SwinGame News

SwinGame 3 Alpha

2009-08-09T20:14:00.000-07:00

Over the Winter break we've been working on a new version of SwinGame - SwinGame 3!

This version aims to consolidate all the previous SwinGame code incorporating a new, more consistent, coding style and naming convention. The distribution mechanism has also undergone a large number of changes which will make it easier to maintain SwinGame and distribute it to a number of programming languages.

SwinGame 3 is scheduled to be launched in January of 2010 in time for the SwinGame 10 Programming Competition. At this stage we are releasing an Alpha version for testing purposes. Please be aware that things are likely to change between now and the full release of SwinGame 3.

Download SwinGame 3 Alpha from SwinGame.

If you encounter any issues with the Alpha version of SwinGame 3 please let us know!

Get started Programming VBugs

2009-03-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

Over the summer we were very fortunate to have two Swinburne students help us create a new tutorial on using SwinGame and Visual Basic .NET to create small arcade style games. The first version of the tutorial is now available on the SwinGame web site. It walks you through the process of creating a game called "VBugs" and shows you how to use sprites, sounds, mouse and keyboard input, along with developing procedures and designing your own classes.

Teachers interesting in using this as a teaching resource can request an additional pack containing solutions to the various work sheets from Swinburne's school resources page.

We hope you enjoy this new tutorial.

SwinGame 09

2009-03-02T16:26:00.000-08:00

The SwinGame competition for 2009 is now open!

This year the competition is open all students from secondary schools in Australia. The competition theme is on developing Arcade games using the SwinGame API.

Check out the SwinGame 09 Competition page for details.

We look forward to seeing what you can produce this year!

SwinGame 2.0 Released

2009-01-20T21:47:00.000-08:00

SwinGame 2 is now available for download!

New features include:

Alpha blended primitive shape drawing
Sound and music volume control
Triangle drawing
Image and Sprite rotation and zoom
Simple text drawing, using pixel fonts

The version also includes a number a fixes to existing bugs.

Download version 2 now...

New Summer Projects

2008-12-18T05:10:00.000-08:00

SwinGame 2 is on the way! New features include:

Triangle drawing
Alpha blended primitive drawing
Volume control
Bitmap and sprite rotation and zoom
Simple text drawing without pixel fonts
Other small changes, and restructured code

We are also developing a new learn to program book using SwinGame and VB... Its in the early stages at the moment, but things are looking impressive!

Time to submit!

2008-08-04T19:53:00.000-07:00

Interest in the SwinGame competition has been great, and we are looking forward to seeing what you have been able to create. Its now time for you to finish that final polish for your game, in time to submit. Remember that all entries must reach us by 5:30pm on Monday the 11th of August. Check the competition details for instructions on what needs to be submitted, and how you can submit.

Thank you to everyone who has shown interest in this competition. We hope it has been a fun and rewarding experience, and we look forward to meeting you on Open Day.

Forum Goodness and New Version

2008-04-17T18:45:00.000-07:00

The forums are back online! Yay... Once again sorry for the inconvenience caused.

To celebrate the return of the forum we have created a new version of the SDK. This one has some minor additions, and now allows you to end text input, a feature requested several times in the forums. Hopefully this will help you guys out...

Anyway. Thanks for sticking with us, and we look forward to seeing what you can create with the SDK.

Forum Issues

2008-04-17T02:57:00.000-07:00

We are currently experiencing issues with the forum software. We are working to rectify the issue which appears to be with the forum permissions.

Version 1.1.4 Released

2008-04-02T02:49:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of activity on the SwinGame forum lately, and this new version corrects several issues that have been raised. Version 1.1.4 includes a number of corrections that mostly effect the .NET and VB 6 versions of the SwinGame SDK. If you are developing with the .NET or VB6 versions of the SDK you are strongly encouraged to update.

Year 7-10 and SwinGame08

2008-03-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

Only Year 11 & 12 students that submit entires to SwinGame08 are eligible to win the major prizes. However, we want to encourage all school students to participate! If you are interested in learning more about software development please feel free to submit an entry into the competition. All non Year 11 & 12 submissions will be judged accordingly, and students who submit entries of high quality will receive a certificate of excellence from the judging panel. Some of your games may even be showcased on the web site, and during Swinburne's Open Day.

The creators of SwinGame 08 would like to encourage all students not in Year 11 & 12 to participate, in preparation for formal entries to SwinGame in the years ahead!

Version 1.1.3 Released

2008-03-11T23:25:00.000-07:00

A new version of SwinGame has been released. This version includes some important bug fixes and everyone is recommended to upgrade to this version. Read the instructions of each SDK for details of how to upgrade between successive versions of the SDK.

Python is on the way!

2008-03-05T01:03:00.000-08:00

Work with Python is progressing really well. At this stage we have a functional Python port of the core SwinGame functionality. Clinton has also ported the AirHockey game from VB to Python. These new extensions are going to be used in the AI for Games subject here at Swinburne, and we should be able to make them available sometime in the future.

We are also making progress on making SwinGame capable of embedding Python scripts within your game. This will allow you to embed code that controls aspects of your game - such as scripts for AI. Progress is looking hopeful, but it is very early days at the moment.

Forum Changes

2008-02-20T23:14:00.000-08:00

We are moving to the new version of phpBB at the moment. There are some style issues currently, and we need to get the feeds on the main page. We will look at fixing them over the next few days.

Videos on TeacherTube

2008-02-19T03:38:00.000-08:00

YouTube has been great, but unfortunately its blocked for schools in Australia. To get around this issue we have now moved most of our videos to TeacherTube , a site designed for teaching and education related to movies. I hope you enjoy the viewing.

We will continue to publish videos to both Y

New YouTube Videos

2008-02-10T19:13:00.000-08:00

Its been a busy weekend. We have now created a new Game Showcase that shows off some of the SwinGames that were developed last year by the PSD students. Its a great way to get a feel for what kinds of games the SDK is able to create.

There is also a short video showing the evolution of our splash screen. We decided to change the splash screen to better match with the "cog" logo used on the web site. This video shows the old and new splash screens next to each other. Its not that inspiring... but if you have any comments let us know.

SwinGame 08 is Open

2008-02-10T19:09:00.000-08:00

Swinburne University is using the SwinGame API in the SwinGame 08 Competition. If you are a year 11 or 12 student in Australia you can submit a SwinGame for the chance to share in the $6000 prize money on offer. SwinGame 08 will let you show off your technical skills and get some real world development experience at the same time.

Version 1.1 is done...

2008-01-31T23:45:00.000-08:00

The SwinGame SDK Version 1.1 is finally finished and we have even created a number of video tutorials to show you how to set up the SDK. The new version of the SDK includes lots of fixes and new features.

As part of the 1.1 release we have created a number of example games. These games can be seen at the gallery page of the SwinGame website. The tutorials showing how these games were developed using the SDK are also available, so you can now start making games using SwinGame SDK, if you have not started already!

Game promo videos for the demo games are available on YouTube. The links are listed in the Gallery page of the SwinGame website.

Design, Design, Design

2008-01-17T23:35:00.000-08:00

This week was a design week. The brochure got inspected, printed and showed some issues: If something looks good on the screen that does not mean it looks good printed! So back to the drawing board (computer screen) and try to make it work. It is better now.
The second area was adjusting our Wikimedia style sheety (css). The initial state was a mess coming from 2 or 3 skins, very confusing. I straightened it out and made it look homogeneous. And of course I did Andrew a favour and used heaps of cogs. I like the one in the bottom right most! Fingers crossed, it works in all browsers now. Always prepared for surprises.
The third thing I designed this week was James' Airhockey. For some reason I felt inspired by the game and intended to make it look "hot"! Here is a small sample of it:

Excursion to Print Media

2008-01-13T13:50:00.000-08:00

My task is mainly to design the webpage, last week I had a new challenge: design a brochure. This brochure will be made for highschool students who should get aware of Swingame and participate. And maybe get Swinburne Students afterwards? It was fun designing it, it should fit to the design of the webpage, and make clear what it is about on one glance. So we decided to fill it up with Game sprites and gems, jets, a car, and so on. And of course with Andrew's favourite thing: cogs. Here is a preview: The webpage is still under contstant construction, but it is getting there...

My Week

2008-01-12T04:31:00.000-08:00

The past week i have been working on my game Air Hockey, I had a few problems with the 3D side of it... so i have given up on that and just went to 2D. So that set me back a bit. The first tutorial for AirHockey is done and the second one is allmost there too, justs need to write down what i have done in the code. One bit of good news this week was exceptions dont require me to do anything to the VB6 code!! The first version of the VB6 SwinGame SDK is now up on our website.
Then yesterday my laptop chose to die on me :(, and would only boot in safe mode, so thankfully i was able to get all my work off before i formated it. Any way that was my week.

Tomato Quest Continues

2008-01-10T21:53:00.000-08:00

Hey all,

This week has been a fairly busy week, but an extremely productive week.

The bulk of the RPG Tutorial I've called The Legend of the Tomato Quest is done, and I'm currently working on the AI parts of the game.

There were some hiccups this week, with exception problems appearing again, but they've been sorted out, and now work alot better then they previously did.

I've finished the first builds of the SwinGameSDK for C#.NET and VB.NET which are avaliable at the download page of our website (which I believe isn't actually up yet).

Here's are a couple of Screen Shots of the game so far...

The Player Attacks

The Player meets an Ally

Next week I'll continue on the tutorial, but also I'll be working to finish up the Documentation for the SwinGameSDK.

Thats all for now.

EmptyYourMind Tutorial is Complete

2008-01-10T21:41:00.000-08:00

The EmptyYourMind game tutorial is finally finished and the game is playable. However, the game does not have everything I wanted. I am planning to finish the game when I have a time. The current game have enemies, player and enemy bullet pattern. The screenshot of the game:

The bullets are using vector for its movement. Therefore, its movement can be manipulated very easily. I will be adding a complex bullet pattern when finishing off the game. The article for the tutorials is on the SwinGame documentation.

I'm currently working on the SGSDK_Graphics documentation. I will probably able to finish it off by Monday :-)

Air Hockey

2007-12-20T20:45:00.000-08:00

This week I have been busy writing documentation for VB6 on our wiki. I have also started making a demo game for VB6 that is called Air Hockey. There is been a quite a few problems with this... as it is kind of 3D so the angle that the puck is traveling on and bouncing off the walls is quite hard to work out. Any way heres an image of what its looking like so far.

The Legend of the Tomato Quest!

2007-12-20T20:44:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

This week, I've been working on the wiki documentation for the SwinGameSDK.NET, which is comming along. Also, I've made a tutorial for Mappy on how to make a valid map that will be compatible with the SDK.

I've also started on my SDK demo, The Legend of the Tomato Quest!, which is going to be an RPG game. Here's a screen shot of the progress so far.

So far, the map loads, and a player spawns in the correct position. The player can also be moved around the map, and collision with map is working also. Animations for the sprite are playing correctly, though this did require us to make some modifications to the SDK due to the nature of the bitmap we are loading.

I've also been fixing most of the exceptions inside the SDK, so that they are caught regardless of where the error actually occurred (either C# or Pascal).

With the game, I've been writing a How to guide to help those who want to make their own RPG's with the SDK.

I also did some work on the Demo Video that's on youtube (the voice over).

That's all for now.

Empty Your Mind

2007-12-20T20:35:00.000-08:00

Hi. I have been working on the Empty Your Mind shooter game tutorial. I have got quite a few things working in the game. I have got the player's ship, the background, and the bullet firing using vectors in my game. The tutorial is up to date to have a look if you are interested.

I have also been working on the documentation for the SGSDK_Audio. It is done but we still need to add more stuff to them. The tutorial for the game can be found in here.

Merry Christmas

2007-12-20T18:48:00.001-08:00

So this Year at Uni is practically over, Greetings to Everyone, have a nice Christmas and a happy new year!

SGSDK Exceptions

2007-12-18T14:03:00.000-08:00

Hi. I've been working on the exception handling for the Pascal because developing a game without a proper exception is very difficult. The Pascal's exceptions and the CSharp's exceptions are done, so it should be much easier to kill a bug. Please email me or comment to this post if there are any unhandled exception within the SGSDK library.

Oops....

I'm going to be working on the online documentation and the game tutorial now. The EmptyYourMind 1.1 is not going to have everything I really want but it will still be fun to play.

Still fuzzing with 3D

2007-12-16T16:19:00.000-08:00

Which 3d program is best to use for our case? This question is keeping me busy. It should be powerful, easy to use, lots of templates and of course it should be free! Is that too much to ask. I have found the Pacemaker, which allows to animate persons easily, but it is hard to find 3d modeled objects for that. Still looking.
The website is also making progress, I try to integrate the content of other websites like our blog or YouTube, but our server is saying no! Still looking and trying.

New Resource Management

2007-12-16T15:58:00.000-08:00

Hi. I've been mainly working on the new resource management stuff because the old version was not flexible and we found it quite annoying when using it. The new system uses an array of strings to manage the names of data instead of enumeration. I've also been helping Stephen to get the collision side detection to work in MappyLoader. This took us about 2 days... I've also been making articles on the wiki. I was working on many small things last week. The showcase has been updated with new resource management support and camera showcase examples.

Me and Stephen are working on exception handling right now, so it will be much easier to debug.

VB 6, damn VB 6

2007-12-16T03:12:00.000-08:00

This week i have been finshing off the COM Library for VB6 and also making the VB6 showcase. Just like last week this was full of problems. The default of Option Explicit being turned off got really annoying... one time i was trying to load a font and typed arial.ttf and i forgot to put the "" around it, with Option Explicit off VB6 tried to get the property of the variable arial... and it was giving me a strange error. It ended up taking me all most a whole day to work out what the cause of this error was. Then after this error... there was more.

I discovered that trying to pass an array from VB6 to C# COM library is very anoying... For some strange reason VB6 hates this. After a bit of searching on the net i came up with nothing... then Andrew said to search for "marshaling arrays with COM and VB" and the very first link was someone who had the exact problem as me and they had found an answer!! All i need was "[In] ref" in the front of the array in C#.

Work on the showcase was going fine until i came to the vector collision example. This would work for a short time then just crash with a error msg that gave no help. I couldnt track down the source of this error as all the VB6 code looked fine and so did the COM Library. Stephen discovered that for some reason the C# library was returning doubles instead of singles for most of the physics methods. This was causing errors for me in VB6 land. Once all the doubles were changed to singles it all worked fine.

My latest problem is our AddingVectors method... for some reason its not working at all :(. I hope to get this working soon so i can finally finish off this showcase.

After the showcase is finished ill start working of the VB6 documentation for VB6 on our Wiki on www.swingame.com

Say hello to Mappy

2007-12-13T18:00:00.000-08:00

Greetings all,

This week, I've been fixing some bugs in SwinGameSGK.NET annd have also completed the MappyLoader module for the SDK.

Here is a screen shot of the MappyLoader in action:

For those that don't know, Mappy is a Tile based Map Editor which allows you to create levels for 2D Games with relative ease. It allows you to create both static and animated tiles ( the screen shot doesn't show it, but the waterfall is actually animating).

As for MappyLoader it has the following features:

-Loading Maps from Mappy using a custom made exporting tool.
-Drawing of the Maps
-Supports both static and animated Tiles.
-Highly Optimized Collisions functions, that can be used to check if your sprites are colliding with the map. The collision will even return which side of the sprite the collision occurred so the user can take appropriate actions after the collision depending on where it collided.
-An Event Layer, which is basically a special layer made in Mappy which allows you to literally 'Paint' Events/Triggers/Spawn Points etc. You could think of an event as a place for spawning your characters, enemies, items, but also places that can be used as triggers for special events in your game, such as falling off a cliff and dying when you hit an Event at the bottom of the cliff that is designated as a Death Event so to speak.

I'm currently working on Exceptions for the SwinGameSDK so that debugging our games and even the development of the SDK itself will become significantly less frustrating. Once this is done, the SDK should progress many times faster than it currently is, since we won't be wasting vast amounts of time trying to work out where an error has truly occurred.

Anyway that's all for this week,

See you next time.

Stephen Holdsworth

Rene's week summary...

2007-12-08T19:42:00.000-08:00

A quick summary what I did this week: After being introduced to the project, I began layouting the project webpage in Adobe Photoshop. Everybody agreed on one design I proposed and I started programming the webpage. Integrating the wikimedia page and the forum page were the most difficult tasks. Uploading the page became very tricky because our internet access is limited in the labs. I still work on the website doing small amendments and optimizations, dynamic content via AJAX as well.
Besides that I introduced myself to 3d designing, the first question was on which program to settle. Google sketchup or wings 3d... Here my first try. The goal is to provide artwork for the games later on.

VB6 can it do SwinGame?

2007-12-06T23:57:00.000-08:00

Hey
This week i have been working on a COM Library for VB6 from the .Net Wrapper . It is about a 1/3 complete. It has been so slow because there has been quite a number of problems with the testing i have done for this. The first problem was getting a copy of VB6... lol.
There was also the issue of registering the COM Library on another computer so it can be used. Like say if i made a program and sent it to someone else on another computer, they would not be able to run it as the COM Library was not installed on there computer.
Then i discovered that i couldnt import a C# struct into VB6 with out defining it in VB6... so i had to make a class for them which was very annoying. There has been a few other little bugs as well... most of them i cant remember now... lol.

I hope to get this COM Library finished by monday as most of the issues i have had are gone now. There is is bound to be 1 or 2 problems left though.

After this is finished i will be creating the showcase for VB6 to test that all of the SwinGame stuff will auctaly work in VB6

Introducing .NET to SwinGame

2007-12-06T01:29:00.000-08:00

Gday,

This week has been pretty busy, I've been working on the .NET Wrapper for the SwinGame SDK and is virtually complete. Just some loose ends to tie up, such as matrices and error handling, after that I'll be looking to implement a loader I've been working on for a tile based map editor called Mappy.

With the .NET wrapper, I've also completed the showcase for it (at least, the parts we've decided to show so far), and it's all working great. It shows off some of the SwinGame SDK's features such as Drawing of primitives, bitmaps, sprites, moving of bitmaps and sprites, collision, physics, text and fonts, and lots more.

As I rewrite the Mappy loader for the SwinGame SDK, I'll be writing a tutorial on how to make, export and load a map from Mappy, which hopefully will help newcomers to the SwinGame SDK make some awesome maps for their games.

Once that is done, I'll be starting my individual game example, which will be an RPG. The title, style and theme are undecided for the time being.

ShowCase!

2007-12-05T22:17:00.000-08:00

Hi. I've been working hard this week trying finish off the showcase for the SDK. It is now done and you can find it on the subversion. The showcase shows all features of the SDK. It looks very nice so you should get it :-) Stephen and me were working on this showcase simultaneously. Stephen was working on the .Net verson of showcase and I was working on the Pascal version. DotNet wrapper had so many problems such as marshaling problem. It was very painful because the data format of C# and Pascal are sometimes different. The worst problem was the multidimensional array. We could not get this working until we have decided to make C# to ask Pascal for a data in the specified array. We have finally got everything working today and I have started working on the tutorial to create a game using SwinGameSDK. The article is on here. It is not finished yet but it is getting there...

The screenshot of the current game:
It does not really look like a game for now but it will have sick bullet patterns and enemies soon. :-P I will be working on this tutorial on next week.

Design for swingame.com is online!

2007-12-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

The new Layout for our Website www.swingame.com is now online, containing a Documentation on www.swingame.com/wiki and a Forum www.swingame.com/forum. As our project continues the content will get populated and changed, so watch out!

The Progress so far...

2007-12-02T14:52:00.000-08:00

Hi.
I forgot to introduce the team member on the last post so here it goes...
The project members of SwinGameSDK are:

Akihiro Noguchi (me)
Stephen Holdsworth
James McNamara
Rene Tessmer

We have been working hard on this project and we have got basic features working.
Working features are...

Pascal library and game compiler script for Mac and Windows
Partial .Net support (written in C#)

The core library is functional but we are planning add more features onto it such as better Sprite features.
We do not have any documentation at the moment.
.Net is almost done but it has a major bug with PChar which is being fixed as I type this entry.

SwinGameSDK

2007-11-26T18:27:00.001-08:00

It is on the way...

SwinGameSDK is a software development kit which allows beginner programmers to create a simple game very easily.

Google Code project:

http://code.google.com/p/swingamesdk/