0x10h three was this weekend and, as always, it was a pleasure. Martin, my partner from the last contest, was ill, unfortunately, so I banded together with Alex and we created CaveFlyer, which is mostly like Asteroids, excepts you're in a cave and you shoot another player instead of asteroids. Turned out it was more an area bordered by colored rectangles than a cave, but nobody's actually interested in details like that.

The download: http://habraun.net/stuff/CaveFlyer.zip
Requires Java. Everything else should be in the package.
Instructions: Click into the window once at the beginning (input won't work otherwise). Player 1 controls his plane-thing with up, left, right and fires with shift, enter. Player 2 controls with w, a, d and fires with alt, space. If one player's health drops below 0, please declare a winner and close the game window.

The game is a bit buggy, freezes occasionally and has performance problems. Still, I'm quite content with it. This marks the first 0x10h where my team managed to deliver a somewhat finished game that wasn't written within 10 minutes during the last hour of the contest. I've also learned a thing or two about game development and I think we'll continue our trend of improving with every contest ("we" being my team, which will hopefully include Martin again next time).

I don't have much to say about the rest of the contest. The overall organization and especially the food supply have been entirely excellent. Martin, our host, did a nice job (attention: different Martin than mentioned before).

There were some interesting games from the other participants. I expect an official review about the weekend to show up shortly, so you can see for yourself. I also made some pictures, which I plan to upload at some point in the future. I will post here when that happens.

Here's something I did recently, mainly because I needed a change from working on my current (yet unannounced) project. Created during a few hours at night, I present to you Kong, my take on the Pong genre (version 0.1).

Here's the download: Kong-0.1.zip
You need Java to run it, everything else should be included in the package.
Source code is also available: http://repo.or.cz/w/kong.git

Instructions: Left player is controlled with W and S, right player with up and down. Appoint a third player to count the score.

A word of warning: As I said, this was written within a few hours. Don't expect too much.
I have quite a few ideas for improvements, but no promises here. Maybe I'll extend it in the future, maybe not.

I've uploaded a tiny game I did at 0x10h 2.0 back in May. It's called Prehistoric Dentist - Hot Pursuit (thanks, Video Game Name Generator) and was a last-ditch effort to save the honor of our team (besides surfing the web and drinking beer we had worked on a Pac-Man inspired game that mostly stood out for its lack of fun). Despite its shortness (estimated production time was 20 minutes and it's possible to play through in 2 seconds, if you know what you're doing) it was well-received.

But enough talk, here's the link: PrehistoricDentist.exe
The game is written in C#. It was developed and tested on Ubuntu with Mono. I'm pretty sure it works on Windows too, using .NET.

More about 0x10h: 0x10h stands for "16 hours" and is a game coding contest and conference. It will take place for the third time on January 10th and 11th, 2009 in Darmstadt. I will be there again and maybe we'll even write the sequel to Prehistoric Dentist.
Stop by if you're interested in game development. I'm sure it will be fun.

I didn't plan to continue this project, but due to popular demand (well, not really, but I'm easily impressed) I've worked some more on it. Nothing big, I mostly implemented some missing GUI stuff.

I've uploaded the new version to my webspace. Check the "Treibjagd" item in the menu to the right.
There's also a new repository for the source at http://repo.or.cz/. I don't know, after a few months with git I'm almost allergic to Subversion.

I haven't been working on Io lately, mainly for two reasons: Scala and actors. Read on for more on these reasons and what this means for the Io project.

I've added a page about Treibjagd, a game I've been working on until May of this year to this site.
Work on the project has been suspended, unfortunately, but I'm putting the game and the source code out there for everyone who might be interested.

If you're having problems with Eclipse on Ubuntu and possibly other Linux distributions, it might be because Eclipse runs on gij and not Sun Java. Setting your preferred Java VM with update-alternatives won't help because Eclipse uses it's own configuration for some reason.

The solution is to alter Eclipse's configuration as described here.

If you work on a Java project that uses Ant and has a few dependencies, do yourself a favor and integrate Ivy into your build system. Ivy is a tool for dependency management which can resolve and download dependencies automatically from the Maven repository. It can also do a few more things, but that's what I'm using it for, basically.

The description of Io's build process just changed from "Download several dependencies from different websites, copy them into the lib/ folder, make sure that they have the correct names (those the build script expects) and type `ant` on the command line" to "Type `ant` on the command line". Nice!

Io 0.3 has been out for a while and I thought it's time for an update. Read on for a summary of past, recent and future development.

As some may know, my project, the Io framework, is named after Io, one of the moons of Jupiter. It's a nice name and I like it, but honestly, I must have been drunk when I chose it because it's a really bad name for a software project. Read on for some details.