Hello everyone,

Mad-n II is happening at last! I still have the first 5 minutes I made in 2009.

You can thank @XIESTORIO for finishing the story. It will be out when it's ready, in a month or so.

EDIT: I am overwhelmed by your response! I am doing a write-up on what Mad-n could have been when episode II releases. I had too many ideas and not enough discipline.

Driving algorithm that lets rockets/vehicles turn to hit a target or orbit around it.

I want the first boss to have a rocket cloud around it, and for it to occasionally send rockets at you, or dangerously close. But I'm sure it will allow much more design. Particles are cool.

Combat from a game(may it see the light of day).
Guard and dog armies, dogs win it for red.

Demo here

WASD + Mouse, Q and E are development abilities, don't use them. There's only 4-5 rooms of enemies. The enemies can't see far enough so be fair. It's slow. But it can be actually played.

Various things going on. I'm putting a dual Xeon X5650 server together to raise the threshold of algorithms I could write that I would consider feasible. That's 12 cores with about 400% of the power of my desktop. Got a couple thousands pages of PDFs about history of programming and computation to study. Movies to watch, books to read, games to play. That means months before any possibility of making anything visible. New game designs keep stacking in my folder. But it's the path I've chosen because I believe it will pay off.

Still working on that goddamn custom programming language. The "perfect SDK/IDE/API hunt" has been going on for 2 years now, I think. Bleh. It's been gaining some form in the recent weeks though, so... :) I also may be getting Oculus Rift for Christmas so hopefully I'll be ready to toy with GPU by then. I MISS SHADERS

Hello Newgrounds :)

I've posted very little during recent years, mostly because I kept improving my programming skills, preparing for a comeback as a game developer. I did tons of tests though, projects where I just tried out new things. Some of them are not so bad, check them out if you want to.

Ancient madness animations(ErMa was before I even had an account here):

• Error Madness 3
• Error Madness 4
• Error Madness 6
• Unfinished Collab Part 1
• Unfinished Collab Part 2
• Madness Accumulation 2

Some coding:

• A tricky game - Menu
• A tricky game - Level 1 (Arrow keys, A)
• Some PK Game (WASD, IJKL...)
• Sun
• Earth
• Vactom (Flash CPU 3D, WASD & be careful with your cursor)
• Quartic projectiles
• Force field
• Water (Flash GPU 3D simulation, download and double-click for fullscreen)
• 3D Destructible Terrain (WASD, cursor, click, shift, space to jump, V to fly, M to change terrain mode)

A flash shooter, codename "chronobot":

• Game's core
• Fast Lowres 3D
• Visibility
• Shockwave
• Editor
• Collision

Here's a project that I finished high school IT with:

I've once again set up all the social networking stuff, links to the left, I have no idea what they're about but I feel obliged to learn to "tweet" and all. Depending on what college brings I may or may not do something in the near future. See you later.

Happy late Madness Day. I've just finished my ZalgoHank art. View it full size! I'm using this chance to promote it because I haven't been scouted... how does one participate without that?

Last year, I did a giant 3D project called When They Want You Dead. It was overly ambitious in many ways and to this day I can't believe how I could complete it. I started in the middle of summer holidays and went 6h sleep / 18h work for 50 days and finished with 4 days on caffeine. I'll never forget it. Here's a graph of daily framecount. HOW THE HELL. I haven't been that motivated for anything in my life.

In fact, I haven't done anything since then either. I wish could work nonstop on something again... but I don't know how. I don't care anymore. The 2012-2013 time between was crazy though, there's lots of things that I'd like to get into before hopping into game development, which is something I absolutely see as my future career now. I won't promise any activity or upcoming project or anything, I know how that would end. Soo... see ya in a year?

Just how good is Flash? If you've been following its updates you may know that starting with version 11.0 it can work with the graphics card and from 11.4 it supports multi-threading (11.5 is the current one). Here's a fine example of a GPU game.

But you can't really see anyone using these features, at least not on Newgrounds. If you wanted to make the best browser game ever, how good would it be? Here's my guess:
Half-Life 2.
Warcraft 3.
Or games from ~2006, that sort of thing.
So why doesn't every developer suddenly go and use these features? Well, they're not really easy to implement, that's one thing, but there's another problem: Compatibility.

Sometimes it just does not start. Really. It's not a mistake on the programmer's part, in fact there's one single function to use: Stage3D.requestContext3D(). If it returns a Context3D in render mode "software", you're pretty much fucked. A processor can't render complicated 3D scenes at faster rate than 2-3 fps. How do you tell the viewer? Let's be honest here, the average attention span of people on the internet is around 3 seconds. I've tried. What happens here is that once you know the GPU rendering is in fact not GPU rendering, you can only show a "sorry, you can't play this game" dialog box. Or ask the player to refresh the page. Which may or may not help, as software rendering is a result of either bad luck or GPU incompatibility.

There are also different GPU profiles in Flash. Baseline, baseline_constrained and baseline_extended (present in 11.6 beta). Again, if you wanted it to have the best graphics ever, you would immediatelly jump upon the baseline_extended profile as it comes with lots of new texture types, multiple target rendering and other cool stuff that separates good-looking games from super-realistic-looking games. And guess what, THIS. If you chose the normal profile over the constrained profile, you make the game unplayable for 1/4 of the audience. I wonder how low is the percentage for the extended profile.

Next thing: Multi-threading. It's 2013, so let's assume everyone has at least dual-core processor, people who do care about performance have bought a quad-core. This means that building the game in a concurrent way increases the amount of code processed by 100%-300%. Now that's a lot, knowing how hard it is to fit all the code into a ~33ms cycle this kind of boost is awesome. But if a game is for everyone, it must run even on the lowest spec hardware. That is, one where multi-threading does not work.

Standalone Flash Player does support multi-threading. So does Adobe AIR and installed programs built in AIR. Mobile devices do not. Firefox and IE do, Chrome does not.
Sigh.

You can change game's graphics, sure. Model complexity, texture quality, shaders, post-processing effect etc. But how do you scale its core functions? Controls, updating health/mana/etc, A.I., physics. You can't. And if it does work on a single-core, what are going to do with the additional processing power anyway?

One of many benefits of using Flash for developing games has always been its compatibility. You could build a demo for Newgrounds and sell the game for both desktop AND mobile devices, because it runs everywhere. Mobile devices do not allow multi-threading in Flash(yet), so even though there are quad-core 1.5 GHz beasts like HTC One X, the power is not really accessible for Flash developers. Okay then, now we only want to make the game run on desktop. There should be no problem with AIR, so let's check the browsers. CHROME! The best browser ever and it's the only one causing problems. In fact there are two Flash Players in Google Chrome, just go to "chrome://plugins/". They are a few minor versions apart. The older can not run ActionScript Workers, the newer one can. I hope this changes with 11.6. The newer one is disabled by default... really!?

tl;dr
If you went for the 'best case scenario', Flash is an incredibly powerful platform that can run far, far better games than those we see now. But they would not work for a not-so-small percentage of people and a large part of the audience would have to refresh the page, manually update Flash Player, maybe check their drivers etc in order to run it. And this is the internet, everything is supposed to work by clicking one button. Do you want to see incredible games available for everyone to play? Well they won't come through the Newgrounds portal, as they would get a score of 0 by 1/3 of viewers. Maybe if we changed the mindset, maybe if somehow people KNEW the game is GOOD and actually put out some EFFORT to play it instead of the "entertain me, you've got 15 seconds or zero". I don't know, I guess I'm talking about a permanent frontpage feature like Madness: Project Nexus or something.

The reason I wrote this all is obvious - I'm trying to make such game, but my experiences with presenting projects using these technologies are quite bitter, so I don't know whether I should keep on trying to make a Flash game revolution or just say goodbye to y'all and switch to C++.

Thanks for reading, feedback is appreciated.

CBE SDK v0.2
4,121 lines of code

A development report

What's new?
UI rendering revamped again and again, so it's not an empty window anymore. I implemented simple multi-threading, added SMD decoding (Source model, heavy again), finally tried plastic & wireframe rendering. That's all, it's still about getting the UI right.

What's next?
Probably redo UI rendering once more along with file handling. Once I can play with models and animations, things might get interesting.