Will's Blog

My DS application has come a long way in the past few weeks, I think it is finally time to present the fruits of my labor. I made a video to show off the player movement, world movement, camera scrolling and some of the simple AI / world effects I have going. This is only the beginning though! Everything is now in place for me to build more cool things. There are a couple more things I would like to show off in the near term which I'll post here and on the YouTube channel so keep an eye out! If you would like the demo shoot me an e-mail. Its not at the point where I'd like to publicly distribute it however.

This is just a quick post. I am working on creating a video for YouTube to show off the current state of my project (see my prior post). Several challenges came up during this process, this is how I handled them: 1) I needed a desktop recording program to record the emulator. This was easy, I installed a program called "gtk-recordmydesktop" and was able to figure everything out with no instructions. On Linux (Ubuntu) this is in the package manager so it was as easy as " sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop " 2) The resulting video is a non-standard resolution and format, in this case my video file is out.ogv with 272 x 432 resolution. My video editor wants a dv file with 4:3 aspect ratio and YouTube wants 640 x 480 resolution. Getting this to the necessary aspect ratio / resultion / file type required re-encoding / padding / scaling with mencoder, and a transcode with ffmpeg. I found this command to do a straight conversion: mencoder out.ogv -ovc xv...

I have a new addiction which has put all my other projects on hold. Nintendo DS Homebrew . A couple years ago I took a look at the homebrew development tools and libraries available for the DS and Wii, but didn't get much further than building and tweaking the example programs. Recently I took another look at the Nintendo DS homebrew devkit, devkitPRO . After a few hours I had myself a nice PONG clone, complete with touchpad control. Well, it was so easy to put together that I started working on something bigger. That was all two weeks ago, and my bigger project is coming along nicely (5000 lines strong). At the core my "game" is an ant simulator, complete with randomly generated underground tunnels, a surface world with food spawns and multiple possible underground surface links and a queen that lays eggs and soon breeders to move the eggs away from the queen, soldiers to fight spiders, spiders, etc. I'm nearing the point where I can stop with the ant simula...