Since I have the phone I decided to check out the development platform again since I only had seen the initial releases, and ended up paying for a developer subscription. I decided that I want to make some kind of tile-based building game, which I had started working on in flash before, so I’ve been porting all the functionality from that.

Here are a few pictures of my progress so far:

First version of the tile renderer

Larger tile set, changed to 32px tiles

Added buildings, and resources

It’s really nice to have something to show for the work I’ve put in, and as a bonus the video has had 100k views in the first day so it seems it’s something people are talking about.

P.S. If you’ve come here looking for extra information on Unlimited Detail, I don’t really know what you’re expecting. I like my job so I’m not going to say anything that isn’t public already.

I haven’t really done much with it since, but I’d be happy to help out anyone who wants to use it where I can.

First up is the hex view,  here you can see Pooyan running in the emulator to the left, and the red numbers indicate memory that has changed since the last step. The memory updates in real time which makes it incredibly useful to track numbers reflected in the game (such as score).

And here is the mesmerizing heat map. You can see here the ROM and RAM being used, the green-only section of the view is the ROM (which can only be read from, hence only green), followed by RAM which is being written and read from. Again this is all real-time, and the colours darken over time so you get a sense of history. This view can be very useful when you don’t have a full memory map; all green sections are likely ROM, orange sections are RAM, and little dots surrounded with black are ports. With machines that have a sound CPU (like Pooyan), you can watch the CPU reading the music as it plays, as well as sound samples.

Unfortunately I don’t have any other pictures, so that’s it. At some point I may clean up my previous revisions and release it as open source.

The top toolbar is from the test bed, I can click to modify random ranges of memory to test the different colours of the hex view or heat map. The last toolbar button turns on continuous random memory updates which shows off the heat map view better.

Red is read, green is write, and blue is a bank change. I sped the heat map up by clearing the view to black, and only rendering the bytes that have colour. It will slow down if a lot of stuff is happening but it’s tons faster for the test.

For the hex view, I now build up 4 strings for each line, one for each colour which signifies if its invalid (grey question marks), dirty (light grey), changed (red), or normal (black). Rather than naively rendering each byte separately it now only renders a max of 4 text draw calls per line. Magnitudes faster even in the worst case.

I also cleaned up some scrolling code, but I’m not having much luck getting the focus to do what I want. I’m going to figure it out for the editor part…

First, a hex memory viewer, which will later become an editor. I’m using a fixed width font, however it’s still very complicated to figure out where stuff needs to be drawn. The grey lines are what I’ve calculated for future hit testing, which currently are a little hacky but seem to line up well enough. As a viewer this is pretty much complete.

And secondly a memory read/write heat map. Writes are red, reads are green, and their brightness indicates how recent they were. This still needs a lot of work, I have to figure out how to lay it out and make it zoom-able, and I want to print memory addresses down the left similar to the hex view. The picture here is 16k of memory (128×128 2×2 squares).

Setting up and running it has been quite an interesting experience. I spent a few weeks slowly getting WordPress installed, grabbed some plug-ins and a nice theme. I created Gmail, Twitter and Cli.gs accounts, and set-up a WordPress plug-in to post to twitter when I publish a new post using Clig.gs for the links. After I had it all working I realised there was something I hadn’t really considered: content!

I’m not really much of a writer, so I’m not really in a position to write something from scratch, so I’ve been just using what developers have written about their own games. I first talked to John Passfield (who I’ve worked with at Pandemic Studios) since Three Blokes Studios had Brainiversity 2 coming up, and used that as the first post. I had to search out games for the first few posts but now I’m getting developers actively emailing me about their games which is good. I’ve also recently signed up for Google Analytics and installed a plug-in for it, but I think I’m going to have to wait a while for it to collect enough data to tell me anything useful.

While I still need to do a bit of work to get it where I want it to be, I’m quite pleased with the site so far. The emails I’ve had from people that get it have been positive but I guess I just have to wait to see how people use it.

Krome is a bit different to what I became used to at Pandemic. Working in a large engine time is certainly a new experience. Also, working with a shared engine is a different too.

Now that I’m starting to get my head around things, I have to figure out what I want to work on. I’ve seen some things that I’m going to put my hand up to work on, hopefully that’ll work out. It’d probably be a good idea to do something useful before my probation ends

The version that I have uploaded at the time of writing this is fairly primative, but the main systems are working.  It consists of a tile renderer (which can be scrolled using the arrow keys), a simple building system where placed buildings can do stuff (which is currently just generating resources), and a system to place buildings (currently it doesn’t check for a suitable area, but part of the work is already done). Obviously there’s alot more to do, but it is functional.

I decided that since I was using Flex – Flash’s application based development enviroment – that I should take advantage of the Flex framework, so the tile render is derived from a Flex UIComponent and I’ve used normal Flex UI controls for the interface. This is great because I don’t have to worry about writing my own GUI system, and I can use the Design view to place and arrange it all. Later on all I need to do is make a new skin and use the built in skinning capabilities to get it to look like I want without chaning anything else. It’s allowed me to work on the game itself rather than fiddling around with UI.

Check out the latest version of Moderor here