My Work

The Cyclops

I've been working with the cocos2d-x engine for a while and have gotten used to one of the important features in the engine.. the autorelease(). It's basically a reference counting implementation which automatically deletes any object that is removed from a scene. Unless ofcourse you called a retain on it. So when i was working on DotDot a simple 2D game, i created a crosshair animation everytime the user got a perfect alignment and removed the object once the animation was done. It worked great and for a while i assumed that everything was fine. I was showing off the game to people on my android device when i started noticing slowdowns once in a while.. and as the score got higher it got worse.. surely the engines' fault i assumed.. but then i thought ill' give Godot the benefit of doubt and checked the documentation about freeing the memory. That is when i discovered that the objects removed from the scene are not actually removed from memory. Basically every tim...

I was trying to build a sample for some image manipulation tool. The requirement was that the user should be able to pick an image that he pasted on the screen, move it around, scale and rotate it. The way we would do this using OpenGL is create a depth buffer use different depth value on each of the Quads' used to render the transparent image. So when you do a readPixel from the depth buffer you will get the z value of the sprite if it was under the touch. This is how we wold distinguish between two overlapping transparent images. The tracking of z value for different Quads is done automatically in OpenGL when you bind the depth buffer to the current frame buffer and start drawing stuff. Now this i know and have used for a while, but how does this work in the Android Canvas drawing world? Short answer: in the same way Long answer:  These are the steps you should follow to get it done: You have to create a separate Bitmap of the same size as your drawing area Set the ...

I've always been fascinated with the vehicle physics used in games. I played so many racing games / the hill climb games and every single time i would wonder wow that must be really hard to do. Thanks to the new generation of game development tools, developing physics based games has become almost a second nature to most people. I didn't want to be left out so i gave it a shot.. I tried setting up vehicle physics in GoDot Engine for a 2D vehicle. Here is what the vehicle scene looks like.. 2D vehicle setup in GoDot As you can see the body collision shape is not right but the rest of the stuff just works. The idea is simple think of what parts move along with the body vs what doesn't. I was kinda stuck setting up the pinJoint2D in GoDot, it actually clearly takes two nodes under the properties. This makes sure that the wheels are hinged to the DampingSpring2D. The Damping Spring2D takes two physics bodies(Body and the PinJoint2D) and makes it work like shock ab...

Some ragged shooter Was trying to see if i can draw something quick as it's been a while since ive' done any. Hopefully will be able to get back to doing this regularly.

I know that cocos builder is old news by now. People have moved on to sexier more advanced tools for getting things done, namely CocosStudio and SpriteBuilder. I have been vocal about using this editor at work because we have been able to integrate it with our workflow very easily. 1) Ability to create custom classes is just amazing, 2) The animation creation just works. The one thing i do crib about is that there was no way to get those custom classes that we created for regular items integrated to the editor. I've tried to get plugins working a while ago and just gave up because it didn't work. Today i was motivated enough to dig deep and get the damn thing working. I was unable to push to the original repo but have forked and have put in the stuff. Ill try to see if i can extend this to be more useful may be change the renderer to cocos2d-x instead of cocos2d. These are some things ive' been thinking about will have to see where this goes. Just excited to ge...

This is a piece I did completely on mi4 using drawchemy, sketchexpress, and adobe draw. Seems like a good start.. I'm just not liking the imperfect outline because of lack of bezier curve tool like in inkscape on desktop. Probably just a matter of preference but this seems to have come out well.