Category Archives: Development

New project!

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Hi,

I’d just like to announce to everyone that I’ve decided to start working on a new project!

Seeing as I’ve loved the game Braid, I thought it would be nice to have an open source clone of the game! I should start working on that soon(-ish), and I hope I can actually see this project through…

Unfortunately, I don’t have much experience or interest in UI/OpenGL work, so I’ll start by designing and writing the low level classes that would allow a game to have the same time-based manipulation mechanic as Braid. And I hope that I’ll find someone willing to join the project and provide the UI/art part of the project!

I’ve contact Jonathan Blow, the author of Braid, and he said he’d be willing to help and provide me with the level file format  he used for the game, so we might be able to have this project working with the levels of the official game (assuming you bought the game and have its data files)!

That’s it, I’ll let you know more about how that goes! In the meantime, maybe someone (who played the game preferably) could come up with a nice name for the clone! 🙂

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KaKaRoTo

Braid for linux!

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Hello world!

I feel honored to say that I’ve recently been in contact with Jonathan Blow, the author of the awesome game Braid.

For those who don’ t know the game, it is an extremely challenging, fun, rewarding and original puzzle platformer which is so far the best game I’ve found on PSN.

I’ve asked Jonathan whether or not a Linux port of the game was in the works, since I’ve seen him hint at that in old posts on his blog (January 2007 and August 2008). I’m glad to say that he reported that a Linux port of the game was indeed being developed. To quote :

“[..] one is in progress but hasn’t quite been completed, but may eventually be released.”

He also said that the porting is about 95% complete, but I don’t know how much time it will take for the remaining 5% to be completed, so maybe it will soon be available, maybe not, but this is great hope for the Linux community!

I also spoke with him a little about Open Source, and I was pleasantly surprised to see him not completely reject the idea of open sourcing his game, but he said “it is not likely at this time”, so although it is not likely to happen, it is maybe another hint of hope for the future!

Finally, as my last bit of news. Just in case you were wondering, I also asked about possible DLC, to which he answered (no surprise) :

“There will probably not ever be DLC for Braid. The game is complete without it.”

That’s it, I hope these news are comforting to those who are just dying to play Braid on their Linux systems!

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KaKaRoTo

Adding reliability to libnice

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Hey all,

First news I’d like to share is about libnice!

I’ve been working lately on adding reliability to libnice. This means that you could be using libnice as a reliable socket.. This is accomplished using some form of TCP over UDP, which is compatible with google’s libjingle implementation.

The API doesn’t change much, you only need to call nice_agent_new_reliable, and there’s a new signal ‘reliable-transport-writable’ in case you fill in the internal buffer and nice_agent_send starts returning -1. That’s all!

I know a lot of people were waiting for a reliable transport with libnice. I’ve discussed with many people during GCDS and most of them said that they’d like to see some kind of TCP over UDP in libnice, so I’m happy to say that I finally got around to doing it.

I also decided to make this TCPoUDP algo into its own GObject and make it available through libnice, which means that you could use the TCPoUDP implementation directly yourself, outside of libnice, in your own applications, if you ever wanted to!

Expect this new exciting feature to become available to you in the next release of libnice!

KaKaRoTo