And while I spend 80% of this free time with my new born sun Arthur, I’m trying to save some time to work on Cosmos Conflict.

So far, I have the basis of my game engine using SunBurn for rendering and BEPU Physics for the… Physics obviously .

I’ve implemented 80% of the procedural universe generation and I’ve compiled a set of screenshots:

The next step will be on implementing player’s input.

It all started the 11th June 2007, in the old version of this blog when I announced to my readers back then (a few people being mostly my family members ) that I was working a quite impressive and challenging game project and showing a small picture of a prototype we were working on.

If you want to read it back, you can get it here.

The city builder genre fans got this information and started talking about it and therefore, I tried to bring as many answers as I could on what was about to become Cities Unlimited and finally Cities XL.

It is very sadly that we announced yesterday that Monte Cristo, the studio behind the game, couldn’t face the low sales level and that we had to close the door definitivelly.
Cities XL is not dead anyway as a publisher saved the IP and should continue to support the game over time with more reasons to do so as the whole team spend a lot of time working on bug fixing the game and even add some new features that I cannot share right now. But nothing forbids me to expose the fact these features will bring some great joy to the urban planners out there

It is still too fresh to share my personal vision on why we fail on the business side and I rather want to see the “bright” future instead of criticizing the past without too much of recoil…
I’d like to take this opportunity to thanks once again all the great members of the City builder community that believed in us and supported us all along.

Special thanks to: Dirk and the whole Simtropolis.com team, Rexer & Trixin from the Simphoni.net website, the French Generation-city.com & Toutsimcities.com teams for their support, the whole Beta testers who helped us a lot during the first months, and of course every player who spend their hard earned money to enjoy a bit playing our game.

Now that the studio is closed, I have to think on my personal future: I don’t want to stay unemployed for too long as I feel really depress when I’m not active on a project that challenges me everyday.

Therefore, I plan to spend my free time in 3 principal daily tasks:

1. Spend more time with my newborn Arthur. As a recent father, this is a great opportunity to spend time with my sun and see him grow. Not that many fathers have this chance and I won’t lose it.
2. Find opportunities to work on the game industry either with some old Monte Cristo members (create a new studio?) or in an existing established company.
3. Finish a prototype of a game project I’ve been working on for this September and try to sell it outside (Read my first entry on the topic here.).

When I feel ready, I’ll leave an entry on my personal conclusions on why Monte Cristo closed. But for now, I’ll take a deep breath and try to rest a bit

If not, this video is still a very good video and demonstration of 3d and post production effects.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

At least, they both can be annoying or funny to watch… This time is the latter

The first and most important principle is creating a good development environment so it is a pleasure to get back to it without having to browse my code and documentation to realize where I was when I stopped working on it.

I therefore combined:

• a working station: my MacBook Pro with a MacOS X and Windows Vista dual boot
• good tools: Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs
• And a subversion hosting platform

The latter was the most difficult part because I wanted to find a centralised source control where I could connect to from anywhere and hook it with a good ticketing system and wiki to help me organise my work and potentially invite other developers/artists to participate.

After googling for 2 days, I find out two viable solutions: CVSdude and Assembla.

Each come with a trial of 30 days and both are really easy to use and fully functional. After a week, I however decided to use Assembla for one simple reason: proven stability.

Don’t misunderstand me, CVSdude is really great and offers everything you need but I got two small issues that didn’t get solved as fast as I would have liked while I didn’t meet any issue with Assembla. In front of this situation, I therefore decided to use the one that didn’t bring me any problem at all.

I also played a lot to the NES and Super NES games but never owned one. I purchase my first Nintendo Console with the Nintendo 64 on which I used to play a lot of party games with my wife and friends. It was a real replacement to social board games and we organised a lot of evenings around Mario Party or Mario Kart sessions.

2 years ago, I got the Nintendo DS which brought me a lot of fun while waiting for the bus or the train on my daily trips to the office.

And this year, Santa brought me the Wii Black Edition. I never really considered getting this console mostly because I was spending a lot of my spare time playing PC games such as WOW, Counter Strike Source or Call of Duty…

However, since I started playing with it and a couple of friends, I can say this console is bringing back this great party feeling I got with the Nintendo 64. For now, I’m only playing the Wii Sport games but they really demonstrate the capabilities of the console and can’t wait to cooperatively play the latest Mario game as well as the Mario Party series

Click here to view the embedded video.

We can find a great amount of game engines with great 2d or 3d graphic API, script engines and sometimes a good level of AI but the developer is most of the time in front of his own GUI implementation.

As part of a hobby project I’ll present as soon as I feel ready for it , I’ve been browsing the web looking for a refresh on the game engines available for free or a small fee and I found some really great engines that meet most of my requirements.

I’d love to use Unity 3d (I’ll talk about it in a future blog entry ) but I haven’t yet understood how to access the game engine’s depth programatically to add the small features I’m missing…

Then, I found Xen developed by a former Australian developer now living in UK which is just a really good API that abstracts Microsoft XNA just as much as I want/need it to be.

Even if Xen is really great feature wise for the rendering side, it doesn’t provide enough for a full fledged GUI system (or I would have to spend really too many hours to get the expected result).

I then found out Neoforce Controls developed by Tom Shane. This library for XNA may be at alpha stages, it really provides any XNA game developer everything he would ever asked for his game. Built with a similar logic as the Microsoft WinForms principles, it gives you a logical, structured while easy to use set of Controls with a great Skinning freedom.

XNA developers, go for it blindly as you’ll just never find out another GUI library for XNA better than this one…

Click here to view the embedded video.