Hi,

Added a few new features to our gaming library today that I wanted to talk about briefly. Over the next few weeks, they will be incorporated into our games, and I thought I would make mention of it here for a little feedback.

I added a new set of functions that attempt to detect and orient the screenmode in the game. The code was mainly added as a direct result of adding multiple device support to the PocketPC versions of our upcoming games. The system works by looking at the screenmodes that are initialized when the application is started, and the game can run custom code based on the screensize.

To give you an example of how this works, take the PocketPC version of PilesOTiles available on our website. At time of writing, the version listed is only available on 240x320 screenmodes on regular PocketPC's. That means in order to play, your windows based PocketPC must be set to a vertical aspect (which some people don't always like, myself included) and have a screen that exactly measures the 240x320 pixel size. This obviously limits the number of devices that the game can run on.

The new code will allow you to specify in the options if you want to run the game in a horizontal or vertical aspect, and update itself accordingly when the game starts. Whats more, the game engine and (depending on the programmers choice) the game code could also render and do things differently per resolution. In other words, the screen may appear slightly different from one orientation to another. This is a cosmetic thing and will vary on the game itself. This new system allows us to add code for many different screen sizes and combinations and compile them into one file, so that when the game is installed, it will automatically pick the correct resolution for your device and you're off!

This new code doesn't just apply to PocketPC versions. It will also support standard PC/Mac/Linux screen modes. To use the desktop version of PilesOTiles again as an example, currently the screenmode is limited to 800x600 on the version currently listed for download. Imagine being able to select a different screen resolution, such as 1280x1024 and have the game load a set of tiles with much larger and more detailed images? They would look better on the screen than upsampling low res images.

The big update to desktop modes is to support the newer widescreen monitors that always look ugly when the game is stretched into fullscreen mode. When increasing the size of the screen, again the programmer has the choice of adding all-new code to make the image render differently than the original, or they can just orient the original screen in the center to stop the images from being stretched.

This new addition to our code library is still under heavy testing, and more details will be released later, and in beta versions of our products.

The other big library change applies to our PocketPC line of games, which right now isn't many. I have taken some time to update our internal files to work with the Visual Studio 2005 compiler. This is a much newer and stronger compiler than the original Embedded Visual C++ 3 we were using, and allows me to put multiple projects together and compile at the same time for ease of distributing new versions across multiple platforms.

With changes to Visual Studio projects, I have also set the boundary to compile for windows Mobile 2003 edition and upward devices, to support the screen orientation and rotation a little better. Our next set of released games may not function on older devices, though if demand asks for it, we might make special editions for those users. They just won't support some of the many new features that we have added to our program library.

That's about it for now, I will keep you posted on how things progress. The first game to utilize all these new features will be the new desktop version of Jelly-Othelly, and the PocketPC version (also of Jelly-Othelly). I'll be posting a small post about those games shortly too, so if you have played the game and have ideas for improvement, now is the time to get your two cents in!!

Kind regards,
Andy 'Fish-Guy' Kellett