And forums are back!

I decided to stick with PHPBB3, but coded in an anti-spam question. If you can’t figure out the answer, you probably shouldn’t be trying to register an account…

Zachtronics Industries Forums

Forums are down...

...but should be back in the next few days. Something other than PHPBB. Sorry to kill your collective buzz.

What? Forums!

The Zachtronics Industries Forums are now live!

http://forums.zachtronicsindustries.com

Feel free to go do forumsy stuff there, but be sure to keep it classy!

Re: Design a Game for Engineers

It’s been nearly a month since the end of the Design a Game for Engineers challenge and I haven’t said anything about it – what’s up with that?!

I received a total of 12 submissions, all of which were more or less decent ideas. Some stood above others in terms of whether or not they seemed like tenable projects, and a surprisingly large amount were similar to ideas I’ve thrown around in the past, such as traffic intersections, cellular biology, robots, and Pulse-like shooters.

For a while I had a side project going on that would have led to making some of these games, but we stopped when it was determined to be a stupid idea. I may contact some of you in the future, however, to see if you would like to collaborate should an opportunity arise.

Apparently I'm now in charge of an open source project.

Infiniminer is now officially open source!

http://github.com/krispykrem/Infiniminer/tree/master

I’ll be maintaining the official branch, which I encourage anyone who wants to help out to submit to instead of simply forking off into oblivion. Bug fixes will be taken after being code reviewed, but gameplay fixes will have to be discussed first (#infiniminer on Freenode). I realize that many of you have ideas for how you want to tweak gameplay, but we’re first going to have to figure out a sane way to allow for customizable servers without having loads of possibly conflicting server config flags.

GitHub uses git, which is a distributed version control program. To submit a patch, you’ll want to fork the official branch, make your changes, test them, and then use the GitHub interface to file a pull request to me to pull the changes from your branch into the main branch.

If you find any bugs or encounter any more crashes you can go ahead and submit them to the official issue tracking list.

AllocateFormatAndData()

There are two ways to fix the AllocateFormatAndData() bug as of v1.5:

• You can turn on the “nosound” flag for your client, which will completely disable the sound for the game and thus fix the problem.

• It seems that the underlying issue might be XNA selecting the wrong sound driver when you have more than one installed, such as a second sound card or a modem being recognized as an audio device. Some people have reported success by disabling the conflicting devices and have been able to get the game running WITH SOUND!

Don't sap me bro!

by Barebone (?), found in #infiniminer

Infiniminer v1.5

Infiniminer v1.5 is now out, available here.

• There is now a server browser! To make your server public, MAKE SURE THAT PORT 5565 UDP IS ACCESSIBLE OUTSIDE YOUR NETWORK and then set the public flag in the server config to true. Junk servers WILL be blacklisted.
• Made kick command IP based, added a ban command with a banlist stored in banlist.txt.
• A random hint will display for your edutainment as you connect to a server.
• Fixed the beacon bug, where beacon info wasn’t sent to players joining later in the game.
• The red/blue colors for text are now easier to read.
• Added a sexy new title screen.
• Added a North mark on the radar screen.
• You can now connect to host names, in addition to using Ctrl-V to paste an IP/hostname into the direct connect field.
• You can now use the numpad!
• Fixed some random crashes.
• Gold veins are now bigger and thicker, but gold is only worth $100 per block.
• Miners now carry 8 loot, everyone else carries 4.
• All classes can dig by holding down the mouse button, but miners still dig much faster.
• TNT now blows up other blocks of TNT, regardless of who owns them.
• There is now a sandbox mode that can be enabled for the server, giving free blocks and no win condition.
• There is now a work-around for the AllocateFormatAndData, the nosound flag in the client config.

• Bloom lighting makes everything prettier! Lava textures are animated now too!

This is probably the last major update for Infiniminer.

Infiniminer v1.4

Infiniminer v1.4 is now out, available here.

• Added beacon block, which creates unique signature on your team members’ radars (50 ore, Engineer, Prospector).
• Added road block, which allows you to travel twice as fast (10 ore, Engineer).
• All radar signals now have relative altitude information.
• Ladder blocks now cost 25 ore to build (previously 10).
• Jump blocks now cost 25 ore to build (previously 30, and before that 50).
• The miner can now only hold 200 ore.
• Default win condition now 10k with a less random total loot amount.
• Fixed “string crash” related to volume parameter.

• TNT now destroys lava blocks!

Infiniminer v1.31

Infiniminer v1.31 is now out, available here.

• Adds volume control parameter to client configuration file.

• Might fix some “missing key” crashes for the client.

Hey man, he was in my face.

by Zaiden, found on the VGCats forum

Infiniminer

That’s right boys and girls – Infiniminer is now available! To play, you’ll need the installer below, the XNA 3.0 runtime (linked below), and maybe the .NET 2.0 runtime (linked below, although you probably have it).

Download Infiniminer v1.5 [1.45 MB]
Download XNA 3.0 Runtime
Download .NET 2.0 Runtime

There’s a README with some basic information, although you can find everything there is to know by holding F1 while in-game. Keep in mind that this is a networked multiplayer game, so you won’t have a lot of fun playing it by yourself.

Fixing the AllocateFormatAndData() Crash
Open Source Project Information

Thanks go out to Chris Gengler (tayrtahn@gmail.com) for helping with the artwork.

The official IRC channel for Infiniminer is #infiniminer on Freenode. You can easily join by using this java IRC client, which will take you automatically to the channel.

Design a Game for Engineers

I’m spinning up on a project related to the Games for Engineers series that, if everything turns out, will take it to the next level. What does this mean for you guys? It means it’s CONTEST TIME!

• Your task is to design a game for the Games for Engineers series.
• You don’t actually need to know anything about making games – all you need is a good idea!
• The minimum that will be accepted is a strong concept. Thinking through rules and designing example levels will greatly increase your chances of winning.
• You should not program anything or create any artwork beyond concept drawings.

• If your design is chosen, you will be given the option to temporarily join on with the Zachtronics Industries team and make your game. Terms will be discussed at this time.

All submissions should be emailed to me at zachbarth@gmail.com by April 30th, 2009. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me by email or in the comments.

Unicode comments bug fixed!

There was a “feature” in the textile formatting code that replaced an ‘x’ surrounded on both sides by numbers with an ‘×’, which is the unicode multiplication character. This, of course, broke every save-code that contained this pattern, as the two characters are very much not the same when the code is decrypted. This formatting was only applied when rendering the page, though, so in disabling the functionality all previously broken save-codes posted in the comments should now work.

Thanks to Jen for figuring out what was going on!

KOHCTPYKTOP

IT MEANT THAT IT IS GAME TIME!

• This game is actually quite difficult; while you don't need to know anything about electronics to play, being familiar with some of the concepts will definitely help in the later levels, as most of them are based around real-life circuits. Wikipedia is your friend.
• The music playing is tracks one and five from CŒDES Pierre-Marie's SYMPHONIE N°2 available here on jamendo.com.
• v1.1: Fixed verification test for KT141AO and fixed a bug where two-input PNP gates would trigger despite one input being high.
• v1.2: Fixed verification test for KR8S1, hopefully.
• v1.3: Replaced crappy instructions with in-game video tutorial.