Disqus - Latest Comments for johngirvin

Re: @nivrig — Game Engine Benchmarking

John Girvin — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 18:29:55 -0000

I used VS2015 Community to make Windows 8 Universal builds, but the github repo only has the Xcode based iOS version.

In VS I built SDL and SDL_gpu and added them and ANGLE as libraries to my project, and it just worked. Unfortunately I lost the HDD on that laptop and no longer have the SDL_cpu project itself, but the main benchmark code is identical to the iOS version.

Re: @nivrig — Game Engine Benchmarking

John Girvin — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 12:02:22 -0000

My SDL_gpu bunnymark is available on github:
https://github.com/johngirv...

Re: @nivrig — Game Engine Benchmarking

John Girvin — Fri, 20 May 2016 19:47:18 -0000

Sure, my bunnymarks for libGDX and Cocos2D-X are available:
https://github.com/johngirv...
https://github.com/johngirv...

Re: Converting KryoFlux dumps to Amstrad CPC DSK

John Girvin — Tue, 17 May 2016 16:56:10 -0000

I'm not the Hairy Hacker myself, but I sure did sent a lot of POKEs to the Haunt :)

Re: Upgrading a Mid 2009 MacBook to 8Gb RAM

John Girvin — Mon, 02 May 2016 16:57:31 -0000

No, I benchmarked an 8% increase in performance after the upgrade.

All I meant was that this 2009 laptop doesn't run the latest OSX very well (quickly) even with 8Gb of RAM and an SSD.

Re: Upgrading a Mid 2009 MacBook to 8Gb RAM

John Girvin — Mon, 08 Feb 2016 16:54:48 -0000

DDR3 modules won't fit in to DDR2 slots and the voltages are different so, sorry, this won't work.

Re: Upgrading a Mid 2009 MacBook to 8Gb RAM

John Girvin — Mon, 08 Feb 2016 16:38:57 -0000

It depends on the model and firmware as already noted, but I managed to upgrade my mid 2009 white MacBook to 8Gb and a SSD. However, using this machine recently felt very very slow so I would consider carefully if the upgrade is worth it...

Re: Upgrading a Mid 2009 MacBook to 8Gb RAM

John Girvin — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 05:36:17 -0000

Sorry, I don't know. Could you try it and see, and only upgrade the firmware if it doesn't detect the extra RAM?

Re: Xamarin Indie Free License for Developers with Published Title

John Girvin — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 19:05:34 -0000

I imagine the published title requirement is a necessary gate to prevent a flood of non-gamedevs taking advantage to get $2000pa ($3000 if the new license includes Xamarin Mac, not sure) of software for free.

This is a marketing play of course. My personal opinion is that Xamarin doesn't offer much to the game developer that isn't available free elsewhere so it's hard to justify the large cost. So even if you have a game out, perhaps it was on another engine because of that cost and now you'll reconsider and get drawn in to the Xamarin ecosystem.

That's how it's affecting me :) I'd blogged about my game engine choices ( http://nivrigdev.tumblr.com... ) and now MonoGame and CocosSharp are on the table as equals.

Re: Steve Hannah: This week

John Girvin — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 10:12:23 -0000

Perhaps worth also mentioning JUniversal, which is another Java to C++ translator. It doesn't try to be a full VM though.

http://juniversal.org

Re: The full monty: Orangepixel

John Girvin — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 04:01:38 -0000

"Be everywhere" ... totally agree, but I see from your videos/posts that you have multiple codebases per game so you can achieve this. Is this a result of a natural progression from J2ME to make use of your existing skills and technology base? What do you think about using something like Unity if you were starting again today?

Good post :)

Re: Atoms: Post Mortem of an iOS game

John Girvin — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 17:36:28 -0000

More downloads would be great, of course, but paying for installs probably isn't viable as the lifetime revenue from an Atoms user would be quite low and monthly revenues are negligible.

I went with AdMob too for much the same reasons, though the iAds adapter for it seems stable too (one of the few) and I run both in mediation. I show banners on the front screen and interstitials after each match.

I think I fluffed my part of the marketing and the service I paid for didn't pan out too well either. There's some good advice on indie PR over here which I did read but didn't quite follow through on properly.

Now, as there's basically nothing to lose, I think I might run an experiment and make Atoms paid for a while just to see what happens.

Re: One Game, Four Engines, and a Revolution?

John Girvin — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 16:05:16 -0000

Nope. I tried GameMaker and Monkey in this experiment and got a good way into making my test game in each.

GameMaker was too UI driven for my liking, and I felt like I had to work too hard in the Monkey language to do anything. The next logical step then was to try the next highest level engine and work back, hence skipping Haxe for Unity.

Since writing this I've played with Haxe; it seems good and the base OpenFL layer is heading in the right direction. I've also started playing with Unity a little now, and if I end up not liking it then Haxe-something (or maybe Loom) is at the top of my list.

This isn't meant to start an engine holy war because that would be a waste of words. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. This is just me looking for something that I'm personally comfortable working in. You think Monkey and Haxe rule? That's great and I hope you make a load of games in them.

Re: 16 ways to make your game for free | Game Development Tools & Tech | Develop

John Girvin — Wed, 21 May 2014 06:42:30 -0000

MonoGame isn't free for Android or iOS as it requires a MonoTouch license from Xamarin.

Re: The top 16 game engines for 2014 | Game Development Tools & Tech | Develop

John Girvin — Thu, 15 May 2014 06:52:36 -0000

With AppGameKit, the C++ library is the base that powers the BASIC level, not the other way around. It's a fairly 1:1 mapping between BASIC commands and C++ methods.

Other good and/or popular cross platform 2D engines would include:
Cocos2D and Cocos2D-X (C++)
HaxeFlixel and HaxePunk (based on OpenFL and Haxe)
LoomSDK (sort of ActionScript++)
GiderosMobile (Lua)
MonkeyX (BASIC)
Love2D (Lua)

Re: 28 Weeks Later

John Girvin — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 20:49:11 -0000

You're right, a dare is a stupid reason.

"I bet you can't", on the other hand...

Re: Making Games

John Girvin — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 19:09:23 -0000

Because it's my list.

I come from a background of working close to the metal (as they say) and I guess that makes me uncomfortable coding to the nested abstractions that are HTML5 engines and, to a lesser extent, "player" based engines like Unity. I'm probably being irrational, but, as I said, it's my list.

Re: A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack

John Girvin — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 09:16:44 -0000

Nice work. I did something similar, for similar reasons, in Z80 on an Amstrad CPC vertical scrolling shooter with animated tiled backgrounds that had to be redrawn every frame. The stack version was the third complete rewrite of that routine.

I'm currently attempting to retrieve the source code :)

Re: Quick Tip: Working With Shaders On iOS

John Girvin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:08:16 -0000

Nice static solution. No messy file loading or string allocation.

How do you handle the requirement that the shader sources are null terminated?
I used sed in the build rule to replace the "};" with ", 0x00 };"

FWIW I also stripped comments from the shader source before feeding to xxd.