Archive: May, 2011

Added large number support to the original BiSON.js (BonsaiDen/BiSON.js) by encoding them as strings with a marker so that they decode back to large numbers. Especially useful for those of you who do not want to modify your data when using large numbers with BiSON.

View the updated file here

Hi all,

The open beta has gone live and is now available for purchase. Currently only discounted premium licenses are available during the beta and you can get all the info you need over at the info page.

Cheers!

Hi folks,

This is a very big update to the engine; the biggest yet in fact. Please check the changelog carefully as there are updates to the engine that WILL break your current game scripts. Bringing your game scripts up to date with this version is pretty easy but you should know what is happening before you update! Read the rest of this entry »

Hi folks,

It’s a monumental moment for Irrelon Software as I can announce that our first real playable web demo will be released shortly! It’s taken some time to get to where the engine is now and in no small part to the feedback and effort of our group of beta testers who have been working hard on getting to grips with the engine themselves. I had a great experience recently when one of our beta testers sent me the files to a tower defense demo he’d put together using the engine. It was great to see that even games I hadn’t envisaged making with Isogenic are more than possible, and it opened up some interesting technical challenges that saw a number of bug fixes and features get added to the engine. Read the rest of this entry »

Just when you thought there was nothing interesting on the web anymore, along comes an excellent programmer to impress the socks off you.

Fans of Isogenic please check this out! It’s not made using Isogenic and I don’t know the guy personally but this is so cool I just had to post it.

You can check out the live game at www.wrecksector.com

Have a play around. Go and speak to the guy far left and then help him escape the hoover robots! HINT: You need to make a mess to distract them!

This video shows a demonstration of how the Isogenic Game Engine utilises HTML canvas for more than just rendering super-fast sprite simulations.

In this demo you can see the image scanner tool that takes a standard 2D isometric image and extrapolates 3D bounding box data from it.

That data can then be used in depth sorting and collision detection in an isometrically projected environment.

2D image assets usually require designers / programmers to align the image to an isometric grid so that they can be properly rendered to the screen. This tool negates the need to do so as the 3D geometric data is used to easily determine the exact dimensions and position that an object needs to be aligned to in order to fit the isometric grid.

Collision detection systems can also use the data to accurately test against other objects for real-time collisions in an isometric environment.

This video demonstrates clients loading straight into a game environment. As they do so, a new avatar is created for them that can be individually controlled. Movement between the clients is instantly synchronised across the network.

The video is a bit jerky but this is not due to the engine performance but rather the video capture software lagging!

Hi all,

Those of you who are part of the closed beta, please find the latest update to the engine available now in the Irrelon Secure Store.

This update includes all previous patches and also:

• The new IgeIdFactory.js class for generating unique ID codes. Documentation for the class can be found here.
• Removed the requirement to supply IDs when creating engine items (if no id is supplied, a unique one will be auto-generated).
• A bug fix in the path-finding system to solve a bug that would cause an engine crash when removing a path-finding entity as reported here.
• The netPropagate argument in many methods has been removed and going forward will use the _locale setting of an item to determine network and database propagation.
• A massive update to the renderer increases performance for full-screen updates such as when using trackTarget.
• An update to the dirty rectangle debug mode now shows dirty rectangles above all other entities, but they are see-through with alpha so you can identify both a dirty rectangle that is redrawing and also the underlying entity that caused the redraw. The debug grid now has co-ordinate labels. All debug data is drawn to layer index 3 (the forth layer in your map definition) which is usually assigned to UI. This will become an option in a future update but is currently hard-coded.
• Panning the viewport and then ending a pan which will force a full-screen redraw is now around 50% faster!
• Mac OSX is now a fully supported development environment and has its own install section in the documentation and doesn’t require VirtualBox or VM to run as Node.js etc all run natively.

You can download your new engine archive from the secure store here: http://www.irrelon.com/secure

Use your account id and challenge as your username and password.

A new patch is available for download to beta testers.

This new bug fixes a large number of reported patches, clears up the networking for entities and makes propagating CRUD actions very simple. Further to this patch, there is a second patch now available that fixes some bugs in the networking clock syncronisation system so that client and server clocks and network latency correctly alter the pathing and engine tick times so that “jumping” when pathing doesn’t occur any more.

The two patch files are called ige_0.1.0_beta-patch-02-05-2011.zip and ige_0.1.0_beta-patch-02-05-2011-2.zip respectively and both should be downloaded and applied over the top of a clean engine installation from the base beta engine archive. A clean database is also recommended!

See the main beta forum for more details.

Thanks