Posted on: March 04 2017
Comments: 3I just uploaded PostCollapse version 1.06 to Steam, which includes some cool new features:
A new game mode ('Hardcore', which is more difficult, realistic and boring at the same time), churches, nicer houses, nicer house interior (furniture), new music and more. Hope you like it!
[Read more]Posted on: March 03 2017
Comments: 0Since Chrome 55 is out, it now shows a download button for HTML 5 video and audio tags in the control bar:
This is a big issue for a surprising amount of users of my free responsive Website Designer RocketCake. I got a ton of support mails, asking me for a way to disable this. Understandable, making it extremely easy for an average person to download a video reduces the amount of people visiting your site for that video.
Here is a way to disable the download button on your page: Insert this CSS code i...
[Read more]Posted on: February 21 2017
Comments: 5In PostCollapse, the world is generated procedurally, including the furniture inside the houses. For simplicity, I simply generated cubes with some textures on them, which looked a bit like cupboards:
But to be honest, this didn't look and feel very good. So last weekend, I played a bit around and changed this with placed pregenerated 3D models instead. Now the interiours of the houses will look much better (for small values of 'better'):
The two screenshots are from the exact same room. I think I'll ...
[Read more]Posted on: February 20 2017
Comments: 0I don't think I like the auto suggestions of reddit's advertising system:
Looking at it, it seems to be even a real non-joke subreddit. Still not really my target audience. :D
[Read more]Posted on: February 17 2017
Comments: 5Recently, I tend to prototype new 3D features in JavaScript / WebGL, because it is quite fast to do this. No compilation times, just hitting F5 and see what works. For the just released 5.6 version of my game engine, I did just that. (Prototyping this in WebGL, of course also has a second advantage: The game engine can spit out WebGL code, which of course based on these prototypes)
(click onto 'comments' to continue reading)
[Read more]Posted on: January 31 2017
Comments: 6I'm currently working on improving the vegetation a bit in my game engine CopperCube. It looks better already and it can be moved by the wind, through a shader:
I was thinking about making this working exclusive for the grass in the terrain, but decided that a more generic approach would be better: Just click a checkbox on any material, and that thing will be moved by the wind. That way, also the leaves of trees can be moved too. Maybe also flags or similar. I still have to make this work well with the r...
[Read more]Posted on: January 27 2017
Comments: 23
Since I have put my game engine and my survival game on Steam, I am getting quite a lot of requests for free steam keys. Some of these requests are valid, made by nice youtubers and twitchers, but a lot of them are made by scammers, pretending to be a popular youtuber or similar but easy to make out to be an impostor, trying just to get a handful of free keys, in order to sell them. If you have a game on steam, you likely know what I mean.
So, how to get rid of those? Simply ignoring them doesn't seem ...
[Read more]Posted on: January 22 2017
Comments: 4If you ever programmed a 3D game, you probably came along this problem: You have a texture with alpha channel and lots of small details on them, which disappear when the object is far away or viewed at a sharp angle. This happens for example with foliage, trees, bushes, grass or chain-link fences. Here is an extreme example showing what I mean:
For most objects like the leaves in trees, this isn't a serious problem, most people won't even notice. But for important, fine grained stuff like wire mesh fence...
[Read more]Posted on: January 12 2017
Comments: 5Please take a look at this short list of things which happened to me today:
I wanted to edit some texts in my Apple Developer account. I couldn't because my Safari wasn't able show the log-in page correctly, everything was messed up. After lots of refreshes, cache and cookie deletions, rebooting and even debugging through the JavaScript of their website, I finally figured out that my safari needed an update. Updated it and everything suddenly worked. So in short: Apple's own website didn't work with the...
[Read more]Posted on: January 11 2017
Comments: 2I just found a "Let's Play" video of a youtuber named Petre who is finding out all the new features in my game. I like how he is experiencing the game and the features:
This was exactly how I hoped people would play the game. But there are others of course, for example a few weeks ago I saw a youtuber standing in the landscape and commenting on how ugly the trees, the grass, the walls in the buildings, the sky and everything looks. After doing this for about 15 minutes, he was slowly dying of thirst be...
[Read more]Posted on: January 09 2017
Comments: 0I just uploaded version 1.3 of my free responsive website editor RocketCake. It includes some neat new features, like support for text shadows:
Which was interesting to implement. For example, the specification says that it doesn't give the exact way to implement this, but no pixel in the result image may not deviate by something like 5% from a certain specification. Ha. :)
Besides lots of other new stuff, I also rewrote the rendering algorithm so that website editing is now much, much faster if you are...
[Read more]Posted on: January 01 2017
Comments: 4As every year, I offer a discount on some of my products for a few days. This year, there are 18 products on sale. Eighteen! Until a few days ago, I haven't realized that I have created that many products so far at all.
The sale page is a bit more structured than last year and I even made it responsive. But the probably more interesting part is that I give away all products for -50%, some even for -75%. That's quite a lot. But it's only for a few days. Hopefully I am giving a few people a nice start int...
[Read more]Posted on: December 10 2016
Comments: 4December hasn't nearly ended yet, but I though it would be a nice idea to recap what I did in 2016. I have the feeling that I wasn't very productive this year, but let's see:
The most interesting event this year for me was that Valve opened the floodgates and more games than ever before were added to Steam. Including my small hobby project, PostCollapse.
Originally written in JavaScript, I re-wrote it in C++ and released it in October as Early Access. It is a survival game, it is ugly because even the ...
[Read more]Posted on: November 22 2016
Comments: 8A lot of people wanted to customize their headquarter in the game, so last weekend, I experimented a bit and programmed a Minecraft style mode for the game:
It actually works nicely, but is of course limited to the buildings. For now, once finished, this mode will likely only exist for the fun of it, but it could be possible to extend it to make more sense gameplay wise. But let's see.
[Read more]Posted on: November 11 2016
Comments: 7I'm used to getting strange software reviews on various app stores. But I think Steam reviews are one level ahead. I'm confused for example about this one:
Is this good? Is it bad? I don't know. But he played it for 23 hours, so it shouldn't be that bad. Right? Hm.
[Read more]Posted on: November 08 2016
Comments: 3Just had to explain to an upset child that on TV, you cannot "watch again" or "watch another episode" or watch something different. Yes, on TV, you have to watch what they are sending, and when they are sending it. Being used to Youtube / Netflix / Amazon Prime Video and similar really makes it difficult to understand how TV is still in business. And while I had to explain how TV works to this child, I noticed that at least when that generation is older, TV will be dead.
[Read more]Posted on: October 26 2016
Comments: 0Finally, I pushed out a free update for CopperCube again, we are now at version 5.5. New features are:
Steam Integration
Improved First Person Shooter Controller
C++ source code (pro edition)
Flash source code (pro edition)
Android Multi-Touch support for 2D Overlays
Android First Person Shooter Camera improved
Scripting extension: ccbGetCurrentNode()
And other small improvements
There is also a new CopperCube website. It is responsive and minimal, and not very overloaded with informat...
[Read more]Posted on: October 17 2016
Comments: 3I think this is the most funny review I received until now for PostCollapse:
Apparently that youtuber doesn't like the game, and he calls it the "Most Unity Suvival Game ever!". Ha :) That's especially funny since I'm one of the very, very few people out there which did this: I wrote nearly every line of code in my game from scratch, myself, in C++. Including the 3D engine. And sound engine. And collision detection. File System. Translation. Input handling. World generation. Hell, I even composed the mus...
[Read more]Posted on: October 13 2016
Comments: 7PostCollapse is now on Steam:
As early access, but available. Hope you like it!
[Read more]Posted on: October 07 2016
Comments: 10Since the first day when I created software, I always wanted to have feedback from people, so that I could improve my software. That's one of the reasons why I started blogging back in 1998, when the term 'blog' didn't even exists. (I was working on an isometric diablo like game named 'Irrlicht' back then, which unfortunately was never finished).
I've learned that the average willingness of giving feedback voluntarily is very, very low. For example for every 100 readers of this blog, only 1 will post a ...
[Read more]Posted on: September 23 2016
Comments: 26I wrote the exact same first person shooter 3D game both in C++ and JavaScript. In this article, I am writing down my findings. Please skip the next indented paragraph if you are not interested in the background details.
A few years ago, when WebGL started to work in most browsers, I had the idea to write a first person shooter game in JavaScript and HTML. It was a crazy idea back then, but it worked, and the performance wasn't that bad (try it out yourself). I extended the game's code in my free time,...
[Read more]Posted on: September 12 2016
Comments: 8I uploaded the first build of the game for Windows here. The game now runs at about 150 FPS instead of the felt 10 FPS when it ran inside a browser.
I also re-created the gameplay video with that build, I think you can see now that it feels much, much smoother now:
Any feedback of the build would be welcome, it is just a 12 MB download.
[Read more]Posted on: September 03 2016
Comments: 4I originally wanted the game to have no borders, and an unlimited area to explore, but for technical reasons (floating point precision), I now limited it to an area of about 120 square kilometers (or 75 square miles). The border looks like this:
It is a bit abrupt, but the only way to keep the player from climbing over it. I think 120 km² is still enough to play the game and have fun.
[Read more]Posted on: August 26 2016
Comments: 3From now on, even when drinking beverages this should remind me to keep pushing the game further towards release:
I'll do my best... :)
[Read more]Posted on: July 29 2016
Comments: 6Well, that was fast. My game was just greenlit today:
I will polish the game quite a bit and refine and beta test it before launching on Steam, so this will take a while. But this is great news! Thanks for all the support and to all the people voting for the game!
[Read more]Posted on: July 08 2016
Comments: 1After I made that video from my last post, people suggested that I could add my game to Steam Greenlight. Since I have a nicely working Windows .exe build I now did: PostCollapse is now on Steam Greenlight.
Unfortunately, the video apparently sucks in contrast to the screenshots... which again I think might be affecting the votes negatively. If you like to help, please vote too. :)
[Read more]Posted on: July 04 2016
Comments: 4Last weekend, I thought it would maybe be a good idea to create a gameplay video of that game I am working on. Here is it, what do you think?
Constructive feedback welcome!
[Read more]Posted on: June 28 2016
Comments: 0It's this time of the year again, Steam is in Summer Sale mode. CopperCube is of course also discounted during this time:
You can get it here.
I'm not sure why a lot of people on steam seem to complain about the 'small' discounts. Did you see that -86% on CopperCube? That's insane, if you ask me. :D
[Read more]Posted on: May 27 2016
Comments: 2I had so much to do during the last weeks, I forgot to mention on this blog that I released version 1.2 of my free responsive website designer RocketCake. There are a few new templates in that version, improved master/client code support, support for radio buttons (somehow I forgot those, and no one complained!) and a few bug fixes here and there.
The editor is still only a few months out of beta, and already used by quite a lot of people. I'm quite happy about this.
[Read more]Posted on: May 24 2016
Comments: 2A lot of people using CopperCube to create 3D Android apps suddenly complained that setting up the Android SDK for them newly doesn't work anymore. The Android SDK Manager would simply refuse to download the required API 8, and show a "Not compatible with Windows" status instead. Which appears to be a blatant lie.
The SDK worked the last years before flawlessly, and apparently wasn't even changed since then. Actually, you can still download the SDK from Google's servers manually, and it will do it's jo...
[Read more]