Took me long enough.
I released the Ruckingenur Editor almost a year ago, but it wasn’t until I received two levels designed by Ariel for EKOPARTY that I had enough to publish a proper Community Edition. The other three levels are by Jonathan, AJ, and Fredrik. You can download the installer here:
A few people have asked about how I was able to make a game in a Notepad window, as seen in Notepad Weekend. I dug out the source code and cleaned it up into a framework of sorts, which I’m posting here in case any of you would find it interesting!
Download notepad_hijack_framework.cpp [3.3 kB]
The code is pretty simple, but will only work on Windows due to the extensive use of the Windows API. It uses FindWindowEx() to find an open Notepad window, SetWindowsHookEx() to set a keyboard hook so that we can catch keyboard events, and SendMessage(WM_SETTEXT) to set the text in the main text box in the Notepad window. If you wanted to launch an instance of Notepad instead of requiring the player to do it, you could presumably use ShellExecute().
In the aftermath of Infiniminer, feeling nothing but disgust in the pit of my stomach, I told people that I was done making games.
A month later I knew it was a lie and that I could never stop making games, but the truth of the matter is that I’m done making these games. The forums will remain up and I will continue reading all comments, but it’s unlikely that I’ll be posting new content any time soon. Thanks to everyone who played and enjoyed my games; without you, most of my recent creations probably wouldn’t exist.
– Zach
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…
…but should be back in the next few days. Something other than PHPBB. Sorry to kill your collective buzz.
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!
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.
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.
There are two ways to fix the AllocateFormatAndData() bug as of v1.5:
by Barebone (?), found in #infiniminer