omni-mad - news on omni-mad - news

2012

Omni-Mad.com — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 14:42:58 +0000

Happy New Year to all our fans and friends!

2011 has been a little … complicated, but all that mess should be cleaned up now, so 2012 will become more productive!

In 2011 development has stalled slightly, but never stopped.

Huge things to come. Soon. Promised!

TUM 2011

Omni-Mad.com — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:50:16 +0000

We are proud to sponsor TUM 2011

(http://2011.tum-party.net/)

Demodays / Buenzli

Omni-Mad.com — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 20:58:30 +0000

Enjoying demodays.

Freshening up old connections and recharging motivation.

See you on the other side.

Demodays / Buenzli

Omni-Mad.com — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 07:23:49 +0000

Once again we are a proud sponsor of Demodays (also know as Buenzli).

Sponsoring the demoscene has been a long time tradition for us and we don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

If you don’t know what a demoparty is, check this wikipedia article.

iCloud

Omni-Mad.com — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 08:49:17 +0000

I’m sure you all have heard about yesterdays WWDC keynote.

The next big thing iCloud.

So what has that to do with us.

A lot!

While there are a lot of tools and engines out there that you can use to develop your game our approach has always been supply a framework and keep the code native.

And that’s exactly the approach apple is taking.

Put the data in the (i)Cloud, but keep the apps native.

While google (like flash or unity3d) takes the

put the app in a VM (aka browser).

Both have pros and cons, but for us the dealbreaker is the overhead th VM introduces.

Being confirmed by apples actions and decisions is a big honor.

We will stay on our track.

Bootstrapping

Omni-Mad.com — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 08:28:13 +0000

While bootstrapping has a lot of advantages like:

being independent from outsiders/investors.
being worry free, since you are not burning through a fixed amount of money.
being able to adapt to changes by changing milestone dates and contents.

It has also some (major?) drawbacks like:

the development coming to a grinding halt, when your “paid for” workload is getting high.
being able to change milestones. (The “just by one day”-syndrome.)
having no one to ask for the 500 bucks you need for the music or font or whatever.

All in all we still stand by our decision to do this without outside investment. Even if it means it will take a little while longer.

And sorry for the lack of updates, but my “paid for” project is in crunch mode…

Crazy Air - Iced

Omni-Mad.com — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 10:41:28 +0000

Yesterday we decided to put “Crazy Air” on hold. That does not mean that it has been axed completely. It just means we’ll stop the active development to focus on other things.

Development on Crazy Air started early in 2008 and the world changed a little bit since then.

We don’t consider any effort put in the project so far to have been wasted. In the coming days we’ll add a bunch of posts about what went wrong, what went right and what we earned by workin in Crazy Air for nearly 3 years.

Status

Omni-Mad.com — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 19:14:03 +0000

Also the big changes really did set us back for a while they actually made is stronger in the long run.

In August we did as small 48h challenge and created a game from scratch. We didn’t have a designer on board, so it is a little … confusing, but the point was to prove that our framework is solid. And solid it is.

There were no major flaws and implementing the game logic was actually a lot of fun.

September was a bit slow again, since I switched my day time job and had to move to Berlin. I don’t have a permanent place to stay yet and switching from hotel to hotel makes consistent development harder than necessary.

On the bright side: I’m doing a port of a really cool game right now.

Update: I almost forgot to mention it, but: The framework has been backported to windows, so finally giving our artists and designers test versions they can actually work with is possible again.

Creating Dialogs - Part I

Omni-Mad.com — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:18:37 +0000

This part shows some sample code how a dialog is loaded and added to the dialog hierarchy. We usually try to keep the hierarchy flat, but sometimes its cleaner to use sub dialogs, so the possibility is there.

definition = g_resourceManager.getResource< UIDialogDefinition >( "yesno.odlg" );
YesNoDialog pYesNoDialog = new YesNoDialog;
pYesNoDialog->createFromDefinition( *pUIElementCreator, definition );
pRootDialog->addChild( pYesNoDialog );
g_resourceManager.releaseResource< UIDialogDefinition >( definition );

(Note: I omitted the asserts to improve readability.) No magic going on here: Load the definition (resource) from a file. Create the dialog object. Tell the dialog to use the definition. Add the dialog to the tree. Cleanup.

That’s all.

Status

Omni-Mad.com — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:11:48 +0000

Yes, there has been a serious lack of updates lately, but that doesn’t mean we vanished.

Bad news first: - Steffen, who is along time friend and was one of our candidates, decided to pursue his own targets, in his own way and time. We still stay in contact and are more than happy to consider his feedback, but for the time being he will not be joining us. - “Mr.X”, one of our silent funders, has also left us due to some personal circumstances. While this is a serious blow in budget and business expertise, we fully understand his reasons. - The acquisition of office space failed. We had some good candidates, but in the end we decided that none of them was really a perfect fit, so we are still looking. (Maybe the Gamespaces.de initiative will help us.)

Good news: - A lot of development took place behind the scenes. - V0.8 of CrazyAir has been finished, just slightly behind schedule. - Looks like we have new project and with it a new developer. (More on that later…)

Buenzli 19

Omni-Mad.com — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:18:19 +0000

The buenzli guys just announced:

And we will renew our demoscene roots and sponsor them again, as we did the last three years…

Avoiding virtual method calls

Omni-Mad.com — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:26:41 +0000

I was about to write a post about how to avoid virtual method calls in C++.

While looking for the correct wording for one of the lines I stumbled across this: Getting rid of virtual method calls

Since my explanation wasn’t much better, I’ll just leave you with the link to Floh’s article and a snippet of our rendering engine.

[renderer.hpp]

#if defined( OM_PLATFORM_IPHONE )
    #include "iphone/renderer_iph.hpp"
    namespace OM
    {
        #define Renderer OM::Renderer_Iph
    }
#elif defined( OM_PLATFORM_OSX )
    #include "osx/renderer_osx.hpp"
    namespace OM
    {
        #define Renderer OM::Renderer_Osx
    }
[...]
[renderer_osx.hpp]
namespace OM
{
    class Renderer_Osx : public RendererBase
    {
        public:
[...]

Just one more thing to say: This works perfectly for us on the 9 supported platforms.

Gianas Return - V0.997

Omni-Mad.com — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:23:41 +0000

Managed to build an .app of Gianas Return. Packaging SDL based apps for OSX takes a little bit more effort than I like, but our games are based on the native APIs anyway.

Check out: ~~GianasReturn-v0.997.dmg~~ And let us know what you think.

Since Kojote is away, there is no artwork (.dmg background, .app icon), but I’m sure we’ll add that to the next version.

There are some commandline parameters that you can use (scaling, fullscreen, etc), but for this version you are on your own to find out how ;)

Update: Due to a little uncaught typo the last .DMG still had a wrong library reference in it. Try this version instead: ~~GianasReturn-v0.997b.dmg~~

We don’t have a dedicated QA at the moment, but rest ensured: All our games will be thouroughly tested before shipping.

Update 2: Yet another version: GianasReturn-v0.997c.dmg

Sorry for the confusion, but SDL is a little bit … erm … complicated…

2010 - The future is bright

Omni-Mad.com — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:00:16 +0000

2010 will be our year.

I cannot tell you why … yet, but here are some hints: - A new/old developer has (re)appeared and is more than happy to work with us again. - Gameplay of “CrazyAir” is 95% finished. Just a little bit of polishing and we might let some testers onto the first-playable version. - Negotiations for “Project: Drunken” have started and do look really good. - It looks like we will have real offices soon, which will really help us with our WiiWare developer license/registration.

So full steam ahead. The future is now.

Happy New Year 2010

Omni-Mad.com — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 20:40:10 +0000

2010 will be our year and you will enjoy what we produce :) So stay tuned.

Last week we suspended our development to relax a litte bit and start into the new year with full steam.

Well, that was the plan, but after two days we got bored and things started to happen.

Kojote gave us the chance to do the Gianas Return port for Mac OSX. Starting from 0.997 we will provide the Mac builds. It’s not cleanly packaged into an .app yet, but Kojote is travelling during January and we will fix it when he is back. Enjoy the game!

And let us know if you need your game ported!

Deutscher Entwicklerpreis 2009

Omni-Mad.com — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:28:58 +0000

As some of you might already know: From December 2007 till March 2008 I worked at Keen Games in Frankfurt as the Lead Programmer for Anno/Dawn of Discovery Wii.

Last wednesday Anno Wii received the award for “Beste deutsche Konsolenspiel 2009” (Best german Console Game 2009). Since this was my first lead role in the game industry im pretty proud on what we achieved.

And I’m more than super motivated to get another one :)

Status - Andreas

Omni-Mad.com — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:02:08 +0000

Just another quick status update, before you forget we/I exist ;)

Didn’t have a lot of time during november, but created some. The only thing that seems to be limitless is time. There are always ways to find more.

Here is a randomly sorted list of stuff that I managed to squeeze in:

Window resizing for OSX and Linux with fixed aspect ratio. It feels so much better to play in a bigger window.
Added score and cash handling. Game logic is almost complete with this.
Implemented pools for game objects. Constantly newing and deleting was just fragmenting the memory.
Added various helpers for easier creation of dialogs.
Added animation converter and loader. Dialog animations are much easier to tweak this way. No editor yet.
Added Level 4. Also added some extra features needed for this level.
Added graphs to our subversion statistics. This is a huge motivational help.

Overall the game (and the framework) got a huge push forward. It will still be hard to make the alpha deadline in december, but we are trying.

I also got a quick update from our artist, but didn’t actually see the new graphics yet.

Our windows developer is still missing…

Polls Archive

Omni-Mad.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:47:16 +0000

[page_polls]

Jobs

Omni-Mad.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:14:58 +0000

Contract

Although we have some of the greatest developers, there is some stuff that we can not do ourselves. Most of our Artwork and Music is done based on contracts.

If you are interested in working for/with us, feel free to contact us at: jobs(at)omni-mad(dot)com

Fulltime

At the moment we do not have any fulltime positions to fill.

Partners

We are looking for partners. Feel free to contact us at jobs(at)omni-mad(dot)com if you want to develop great games.

Status - Andreas

Omni-Mad.com — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:20:04 +0000

The bad news: Over the last 4 weeks I only had about 4hours in total to work on Omni-Mad stuff :( About 2 hours at the End of October and about 2 hours this weekend.

The good news: In the first 2 hours I managed to: a) Get the Mac Version working again (the dreaded Carbon to Cocoa translation). (And yes, I will give you the promised sample code, but first I have to fix some minor things … and that is pretty low on my list right now.) b) Created a bunch of tests for the platform/window/context code. This should make it a lot easier to port to a new platform in the future. c) Cleaned up the platform code … using the said tests.

In the other 2 hours I managed to work on “Crazy Air” [Codename] again. This included the following: a) Level converter, kevel loader, in-game level selection and 3 sample levels are done. b) Game over and level completed handling are done. (About 99%.) c) The build utilities have been extracted from “Crazy Air” and can now be shared with the other projects. d) The asset-build has been automated. e) The font system is fixed. Before the alpha was broken and only one font could be used. f) “Speed” controls have been added to the game. (Including pause…)

That might not seem like a lot, but the game (prototype) is about 90% finished now. Soon there will be some gameplay tests, before I go and fix all the small glitches. There is simply no need to make the graphics perfect if I don’t know if the game will be entertaining. (It is for me, but I want some extra players…)

Test - C++ Highlighting

Omni-Mad.com — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:37:19 +0000

Just wanted to test if syntax highlighting of code works correctly in our blog, but instead I posted actual code from our framework. This is all that’s needed to get an OpenGL Viewport/Window/Screen on any supported platform.

int main( int argc, char* argv[] )
{
    Platform::initialize( argc, argv );
    Platform::run( &g;_application, 320, 480 );
    Platform::shutdown();
}

ps: By the screensize you might be able to deduce the platform I copied this from ;)

Mac OSX 10.6 - Snow Leopard - Carbon

Omni-Mad.com — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:30:54 +0000

I just upgraded one of our development MacBooks to Snow Leopard.

Good news, everything is up and running … faster.

Bad news our framework for OSX is based on Carbon and lots of the functions and methods we use are deprecated or removed. Looks like I finally have no choice and have to port the framework to Cocoa.

Back to square one. How do I open a window with OpenGl support?

Status - Andreas

Omni-Mad.com — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:57:26 +0000

Didn’t get a lot of work done since the GDC, so here is the (short) list:

Added building via lace to two projects. Looks promising, but still has some kinks to work out.
Did some input routing cleanups.
Did some work on the slider/scrollbar element.
Remove libfake dependency from font converter. Should work under “all” platforms now.

Blockers and Stuff:

Up and down is seriously messed up and costs alot of time when building/creating UI stuff.

GDC 2009

Omni-Mad.com — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:59:50 +0000

Game Developer Conference 2009 Europe in Cologne is over. Met some old friends and made some new ones.

The whole thing was pretty exhausting. Listening to presentations, panels and keynotes forthe whole day, networking during the breaks and “partying” all night.

Actually I skipped the Gameforge party on monday, but made more than up for it at the Crytek party on tuesday.

All Gamefolks are crazy. And I like it. Even some weird “sunny delight” stories ;)

Overall it was quite a success. Many good new contacts. Even more good ideas. New ones for stuff to try and to use and some solutions that might solve current problems.

Not much work on the framework or UI this week. I was just too tired.

I almost forgot. We’ll start using lace-build as a build system. It’s based on the same system that we are using already, but looks like one generation further, so it’ll save some time.

Good night. I’ll keep you posted.

Eye Candy - More UI System

Omni-Mad.com — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:15:22 +0000

The filechooser dialog is actually working:

OSX:

The filesystem is nicely abstracted, so we can also browse pak files or networked stuff.

Linux: No box here right now, but it should still be working.

Windows: 98% there. Steffen only has to port 3 or 4 files.

iPhone: Should be alright, but I’m still on the replacement notebook :(

Next step: Make the slider work ;)

Eye Candy - UI System coming along nicely.

Omni-Mad.com — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:24:49 +0000

The work of the last nights has paid off and the UI System is starting to shape up.

Linux:

OSX:

iPhone: Should work, but my MacBook is still being repaired.

Windows: Steffen will start this weekend to do the Windows port. We already have a running Win32 lib so this looks promising.

The fonts look a little dim, but that’s only due to using the COLOR of the pixel to blend with the background. The converter doesn’t support ALPHA yet. Should be a five minute fix, but I don’t care enough right now.

Wiki

Omni-Mad.com — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:28:13 +0000

So far we have been using MediaWiki for our internal documentation, but now we have an external artist who needs access to some areas of the Wiki (Artguides and the specific project he’s working on). Naturally he’s not allowed to see our other projects.

Per page ACLs are a mess with MediaWiki, which is understandable sinc Wikis are usually as open as possible.

Se we started looking into new solutions.

New blog!

Omni-Mad.com — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:37:34 +0000

Well,

not actually new, just an attempt to unify the information that is spread over various blogs into one single location, where you can find everything that is going on at Omni Mad.

About Omni-Mad

Omni-Mad.com — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:24:23 +0000

Omni-Mad is an independend software development studio.

Right now we are working on a generic game framework. The first titles are targeted for the first quarter of 2013.

The blog

In the blog we communicate a litte more freely and less constrained with the world. Here is where we give back to the development community and give you some peeks inside our work.

The things you find here are not reviewed or filtered, so the information might be totally bogus and just reflect the individual authors opinion.