Create-ivity

I intended to release AI Wars last week, but some things got in the way. Some people have been asking me about it recently though, so I contacted my friend Inky for the latest version of his AI client and wrapped it all up in a .rar file:

AI Wars download (210 kB)

The package contains the server and an AI client, written by Inky. Startup instructions can be found in the readme.txt file. If you’re interested in writing your own AI clients, contact me on this blog or through my portfolio’s contact page and I’ll settle some documentation and code.

Thanks to Mark, who worked with me on the AI Wars server, and Siebe, who built the AI client. And thanks to Jaco and Vassili for their emotional support, of course. Hehe.

Anyway, enjoy, and please let me know what you think of AI Wars.

I recently stumbled across Neko Media Engine, a SDL wrapper for haXe. I decided to port one of my Flash games to NME, to make it a stand-alone application. I got it up and running after modifying my framework for a few hours. It turns out that, with relatively few changes, my framework can be used for ‘normal’ games just as well. I’m starting to like haXe more and more now, especially with such libraries around.

The developer of NME, Lee Sylvester, has recently teamed up with Hugh Sanderson to create Neash: a Neko library that provides the Flash API for Neko applications. In other words, we’ll be able to use (almost) the same haXe code for both Flash and Neko applications… That sounds interesting!

Last week I started with my final internship. It’s, again, at Triangle Studios. This time, there’s no mobile games to work on though, but Nintendo DS titles. I’m working on something pretty interesting, but for now that’s about as much as I can tell.

As for spare-time development, I plan to release AI Wars next week after some minor fix-ups. I’m then going to continue work on the surprize I mentioned last month. After that, I’ll either do another small project in-between or I’ll immediatly take up work on Aural Fighter.

The framework I’ve been building for Aural Fighter has been tweaked and refactored all the way through AI Wars, the surprize project and a few other prototypes. I recently streamlined the rendering system: animated sprites are now simply a matter of creating a single sprite sheet and writing an animation data text file, rather than creating multiple numbered files. At compile-time, this animation data is compiled into the .swf file. The sprite loading process then attaches that data to the loaded sprite. There are still a few things I’m working on, such as color remapping and fading filters, but the framework is steadily moving towards a point where creating new games doesn’t require me to add new functionality anymore. Which means I can focus more on the actual games and less on the technology behind them. Which is good.

AI Wars is done

It’s finished. The Flash frontend and Neko backend are done, and my classmates have produced a nice AI client for demonstration purposes. The whole package is roughly 0.5 MB.

To make things a little easier, I’ve written a batch file that starts both the backend and the frontend. All that’s left then is connecting the AI clients and starting the game.

The gameplay

Continue reading AI Wars is looking for AI agents!…