Found the ftp and http downloads were broken.. Not sure what broke it, but its fixed now. One annoying thing about CKEditor is that it is all messed up, it uses the theme that Drupal is using, and because of this, I can no longer use the ckeditor, I just have to always click on “source” copy and paste HTML.. Which is a big hassle. What can you expect for free?
I also notice lots of exploit hacking on the site too.. Just one of those days eh? Lots of phpmyadmin and setup.php hacking going on in the log files.
Apple, and Microsoft have very long winded license agreements. Apple’s has recently become more restrictive from what I understand, if you developed your iPhone app in torque 2d, or another game/app engine entirely and not in the XCode Objective C environment, then you may not meet the needs of the new license agreements for your app. And you could end up denied.
I understand the want of this style. Xcode gives the end developer full power over their app (including power consumption), which also includes how fast it draws, where as 3rd party engines do not. 3rd party engines would be less efficient than using native code, draw more battery power, and makes the devices look bad to the end user, if you looked at my article on Battery life, I have links there that show people whining and complaining they don’t get the battery life they think they should with games.
Long story short, you got to read those license agreements. I read about Apples change in this months ‘iCreate’ magazine. Now if the engine integrates into Xcode nativalely, I think those types are permitted, ie Unity game engine is designed to stream line the drawn 3d scene, it doesn’t interfere with Xcode (to my knowledge).. I haven’t played with Unity so don’t quote me..
I was playing around with WebSudoku’s puzzles to see how they compare to what I have.
My concern here is that something is up or abound. I get a ton of positive feedback on my PC version of the game, but wondering why not many converts from Downloaded to purchased. I’ll have to get some sort of review from people on this.
I finished the iPhone version, and am about to post this new version of SudokuGeek for approval on the app market. On the iPhone competition for Sudoku is fierce, but its looking more and more like people may have moved on, or lost interest? So I am looking for insight as to whats happened? Are to many free Sudoku’s out there that people lost interest in video game format versions? Or is it lack of diversity, puzzles to hard so people don’t generally buy them, or lack of features?
In any case, I have to get out there and find out what people who play sudoku are looking for in their sudoku grids, because just throwing up a game I really enjoy doesn’t mean everyone else will. Although tons of feed back and positive re-inforcement has me optimistic.
Onward and upward. Play Testing for the XBOX version finished, perhaps in the next two days I will get time to get it up into approval mode.
We originally wanted this fancy font to be our Sudoku Graphics for our game,
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=77 << what the font looks like
Company; http://www.monotypefonts.com/ They responded 2 months late.. My Email got lost in their system. I have wiped out the font in my game already, I would love to add it back in, I still have the old graphics. But their licensing is very prohibitive. Artistic renditions of their fonts are not permitted, so without clarification, I cannot use their font. A plug in the game would probably have lots of people wanting the font.
Microsoft points to Ascender Corporation, they may have better licensing terms.. I didn’t know they carried a Rounded Arial also. Interesting.
http://www.ascenderfonts.com/info/font-licensing.aspx they still must be contacted for inserting the font into video games.. hrmm.
A few people have downloaded and tried the game. Even all the feedback I get is fantastic. I am wondering what is going wrong. No incomplete orders, no nothing.
You’d think for the hours of fun that could be had for just 5$ someone would buy it.. For the price of a sub sandwich right? The sub sandwich lasts 20 minutes or less. SudokuGeek last hours. I had alot of fun making the game, and am having a lot of fun porting it to the apple platforms. Learning OpenGL is a lot of fun.
I’m thinking google adwords may be in order before we resort to aligning with other firms to much. Ah the frustrations. We’re also going to rely on the iPod touch/iPhone version to launch it more or less.
I found that “Next game” was not working. So I fixed a few things and reposted the newer version today.
MD5 Checksum;
391DF104C182A0FDD29FEF8FBCF38C42 SudokuGeekInstall.exe
fixes;
1. Next game was doing random creation and saving. Disabled and made it go back to play menu which works properly.
2. Playing with PC mouse, the next number was not auto selected. So I made this work. Keyboard auto next number already worked.
3. Help Screen – re-centered at the end.
4. Play Menu -> Made it properly draw the menu.. I found when it transitioned from Trial to full version, it would draw improperly. fixed.
I don’t know how many people make use of this, but I have posted just in case.
The MD5 checksum is to help ensure tampering of the Download doesn’t occur. Also I noticed a few IP address’s have tried to download twice. So I setup a FTP download for those users with Internet Explorer, so they can download it properly.
Site is slow; Ya I noticed too. Some other website hosted on the same server is a heavy user. Especially today. Were on the inexpensive for now, no dedicated host. That means we have to live with it.
Ok, so as of today, I have a much better playable PC version of SudokuGeek. Just released this day May 8th 2010. On the main Menu, it has the version info displayed on the lower right hand corner.
XBOX360 version will take additional testing. It will be a while anyway, so just hang on tight.
Well I’ve been working on the XNA version today. I didn’t make the 5PM EST.. Why, well with what I fixed and added features, I introduced a new bug that is hard to track down what is causing the issue.
Only 2 render engines work out of the 3 right now. BasicEffect fails to display anything now, and this was with just modifying plasma saver settings as best I can tell.. After I made a few more changes, it fails to render at all now (even with plasma saver off).
My brain is not working well today, really slow. Hard to think through where the issue starts. I might have to bag it today and come back another day to fix these issues.. That is not ideal for me or the company, but we are relying on my brain at the moment.
On other news, my dad said that my moms boss is very excited about SudokuGeek, very kewl news!
I’ve been working solidly for several months now. Time to take a full day off.
Yesterday mom and dad came over with their iPad’s, iPod touches. I was able to give them a preliminary build for the ipad and ipod. Very kewl.. Mom got very excited about SudokuGeek and how great it looks on the iPad!
After they left, even though I shouldn’t have, I got the iPad version working just like the iPod version does. I have yet to do the skybox, and menu system.. At the moment, Sudoku is completely playable on the iPod touch,iPhone,iPad systens.. This also includes MAC OSX and the PC OpenGL versions.
I have yet to finish upgrades to the XNA XBOX360 version. I plan to do that tomorrow and re-test and re-release it for play testing and then eventual submission. The PC Version will follow tomorrow too with several worthy updates, it should be available for download by 5pm EST.
All in all, looks like my time making SudokuGeek is nearly complete for these platforms.
I’ve found the most difficult issue is with switching keyboard styles. The iMac has the smaller style keyboard, which messes me up when switching back to the PC.
Cya everybody!