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.

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!

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 v1.31 is now out, available here.

• Adds volume control parameter to client configuration file.

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