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 😀

Chocolate Koala Update

Tim Stableford

Just a few bug fixes and a change in the buffering system 🙂

Fixes:

  • Full-screen mode no longer turns on slide show
  • The slide show button now releases when leaving full-screen
  • The slide show function now waits for the set amount of time after the image has loaded rather than when it starts loading

Changes:

  • Each time it enters shuffle mode it re-shuffles
  • Images can now be buffered infinitely either way (no setting for this yet) and there’s a thread that cleans up after it

The download is only available as a jar
http://tstableford.co.uk/downloads/chocolatekoala.jar

Pathfinding

Tim Stableford

The files below are an original attempt at making a 2d tile based game, however I decided to scrap this project realizing many flaws in my design. If I was to try again I would use a game library probably lwjgl, and I would also plan it better.

However, recently I decided to revive this project in a small way because I decided it was a good platform to test path finding. The algorithm I decided to was was Dijkstra’s algorithm where the starting point is the NPC and the end point is the player. The controls are WASD to move and U to go to the player.

Runnable jar: http://tstableford.co.uk/downloads/pathfinding.jar
Source: http://tstableford.co.uk/downloads/pathfindingsrc.zip