Joe’s Internet This Week – 1

Random reports from screwing around on the internet: There exists video of M. C. Escher creating his last major woodcut, Snakes: link. I haven’t figured out where this video comes from or why it doesn’t have sound. The camera movement and so forth make it seem like it isn’t a home movie — so I’d like to know more about the source material. H. G….

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Cocos2d-x + Box2d Breakout Updated

Cocos2d-x releases since version 3 have broken compatibility with old tutorials. This can especially be a problem when you want to do something slightly non-standard from the point-of-view of Cocos2d-x. If you want to use physics in a Cocos2d-x game the current standard way to do this is to use the integrated physics classes, which are Chipmunk-based by default and can use Box2d too in some…

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Snurtle and My Greatest Contribution to Mathematics, Such That It Was

This summer coming up will be 20 years since the summer after I graduated from college. I’m currently in that golden period in between software jobs — starting a new one in March — and, given the free time, have just done something which I have been meaning to do since that summer. I generated the following image in a non-ad hoc manner, with re-useable…

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The World’s Simplest 2D Curve Library

For the game I’m working on I need to have sprites that travel along curving paths. I’m talking about the sprites traveling along somewhat arbitrary curves, meaning curves that look good, not curves that result from gravity or other physical forces. If you need those kinds of curves, e.g. the parabolic trajectories of cannonballs, you need to simulate the forces acting on the sprites and…

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Syzygy Update

So, looking at the early entries of this blog, I must have started working on Syzygy around the beginning of the year 2012 because by March 2012 I had the Win32 prototype done. At that time, I didn’t own a Macintosh, didn’t own an iOS device, had never heard of cocos2d-x, and, professionally-wise, was still writing image processing code for Charles River Labs / SPC….

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Marble Madness Madness

gamedev.net recently linked to this video about the making of Marble Madness, which got me thinking about the raster-to-vector via contour extraction script I wrote in Python last year and the fact that, it being the future and all, I can probably find all of the art from Marble Madness unrolled into a single image file. So three clicks later and, oh yeah: (Click the…

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Sprite Packing in Python…

(update: newer version mentioned in comments is on github here.) I’ve been working on my puzzle game Syzygy again, after a long hiatus, and am now writing to iOS/cocos2d-x rather than just working on the prototype I had implemented to Win32. The way that you get sprite data into cocos2d is by including as a resource a sprite sheet image and a .plist file which…

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The Cocos2d-x Device Orientation Bug…

This took me all morning to figure out. I’m posting here so there is clear information on this subject in at least one place on the internet. The situation is this: when targeting iOS6 using Cocos2d-x v2.0.2, there is a bug in the auto-generated “Hello, World” code that shows up in a fresh project such that the compiled game will not display in landscape orientation…

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