Thursday, December 29, 2011

Wizznic! 0.9.9 Released

Finally, after so much time, and so little work.. I am very proud to present yet another version of my little hobby project, Wizznic!
Thanks goes out to ViperMD who have helped me a lot during the preparation of this release, especially his awesome graphics skills and providing a windows box for building, also for putting up with my ranting ;)

The actual Wiz version will be out in a couple of days, also the PSP version will come out later.

Get it here: http://sf.net/projects/wizznic

Changes since last release:
0.9.9
Reordered levels
Corrected some misaligned text
Changed level file naming from levelX.wzp to levelXXX.wzp (level0.wzp is now level000.wzp and level10.wzp is level010.wzp).
Time that it takes for a brick to "die" affects the framerate of the expl-animation, this value can now be set from each level.
Particle systems have a layer associated, either PSYS_LAYER_TOP, PSYS_LAYER_UNDERDEATHANIM or PSYS_LAYER_UNDERBRICK.
"Thor" theme by ViperMD.
Tiles 0-17 can be animated from files TILEBASE-tile#.png, animation runs at 12 fps, one row of images, number of frames abritary.
Clocked wiz up to 600 mhz since the pixel plotting function became a bit heavier.
OpenGL support is enabled by default, compile with WITH_OPENGL=false to disable. See readme[1.0.4] for more information.

0.9.2-preview2
Made more changes to code to better allow for non-320x240 screensizes, fixed some related
bugs. The highscore onscreen keyboard for one.
Changed the "Please enable feedback" screen to be more obvious.
Applied PSP patch from Riviera71, this patch makes some code prettier and also more
portable for devices with non 320x240, by defining display size for device in defs.h
0.9.2-preview
Several new graphical themes added to main package.
Cut down number of background music to 9.
Prefixed wizznic pack-names with 000_ to to make sorting more sane.
Highscores are now properly saved when entering them after selecting "Exit Game".
Fixed bug that made wiz-version "hang" on first run if no settings.ini present.
This bug was hackily fixed in 0.9.1 by having settings.ini be present in the zip.
Added option to compile with MAME keyboard layout for use in an arcade cabinet.
Reworked the "Enter Highscore" screen with an onscreen keyboard instead of the
"up/down/menu" thing, which didn't seem nearly as intuitive.
Solved random-letterss/segfault in highscore entry.
Playlist functionality (overrides music= setting in levelfiles with a playlist entry)
this is done to make it easier to put music on packs. The entries are placed in
packname/info.ini and have the format mus=ff-tt,music file.ogg where ff is from
level and tt is to level. mus=00-03,music/song2.ogg will play packname/music/song2.ogg
in levels 0,1,2,3. And mus=23-23,music/song3.ogg will play packname/music/song3.ogg
in level 23.


0.9.1
Changed Wiz default clock to 500 mhz instead of 400 to improve performance.
When completing a pack, PACKNAME/finished.png is loaded and shown instead of wall-o-text.
However, another wall-o-text is shown if there is no finished.png in the pack.
Moved some levels around, removed some levels. 80 levels total.
Added optional WxH argument to tools/updatelevelpreviews.sh to generate images of given size,
while not useful in the game, they are useful for sorting levels (using an image-viewing app to browse them)
"Commercial" for the pack function. in the start of some levels.
Level editor now reads and writes all level properties, including optional ones.
Updated readme.
Updated data/empty.wzp so it contains all level properties, and comments explaining their function and usage.
Added another intro level to teleports, added intro-images to those levels.
Updated the cursor in the NES pack.
Removed "template" pack, it does nothing that the main pack does not show allready.
Fixed music changing in intermediate screens ("Level Stats" and "Entering Level").
Fixed crash that could happen when entering highscores.
Updated ports list (gee, someone ported it to a phone, neat..)
Updated changelog and decided to use X.Y.Z versioning.
Program now calls SDL_Quit() on exit (resets screen-resolution if in fullscreen)
tools/releaser.sh now generates the src package witout src-graphics, instead it generates a srcgfx tarball seperately.
moved the unused theme graphics into src graphics..

Thursday, August 18, 2011

I'm not dead!

IRL have been taking it's toll on my development efforts..
I'm now both a Data-technician and AP Graduate in IT Technology and Network Engineering..
However, everyone wants a 25 year freshly educated with 30 years of experience.
So I'll be getting a lot of time to work on my games now..
I've been sifting through the Wizznic! code and made it way better at handling non-320x240 native window sizes, this should make porting to devices with screens larger than 320x240 a lot easier. I also changed the "Please allow feedback" screen to be more verbose and it can't be skipped without making a choice (yes or no to send feedback).
Now I'm wondering where to take Wizznic! next, the preview was more a tech-demo, I'm not sure I like the idea of making such radical changes to the tilesets..
I'm splitting the main levels into several packs, to make it easier to "complete" a stage of the game, a bit like the original Puzznic.
Maybe tilesets should only change per stage, and not every X levels..
Feedback is appreciated from the 1 or 2 people who'll ever read this :)