N3D mesh example
Groundbreaking news on Nintendo DS homebrew development! Peter Schraut wrote an library in his own words “an abstraction layer for the Nintendo DS 3D hardware, to
be used with the homebrew devkitPro toolchain. The interface is designed to
be very similar with Microsoft’s Direct3D API”. The documentation is available and on the official website some examples waiting to be explored (also look here).
N3D code example
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rails.rivva.de
Frank Westphal (note that interview I held with him) started some months ago a project called Rivva – a “Meme-Tracker” that automatically aggregates content from blogs and sorts it in order to relevance with some algorithmic voodoo hidden inside the application. Rivva now became a new child: rails.rivva.de. That new section focuses on English blogs with debates on Ruby on Rails. To keep in touch with what’s hot on the blogs just visit rails.rivva.de or directly subscribe to the RSS-feed. A fresh source to start the day.
And while we are already on the topic… Please spot this post to get a screenshot on recent iPhone development sources, mostly focusing on web development for iPhone.
The Nintendo DS homebrew scene is growing and more and more useful applications appear. Today we will have a look on two interesting drawing applications. Both follow the approach of “digital painting”. This technique however use bold and blurred brushes you certainly know from Photoshop: Pictures made with this technique really look like painted pictures if done right. Please look at the digital paintings of Mathias Snygg and this amazing tutorial to get into success with this technique. I think a solid background in drawing and painting will be very useful to heighten the quality your pictures – also on the DS.
The first application is Colors!, that was developed by Jens Andersson. He solved the questions of usability, GUI and constrains versus flexibility very well. Besides a clear color-selector and the basic drawing functions there are also nice little features like mirroring the picture or watching an instant replay form the painting you made. You can use up to 9 slots to save pictures and replay data as well on your flash-memory or SD card. Note that you can retrieve the data on your PC to reuse or work with the data you made on your portable gaming console.
Colors! Webpage
http://www.collectingsmiles.com/colors/
Colors Gallery
http://colors.brombra.net/
Quite a similar application is Phidias programmed by the Finnish coder Tassu. Phidias has some more functions like colors!, for example smudge or blur. Also in addition you can save your pictures under self selected filenames. The straightforwardness of Phidias is not as high as on Colors!, but both applications are good additions to the homebrew scene to make the Nintendo DS a compact and versatile mobile tool. So let your own taste decide. The ability on both applications to save the pictures makes this good tools for preparing pictures stylo-driven to re-use them afterwards on Mac or PC.
Phidias Webpage
http://sivullinen.fi/nds/
Echochrome: Optical Illusion Gameplay.
Games for playstation with only one color are extremely rare. I simply can only remember Vib Ribbon and Rez that dropped the highlighted grafics and forced all attention to the gameplay. The coming title Echochrome does similar with an outstanding simple gameplay. There is a man wandering in an “optical illusion” landscape. In the game you have to rotate the scene in that way, that the fellow wanderer will get his way through. Watch a video of the gameplay.
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Andre LaMothe is the creator of the XGameStation, a do it yourself kit for making your own gaming console. Yes, I am talking about hardware here. Get the technical details for example for the XGameStation Micro Edition on the website. On a meta level this console kit is about the following:
“Imagine understanding how video game systems are designed and developed at an engineer’s level. Imagine writing your own games for a piece of hardware you’re personally capable of building. This isn’t a field trip to the factory — this is decades of video game hardware development boot camp compressed into a single product designed to upgrade your brain and take you to the next level of skill and understanding. It was estimated that only 100-200 people on the entire planet understood the workings of the legendary Atari 2600 and its design. What if you could design machines like this and beyond?”
If you want to dive into self-written games on your custom console then you will prefer HYDRA.
“The HYDRA Game Development Kit is a complete edutainment platform to learn multiprocessing game development, graphics and media applications on the HYDRA Game Console. Based on the new Parallax multiprocessing Propeller Chip. For beginner to intermediate coders, you need only basic programming experience in any BASIC or C-like language to get started with the kit. The HYDRA Game Console is based on a socketed 40-Pin dip version of the new Parallax Multiprocessing Propeller Chip. The Propeller chip is simplified cell processor very similar in concept to the Sony ‘Cell Processor’ used in the Playstation 3.”
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Pictures and quotes from XGameStaion website
A valuable source of short video tutorials are on the Railscast videopodcast. They are very clever not only focusing on good code practises, but also implicate how to work on rails in general (including refactoring and such).
