Warning, this is another vanity post!

Hardcore Gaming 101 have republished an article from Retro Gamer Issue 95 on the classic C64 game Project Firestart and it's creator, Damon Slye (a hero of mine, not just for Firestart but another all time favourite game of mine, Aces of the Pacific). Definitely a great read. As a long time fan of the game I was shocked to learn that the game's monster was based on a children's toy!

This quote here, however was personally flattering:

Although Firestart suffered from hardware limitations and perhaps didn't receive the attention it deserved, both fans and its creators recall it fondly. There was even a fan remake (screenshot taken from the creator's homepage) in first-person 3D in 2006. As Slye reveals, he's rather a fan: "I loved it, and loved that someone had liked the game enough to do a remake."

Obviously, I'm very keen to get a copy of Retro Gamer #95! Unfortunately the physical copies have all sold out and the digital copies require an iDevice, if you have a copy that you're willing to part with please let me know and I'll buy it from you.

For the Overload 2012 launcher game I hacked together support for multiple simultaneous Joysticks in Monkey (The first C programming I had done in a decade!). I did a bit more work on it today and turned it into an enhanced Joystick support library. It can handle:

• 16 Joysticks simultaneously
• 128 buttons per Joystick
• 8 axes per Joystick
• POV Joystick hat support (Necessary for the XBox 360 controller's DPad)
• GLFW on Windows only at this stage. Mac support shouldn't be too hard to implement, XNA is another possibility.

Source has been bundled into the Earok's Monkey Demos pack.

The Overload 2012 Comic and Manga convention is on the 22nd of September, next Saturday. This year a few Auckland-based game developers are putting together a bundle of sorts to distribute exclusively at the convention. Tentatively, it'll be a pay-what-you-want bundle with any proceeds heading in the direction of a yet-to-be-determined charity. Subject to change the current collection includes:

• Smashbox by JollyCorpse
• Trail Bay by Matthew Gatland
• Whale Bait by VideoJames
• Wizard's Lair by Tiny Frog Software
• Kiwi's Tale, Derelict and Witchblaster by the people who have collaborated with me and myself.

(The launcher itself is a basic action game in the spirit of Bomberman and the Wizard of Wor. I really wanted to get more milage out of Anthony's mecha artwork so I thought this would be a good use for it).

There's still a couple more games yet to be added to the bundle, but we don't quite have enough for the fifteen slots provided! If you know of anyone in Auckland that might be interested in donating a game or two to the bundle please get in touch.

The HTML5 voxel terrain demo has been updated to run a lot faster at higher detail settings (for comparison, the old voxel terrain demo is still here). The new version of the source is also available on the Monkey Demo page.

One of the difficulties with the HTML5 canvas (and many other graphics platforms) is manipulating individual pixels enmasse can be incredibly slow, even slower than just rendering numerous images.

For example, on the SNES Mode 7 demo, the 3D effect is achieved by scaling, rotating and rendering a 1024x1024 image 7,200 times a second (Once for each of the 120 horizontal lines on the bottom half of the canvas, times 60 frames a second). As horribly inefficient as this sounds, it's still much faster than programatically colouring each individual pixel, which is why the SNES demo runs much slicker than the old voxel terrain demo (which DID manipulate individual pixels).

Thankfully, the latest version of Monkey has a neat new feature to get around that. You can write pixels to and read pixels from an image at runtime, so basically you just manipulate the pixels of an image (instead of the canvas), and then draw it once. Simple as that.

I'm really tempted to have a shot at doing a Doom-like engine in Monkey now!