Yikes, it’s a weekend again already! Sunday too! Ack!

Rule of thumb. When Mike says game will be out in a week or two, assume month. Then assume longer.

Ahem.

There’s always the chance that this mysterious iPhone game may destroy my ‘cred’ as a physics guy. Though, I’ve been doing some fun stuff in it to rectify that.

I’ve found several uses for effects based on verlet and spring physics, even though the game lives in a world of tiles. When you can constrain the motion to a single axis, springs and integration really simplifies. Magnitude becomes a mere subtraction, and a spring a mere scalar for the magnitude. Fun stuff.

Just this morning (Saturday) I added something vaguely like a water/pond simulation. A 2D spring system that creates ripples. But it’s actually a collection of 1D springs that influence their neighbors. A proper 2D cloth would break your the perception of things. In the end it’s pure eye candy, but still.

It’s stuff like this that makes me wish the GBA wasn’t dead. When restricted to an axis, it’s only a couple subtracts, adds, and multiplies. No square roots to be seen. And for some of the funkier effects (Jello), only a few divides (ARM7’s can’t divide).

Then again, go ahead and stay dead GBA. I’m loving the freedom of having crap-tons of textured quads.

Also, these are pretty cool. My brother picked one up from Future Shop, and it took only a couple hours to get my SDL OpenGL PC build working on it’s Linux (was all just figuring out the names of packages that were missing). Just over 2 lbs too! I’m soooo grabbing one once this game ships.

Gamma 3D compo for October, then in November in Montreal. Geez… I really need to start doing semi-local game industry events.

Why do you have to be 2 whole hours away Toronto!?

I guess that’s what Greyhound and Audiobooks are for.