stick's corner

Last week we had a Hackweek at Novell. I decided to do something rather unusual for me – to hack a device. I bought one of these nifty LiveView devices made by Sony Ericsson, which are basically an intelligent watch that can connect to your mobile phone using Bluetooth. Unfortunately, it turned out to be rather unusable with Android devices (lots of Bluetooth disconnects), but supposedly a firmware update is on its way. After I saw that, I was somehow disappointed but I thought there must be a way how to reverse engineer a protocol and try to connect the device to my computer. I started to look around on the Internet and found a great blog by Andrew de Quincey. What was even more cool was that Andrew already did most of the job and wrote some code in Python. All I had to do is to wrap it into classes to make it more general and thus customizable. So what’s next? My dream is to create a custom open-source firmware and flash the device. I hope I can achieve this with help of hardware wizards from our Prague hackerspace. The source code is available from gitorious as usual. Do you think that Hackweek lasted only until Friday for me? Well, not really, keep reading …

When I was last time in Germany, Leinir told me about an event called Global Game Jam. I liked its idea very much – 48-hour game coding marathon. I was amused when a couple of days later (just one day before the event took place) my friends Split, Lokiman and Frem told me about the Prague chapter called Game Jam Prague and invited me to join them. We decided to go there under the name they already used for a couple of their projects – Hyperbolic Magnetism aka @hypmag.

The event started on Friday evening. When we arrived, the place was already full of other teams preparing their stuff. This was very different from other (mostly open-source related) events I attend where I usually know at least a few people. Here, I knew no one except my team! At around 6pm we were given a topic that should be somehow present in our game – Extinction. I was very surprised that we were able to brainstorm over 15 ideas in less than half an hour. Later we discarded most of them (because they were too obvious or too complex) and we ended up with two.

We agreed that for idea one to be successful we would need to create nice graphics and because none of us was confident enough, we decided to pick the another one where simple graphics would suffice. So we started to work on a game with the working title “Nations”. The idea was really simple: you have a couple of nations, represented by triangles (people) moving inside the circle (border). Each nation expands in time and when the circles start to overlap, triangles inside the intersection start to fight together. Moreover, if the nation is big enough, it starts to produce A-bombs which are then launched at other nations. Your task is to maintain balance between the nations, so none of them is completely destroyed. This is achieved by applying positive or negative force on some places of the game area. Positive force causes affected triangles to reproduce more, negative force causes the affected triangles to disappear. We implemented basic behaviour of the game mechanics and went to sleep on Saturday morning.

We met again on Saturday evening and we coded and tweaked and coded and tweaked … It was a long way, but at some point (I guess it must have been something around Sunday 4AM) we realised we want to change the whole game logic completely. How about we had only two types of nations – green controlled by the user and cyan ones by AI? What if player could decide to split the nation into two halves or join two nations into a bigger one? Bigger nation of course produces A-bombs faster, but is also easier to target. We replaced most of the code and I started to work on an AI, which suddenly became necessary. We worked until Sunday noon when we were finally satisfied with the result. In the meanwhile Split composed a great music track and we quickly hacked game menu, intro screen and other cosmetic stuff. That’s how it looked in the end:

I’ll attach the gameplay video to give you even better idea how the game is played:

At the end of the event all contestants judged the produced games and the first three places were announced – check the list for all other games and the result. The first team also got a very nice pacman-themed cake (which was also very tasty, thanks for sharing!). Although we didn’t make it into the Top 3, I think it was a great success for us. We tried something completely new and we also met a lot of interesting people (one of them being Antonin, author of the legendary TotalFinder). I also hope that we’d be able to finish the game and publish it into Apple App Store (and probably later into Android Market).

Finally I present you the photo of amazing Hyperbolic Magnetism shortly after we submitted our game at the end of the 48-hour session.

See you next year!

This week we had Hack Week event when everyone was welcome to use Innovation time on FOSS projects or even start the new one! I spent most of the time on hacking the Game Store, which I introduced in my previous blogpost. The package is now ready for you in the Build Service.

Simply use the following One Click Install files (openSUSE 11.0, openSUSE 11.1 and openSUSE Factory) or add the games repository and install the gamestore package manually. Game Store uses this repository to download the games, so you should stay subscribed to it after the installation too.

As a bonus I created a very simple One Click Install files catalog which imitates the Game Store look. It is available at gamestore.gk2.sk.

The screenshots for both versions (left Qt, right web) are here so you get the idea how it looks, but the best thing is to try it on your own!

Big thanks go to randy-sk who helped me with harvesting of icons and screenshots of the games. I am already looking for your feedback!

I was adding some new packages to our games repository in openSUSE Build Service, when I realized that we have over 150 games at this one centralized place! Wouldn’t it be great if there was an application which would allow users to browse through games, filter them by genres or names, view the screenshots and read the information about the games? Players usings Windows can already use “Games for Windows” or “Steam” from Valve, but they also have to pay for the majority of the games. All games in our repository are free and just one click away! I started to hack an application with pretty concrete idea in my mind. You can look at the result of my efforts below (left Games for Windows, right Game Store):

As you can see, Game Store is at the moment quite immature Qt application (actually it is my first Qt app, so my Qt skills suck pretty much right now ), but it is already able to load locally stored XML together with game icons, screenshots and descriptions. User can install new games (using our great One Click Install feature) and launch the installed ones. Later I want to add the ability to synchronize your games settings (configuration + saved games) with Game Store server, so you can have these on any computer and the server could create a hi-score charts for every supported game. There is a long way ahead to go, but I wanted to approach you very early, so you could be involved too. Even if you don’t speak C++ or Qt, you can help us with filling the missing descriptions, gathering game icons and screenshots. Just read the GameStore wiki page to get the idea what needs to be done or clone the git repo and start hacking right away!

Thank you and I hope that GameStore will be a great addition to other openSUSE applications and tools we already have!

Update: See the next blogpost for more information.

We decided to restructure and cleanup the games projects in the openSUSE Build Service. Before the change we had 8 projects for each game genre (action, adventure, arcade, board, puzzle, roleplay, strategy/realtime, strategy/turn-based) and one separate project for game libraries (so you can play games even on older distributions with obsoleted libraries).

This situation was causing more harm than good, so now we will only have one “games” repository with all game genres together. If you have already added old game repositories, please remove them and add the brand new one located at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/ and then the directory of your distribution. The old URLs for the individual games repositories will no longer work.

If your favorite game is not yet packaged you can add it to the Games Wishlist at openSUSE wiki. Or even better, you can try to package it by yourself and when you are finished contact me and we will add the game to the repository. You can also ask on the opensuse-packaging@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list you have any troubles with the packaging.

Game On!