Current projects

It’s about time I started blogging about my game projects. As part of a research semester for my study I’m building some prototype games to explore game development in Python. Our first one, Pyrio, is already done and turned out to be quite nice. The second, tank-battle, is lagging a bit behind our own expectations but is nevertheless quite nice, though I don’t plan to do all the packaging stuff for this one.

Pyrio is a Mario clone. It uses graphics and sounds from Secret Maryo Chronicals and is written with Pygame. One of our findings was that rendering with Pygame was much to slow so for Tank-battle we started using Cocos2d / Pyglet. Tank-battle is not really a game but more a tech-demo. It plays with networking and AI. The networking part is built on top of Twisted and works quite well. We even built some interpolation code on the client which makes prevents opponents from jittering around the screen. We are now in the process of building some path finding into some computer players and make them do smart things. But time is almost up as tomorrow will be the last day of development and we ain’t got anything battle related, so it’s just tanks for now ;-)

In the upcoming weeks we will build a 3D prototype, participate in the Pyweek and further develop our Pyweek game afterwards. In the meantime, try Pyrio ;-)

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Blog moved to new host

When you read this my blog is moved to my new host. :-) Bye Servage

I will be sharing a VPS @ slicehost with Ronald and Mattijs

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Security problems Servage

Revived my blog today. It seems my servage account got hacked and some worm destroyed my index.php file. A quick google search revealed that I am certainly not the first.

Time to start thinking about new hosting as this is probably not going to end any time soon.

I was thinking about runnig my own vps so I can also run other services. Anyone (other) suggestions?

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Launchpad, games and python

Just wanted to let everyone know that I use Launchpad now to host my personal projects. On Launchpad you have your own personal +junk project in which you can host branches that do not belong to a project on Launchpad. In other words it is a perfect playground for little pet-projects. :-)

I’ve been working on a Sub Hunt game lately. It has been amazing how quick you can get a game together with python and pygame. At the time of writing a spend about 4 hours on the game. It is off course very basic and far from finished. But in another 2 - 4 hours it can be almost done. At the moment it contains only three levels, but creating levels is as simple as defining which and how much submarines are in the level.

So check it out and let me know what you think. Ideas on how to expand the game are most welcome. :-)

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Internship update

So nearly another month has passed and I’ve been busy with quite a lot of different things. First my tagging add-on for Hippo ECM is coming along nicely. You can add tags to a document and it pops-up some suggestions beneath them (they aren’t really good suggestions yet but they are there).

To test my tagging add-on I needed some content so I wrote a converter which converts a Wikipedia XML dump into a XML import for Hippo ECM. The script takes the number of articles you want to create in the import as an argument, so I now have imports ranging from a hundred articles to about a hundred thousand articles.

My third project for this month was to create a tag cloud which would enable a user to browse documents by tag.

So after all these details I bring you: The Screenshot :-) (click for a larger version)

Tagging in Hippo ECM

On the left is the tag cloud (needs some layout work still), the center shows the documents with the tag “Living people” and the lower right shows current tags and suggestions belonging to the document.

The suggestion system is quite dumb. It suggests the most common tags at the moment. The coming weeks I will work on a more smart suggestion system. I plan to experiment with:

  • searching tags related to the already assigned tags.
  • searching for existing tags in document body and title
  • searching for tags from embedded documents (images, download-able documents, etc.)

Enough for now. I need to get back to work :-)

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