraft within Minecraft?