Tag Archives: games

Eleganz: The Elegant Homebrew Manager

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Hi everyone,

Last year, in January, I decided to have some fun and write a homebrew application using the EFL libraries. I decided to work on a homebrew manager.. basically a replacement to the XMB. It went really well, and the development was really fast, and it was all thanks to the awesome API and capabilities of the EFL libraries. However, I became busy and was unable to continue… also, it was a bit slow and without proper hardware acceleration, it wouldn’t be as good as I hoped for, so I put the project on the side.
After many months, in September, thanks to gzorin’s work, we finally had a working and usable GL implementation and the EFL apps automatically gained from it by becoming hardware accelerated. My homebrew manager was much better! but I still needed to finish a few things and I didn’t have time so I put to rest again.

Today, I have decided to release this homebrew application, *as is* for everyone’s enjoyment! This means that it is not fully working, it might still have some bugs here and there, but it is still a homebrew app that people can use and have some fun with. Most importantly it will serve 4 purposes :

  • Maybe re-awaken  this dying PS3 homebrew scene
  • Be a good “exercise to the community” for finishing it up
  • Be a good example of what can be done with the EFL
  • Bring non-developers into writing EFL themes for the app

 

I introduce to you, Eleganz! The Elegant Homebrew Manager! A little homebrew app that lets you install pkg files and run your games directly from it. Here is the mandatory screencast video :


YouTube Link toEleganz screencast

 

I have published my app in both github and on ps3dev’s gitorious. and you can also download a pre-compiled .pkg for your PS3 to have fun with it.

Here are some highglights of the application (features, limitations and bugs) :

  • The whole User Interface is completely customizable with themes
  • Installs .pkg files locally to its own data directory (won’t be visible in the real XMB, unless someone reverses the database format)
  • Does not yet run games (it’s for you to do it, use ps3load as reference maybe…)
  • Current theme is missing proper theme/images for the progressbar windows (default exquisite/E17 theme used)
  • System freezes for a few milliseconds when it tries to load a game’s background image (might be fixed if we implement a pthread library and threading support in the EFL)
  • Apparently crashes when it exits (bug)

The homebrew app comes with two themes, a dark and light theme. I like the dark one so I chose that as the default (oh, ignore that grey background ‘default’ one from that screencast video, that was just for testing). I wrote the user interface for the theme (the Edje files) while opium designed all the graphics. The theme engine in the EFL is extremely powerful, so I hope I will see tons of themes popping up. And I do not mean “change the images” themes, I want real themes, where the whole UI is different, a vertical XMB, a circular one, a 3D theme with perspective/depth for the icons, a dynamic/moving background, etc… You can learn about the .edj/.edc file format here and don’t forget to check the EDC reference wiki.

I hope to see the community pick this up and have fun with it!

That’s about it, enjoy it, and send me your patches! I’ll be waiting 🙂

KaKaRoTo

 

p.s: Forgot to say that the rules/naming conventions/etc.. of the EDC files are explained here. If a .edj file doesn’t have the appropriate parts/groups, then it will be ignored and will not show on the UI.

p.p.s: You can install the EFL on windows and have access to edje_cc to compile your .edc into .edj.

p.p.p.s: Damn, I  keep forgetting stuff.. by the way, the whole Eleganz application works just fine on the PC too, I did all my development on the PC (that screencast was actually on Linux), *then* I tried it on the PS3 and it just worked.. so for theme development, it should be pretty easy to test without the need of a PS3.

Eskiss for PS3 with PS Move support

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Hi all,

I’m releasing Eskiss with Move support and I think the instructions on how  to use it require a bit more than what twitter allows (from my usual small updates).

You can download here the Eskiss package for PS3 3.55, and here the package for PS3 3.41.

The instructions are simple, you can still play with a normal mouse if you want, or use the controller to emulate the mouse, just like before. But, if you have a PS Eye camera plugged in, then it will also be ready to handle the Move.

If it detects a move controller, the ball on the controller will be white, at that point, you must press the Action button while pointing the controller to the camera (there’s no image feedback on the screen, so just point and press the action button). This will calibrate the controller and the ball will change color. At this point, moving the controller will also move the cursor on screen.

You can press the Action button at any time to recalibrate the controller (useful if the tracking stops working correctly, or camera falls off), and you can press the Start button at anytime to center the cursor on screen. Pressing the T button trigger will emulate a click.

You have the choice between two tracking modes, the first one (the one selected by default) is the 3D coordinate system, which means the cursor appears on screen with 1 to 1 precision (kind of) with where the controller is located in the room, so you have to move the whole controller to move the cursor (and even maybe stretch your arms to get to the corners), the second tracking mode is using the internal gyroscope of the controller, in other words, you can move the cursor just by pointing or rotating the controller without moving the whole controller in 3D space.

You can switch from one tracking mode to another at any time by pressing the Select button. Try them both and see which one you like best.

P.s:  When you press the Action button to calibrate, the ball will change colors a few times, you must not move the controller while it’s doing that, do not move until it becomes a solid, stable color. If the ball becomes white again, it means you moved and the calibration failed… in that case, try again.

P.p.s: In this release, I have also fixed the crash that you might have had in the previous version, so the game should be a lot more stable. While it still might crash, it is now very rare and shouldn’t break the gameplay like it did before.

And here’s a video demo of the game running with the Move controller, courtesy of fungos :

Enjoy,

KaKaRoTo

Second Humble Indie Bundle + Braid Linux release!

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Hi all,

After the huge success of the Humble Indie Bundle from last May, which I absolutely loved, the group of Indie developers decided to release a second Humble Indie Bundle with five other games, one of which is Braid, my favorite Independent game.

I suggest everyone goes over to http://humblebundle.com and buys those games, you name your price and you get five great games with no DRM and with Linux, Mac and Windows binaries available for you to install on any and all of your PCs. you can also decide how to share that money you just spent, how much you want to send to the developers, or to the EFF or Child’s Play charities. Don’t waste any time and go show your appreciation of good games and your support to the open spirit of writing multiplatofrm, non-DRM games. Maybe this time again, like in the first bundle, the developers will decide to release their games to an open source license (I wish:)).

In the last bundle, I was a bit sad that Braid wasn’t included, but it was because it wasn’t available for Linux yet. I had previously discussed with Jonathan Blow (the author of Braid) about Linux support and he said that it would eventually be available, and he indeed delivered! Although there has been no news about this and no release of Braid for Linux so far, the Humble Indie Bundle also marks the release of the Linux version of Braid. Get the bundle and you will be able to download a native version of Braid for Linux (although it’s been reported that the Windows version worked under Wine).

I’ve tried running Braid on my  Linux system and had the horrible issue of the ‘missing GL extension’ that so many people are having. I checked the game’s bugzilla on icculus and found the related bug report in which Scott Mansell found the solution : The missing extension is “GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc” which is disabled on the open source drivers because it is covered by a patent and requires a licence.
If you live in a country where the patent doesn’t apply, you can enable it using driconf. Simply install it (“sudo apt-get install driconf” or “sudo yum install driconf”) then run ‘driconf’ and enable the S3TC extension in the “Image quality” tab of driconf.

Thank you Scott Mansell! 🙂

I hope this helps a few of you, enjoy!

KaKaRoTo

Humble Source

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Hi,

As some of you might have seen already, there’s this great great initiative called the Humble Indie Bundle. It’s basically a group of five independent developers who decided to make a ‘pay-what-you-want’ promotion for a bundle of five games, and the money can be distributed however you want between the developers and two charities (Child’s play and Electronic Frontier Foundation).

This whole idea is really awesome! The minimum donation requested is 0.01$ so for just one cent, you could be getting 6 very awesome games (World of Goo, Gish, Penumbra, Lugaru HD,  Aquaria and as a bonus Samorost 2) although I hope you will be more generous than that!

I think that the initiative is indeed humble, and by giving the power back to the consumer, you let him decide on the price and ask him for his generosity, you can get some really good results.  And the proof is here.. After only 10 days, they have raised over one million dollars! 30% of that went to charity and the rest went directly to the developers! What does this mean? It means that people thought that the developers deserved the money because of this brilliant idea. This also gives us some pretty awesome statistics.

As of the moment of writing this, the average donation was 9.05$ and The distribution is  : an average of $7.95 for Windows users, $10.18 for Mac users and $14.55 for Linux users! It looks like Linux users are more generous than Mac users who are more generous than Windows users! The developer seems to have noticed this and talks about it in his blog.

You can also see the distribution of the downloads, it looks like the Linux and Mac gamers are also a big part of the gaming market. As explained in the developper’s blog :

Our most recent promotion, the Humble Indie Bundle, shows even more dramatic statistics for Linux: 52% Windows, 24% Mac, and 24% Linux.

Finally, the most interesting thing for which I want to salute those developers is that, considering the success of the Humble Indie Bundle, they decided to open source 4 of the games from the bundle! This is great news for the open source community and for the gaming community as well.

The bundle has been extended for 3 more days, so I encourage everyone to go buy these games and help the developpers who had this brilliant idea!

KaKaRoTo