Givin’ Props

A couple of guys that I went to school with have gone on to live the dream – they’ve started their own video game company, called Shadowcat Productions. I just wanted to take a moment to draw some attention to one of their current projects, an arcade game called Battleshape. As the name would suggest, it’s very Geometry Wars, but with a few new twists and some really cool effects. Check it out under “Other Projects” and “Battleshape”

DRM is a Bitch

With nothing important to do this morning (except for all that studying that I should be tackling), I decided to play a favourite game of mine – 1701 A.D. It’s an excellent RTS-style game from Germany in which you play the role of an explorer in the new world. It is your task to build a successful settlement that supports itself and glorifies the Queen. Think SimCity meets Age of Empires, all rendered in pretty graphics and with engrossing game play that will easily make your entire day fly right by. Unless, of course, you try to install and run the game on Windows Vista:

Alright, so, the installer must have failed. I went and ran DrvSetup_x64.exe from the game disc, and got another fantastic error message:

Well, that’s handy. A Google and a half later, I found a slew of angry posts about Tages copy protection on various message boards. I gather that Tages essentially installs a copy-protection driver to your system that isn’t signed by Microsoft. This is an issue under Vista, and the system refuses to install the driver for security reasons. You can reboot and tell Vista to not require that drivers be signed by tapping F8 at boot and selecting “Disable Driver Signature Enforcement” from the boot menu, but according to these posts, you have to perform this action every time you wish to play the game, which is a big security hole as well as a big pain in the ass.

I found a link to an updated version of the drivers at the Tages website that were signed by Microsoft, and installed with no issues, finally allowing me to run a game that I legitimately paid for instead of simply pirating. While I appreciate the situation that studios and distributors find themselves in regarding piracy, I can’t help but be indignant when confronted with copy protection schemes that punish the honest customer. Between my mother and I, our family has purchased three copies of this game, and every previous installment of the franchise. She wouldn’t have been able to figure out the issue with the drivers. Why weren’t the drivers distributed on the game disc signed by Microsoft? Why did the game not automatically update the drivers after validating a legitimate install? Why was there no post about this issue on the game website?

I have to admit that while looking for a solution, I did consider torrenting a cracked version of the game instead of bothering to fix my legitimate copy, which is funny, because the Tages website states that:

The proof of TAGES™’s effectiveness is undeniable as illustrated on various web sites. All major competitors have been hacked and the hackers have made generic cracks available for free. Anyone can break into these systems and produce illegal copies. With TAGES™ there will never be a generic crack, and there will never be one-to-one copies. It is physically impossible.

An interesting claim, since a quick Google search shows quite a few illegal versions of the game available for torrent. At the end of the day, while I cannot condone piracy, this kind of nonsense really gets me angry. I understand that piracy is pushing developers away from the PC platform and toward the more secure Console systems. I understand that piracy can destroy the user experience of a game; but I demand that if a company is going to take steps to prevent piracy, they do it well, and don’t inhibit the actions of legitimate users of paid copies of their product. You wouldnt knowingly push a game to market that had a bug that made it unplayable – so why do DRM schemes get a free pass?

OpenGL in VisualStudio.Net with the TAO Framework

Some who read me on a regular basis might be wondering what ever happened to the RPG I was writing in VisualStudio using Microsoft’s XNA technology. Truth is, it never went anywhere. Like a lot of past projects, I got very psyched about it, wrote a bunch of code, and then school started and I got way too busy to finish it. I haven’t touched the code since I wrote that post, but now I’ve got some new ideas.

Last term in school, I took an excellent course on OpenGL programming with C++. The course covered how to create and render 3D graphics, with study lent to topics such as window management, points, vertices, and polygons, lighting and shading, hidden surface removal, and texturing. My earlier post about the MAX 3D Engine was a byproduct of that course.

Since then, I’ve discovered a managed .NET wrapper around the OpenGL libraries called the Tao Framework that allows you to (in theory) code any graphics application in Visual Basic or C# that you could in C++, with the added bonus of the pretty IDE, code completion, top of the line window handling procedures, and the .NET libraries. Now at this point, if you’re a graphics programmer, you’re laughing aloud at my outrageous claim – managed, run-time interpreted code could never be fast enough to run a video game! You may be correct. Frankly, I have no idea, as I haven’t yet had the time to write a full video game.

What I have come up with however, are two starter projects for anybody wishing to try their hand at OpenGL programming using Tao and Visual Basic.NET. The code in both is well documented, easy to follow (especially if you are familiar with standard OpenGL routines), and seems to run at a reasonable 60fps. Now, I can’t tell until I add a few more polygons to the scene whether this framerate is an artificial limit applied by the environment, or if interpreted code actually has no hope of ever running a game at a reasonable speed. That is an experiment for a later day. For now, I will simply share these starter projects for all to use. If you do something with them, please leave a comment and let me know how it went.

Tao2D Test Harness:

A simple application that spins a tri-coloured, smooth-shaded triangle around the y-axis.

Source Code: Tao2D Source VB.Net.zip

MD5 Hash: 4DA0FC584B1EF8738B3B9CA4C1F55388

Binaries: Tao2D Binary.zip

MD5 Hash: 611382CB00CADD860A81A85573CBA763

Tao3D Test Harness:

A simple application that spins a really crappy looking cone around the x-axis

Source Code: Tao3D Source VB.NET.zip

MD5 Hash: 8D54DB42109F12C745AD14922FF8850E

Binaries: Tao3D Binaries.zip

MD5 Hash: 5D4CD4D02B3EE1194758A543DF36C034

As always, I recommend using Tyler Burton’s Hash Verifier program to verify the integrity of these downloads.

Troubles with XNA

I’ve always had an interest in making video games. I remember making a puzzle-based game with Microsoft Power Point way back in the day that occupied a full box of floppy discs. While the current state of the video game industry seems contrived to prevent new players from entering the scene, I’ve often toyed with the idea of trying to get involved by way of participation in a smaller project.

I’ve worked on numerous ‘bastard’ games over the years, so called because they’ve often been written in VB or Java, and usually had horrible physics or jerk rules that made them impossible to play. These have always been fun, but I recently decided that I’d like to do something a little more serious, and started looking into the MS XNA framework for Windows and XBOX 360.

I grabbed a text book on the subject, and started at it, intending to create an old-school top-down RPG similar to early Zelda titles or Pokemon a la GameBoy. So there I was trying to write a game in an unfamiliar language (having never used C# before), and with a new mindset on how games should be created. The majority of basic classes were ported over from an old VB project that I had lying around, allowing me to get a sprite and tiling system up in short order.

In order to properly test the tiling system, I decided to leave the engine for a short period and build a map editor app back in trusty old VB. I set it up so that the editor saves two files – a PNG pallete of all tiles used in the map, and an XML file that describes which image from the pallete to put on each square of the map grid. For those interested, the source code can be had here.

So now that basic maps can be created and saved, the task of loading maps into the engine is at hand. And this is where I got seriously mucked up. XNA introduced me to the idea of a Content Pipeline – essentially, my engine cannot load files from arbitrary directories on the system drive at run time. All necessary files must be dropped into the project at design time, to be compiled into a binary file that the engine will read from at run time.

Ok so not a big deal for image files – just drop them into the content folder, load them into a Texture2D object, and draw them to the screen. But how on earth do you do likewise for an XML file? In order for my engine to use the fancy map editor that I spent hours working on (and am pretty proud of), it has to process an XML file for the level, load the necessary pallete of tiles, and construct the background grid based on that information.

Sure, hardcoding the levels -would- work, but that’s ugly and stupid and horrible. I like my XML levels, and want to process them (with the content pipeline if I must) with ease. The missing link is figuring out how to open an XML file for reading that is hanging out in the content pipeline.

Anyway, that’s about as far as I’ve gotten, but I’ll keep updates coming as I get farther into my adventures with writing an RPG.

Cheers,

Jon