One step forward, two steps back?

We’re a quarter of the way through 2009 already (!) and progress has finally been made on Flyin’ Irons.

Using the instructions from Thierry Brault on the Soya mailing list (which were excellent and only required a few small amendments), today I successfully built Soya 0.14 for Python 2.5, with gcc-4 and pyrex-9.7.2, on Windows.

I then installed and built Flyin Irons using Python 2.5, and was able to play the game on Windows using Soya 0.14 and Python 2.5 for the first time!

It worked remarkably well – it looks “better” in general, the main thing that I noticed first was that text looks much better in this version.  Is it me, or is the smoke system looking a bit better too?

Happy Christmas! New logo!

It’s Christmas at last here in Australia, and Flyin’ Irons has a brand new exciting logo! Happy Christmas to you all.

New logo!

Ghostly goings-on in the Vertical Steam Championship!

The latest revision of Flyin’ Irons includes a new, exciting Ghost system in Time Trial mode!

When you set a new lap record, the path you take around the track is saved as a series of points for the Ghost Iron to follow.  Then, when you next play Time Trial, the Ghost Iron (currently a Kensworth Drake but soon to be a unique Brawn Ghost) will race you along your record-setting path!

Head over to Sharesource to download the newest revision!

Here’s a screenshot or two of the ghost iron in action:

Self-righting irons!

I’ve made a big step in development: the control system now allows self-righting, that is, your iron will automatically tilt itself so that it faces upwards while you are flying it. This makes hovering a lot easier, and controlling the iron using the Pilot Camera and Chase Camera is now a lot easier as well.

Here’s a screenshot of another development: the Debrief screen, which will appear after a race.

Debrief screen as of 20/12/08

Getting back on track.

The Aussie road trip has ended, and it’s time for me to think about how to continue programming Flyin’ Irons.

There are a number of fundamental things that still need to be changed before the game can be “released” as even a playable proof-of-concept, and foremost is that it needs to be a hell of a lot more accessible to Windows  users (like me!).

Mark has suggested the next step to be upgrading the version of Soya3D we use to the latest, 0.14, to take advantage of its bugfixes and so on. Our terrains need to be much larger, and we need some kind of level of detail code to reduce the quality of visible items and significantly speed up graphics rendering.

The fun has just begun!

Flyin’ Irons development on hold until 2009…

I’m off on a tour of the Australian east coast, so Flyin’ Irons will not progress until 2009, when I might have a little more time to work on it.

I am, of course, still very keen to hear your comments and suggestions, and even your encouragement!

Stay tuned, for when Flyin’ Irons will return, bigger and better than ever before!

New features for Flyin’ Irons

Here is a list of the latest improvements to the game:

-  Fully functional menu system, including a new Options menu, in which players can change game options in-game! Currently, the only adjustable option is the mouse sensitivity, but this will expand in the future to include lots and lots of options.

-  New iron! The Kensworth Drake is low-powered, but its relatively light weight and low air resistance makes up for this.

- Count-up timer in Time Trial mode (replaces the static 30-second countdown timer), so you can see how your current lap is progressing as you fly.

The Kensworth Drake - third flying iron in Flyin' Irons

UnicodeEncodeError workaround

I’ve been trying to get FI running on another Windows box, so I can continue development when I don’t have access to “my” computer. Having got past the first few problems (the cerealizer thing mentioned earlier!), I ran into a rather more general problem to do with an “ascii” codec and a UnicodeEncodeError involving “ordinal not in range(128)”.

A solution, or at least a workaround, to this, is to set Python’s default encoding to UTF-8. To do this, go into python24/Lib/site.py and change line 352 from

    encoding = “ascii” # Default value set by _PyUnicode_Init()

to

    encoding = “utf-8″ # Default value set by _PyUnicode_Init()

 - this should allow Flyin’ Irons to load up properly.

Cerealizer register_alias error solution

Windows XP users have been having trouble running python setup.py build, due to the Windows version of Cerealizer not having the attribute register_alias. The problem can be solved! Here’s how:

- Download Cerealizer 0.5

- Extract the archive (use 7-Zip ) to your python folder, so there is now, for example, python24/cerealizer

- In the Command Prompt, navigate to that folder, e.g. cd\ then cd c:\python24\cerealizer

- Run python setup.py build. This will create a new directory build/Lib/cerealizer in the python24/Cerealizer folder.

- Move that build/Lib/cerealizer folder to python24/Lib/, so the path is now e.g. C:\python24\Lib\cerealizer

And that’s it! The game should now run. Let me know if this helped you!

New Iron Select Menu

The Iron Select menu has been improved. There is now an arrangement of nice-looking boxes for the text to go in, and the statistics and description of each iron are displayed beside a rotating 3D view of the iron when it is selected. As usual, the changes are on Sharesource.