Phew!

Chopper has been on the App Store for around 5 days now. In that time it has been slowly climbing up the top 100 (currently at ~#35), and seems to be well received with mostly very positive reviews.

I’m really happy with how it has gone. I’m happy with the App Store and how it’s been managed by Apple. I’m happy that no major bugs have been found in Chopper and most of all I’m happy that you guys are happy!

There have understandably been a few kinks in the App Store, most of which have already been resolved. I’m sure the crashing on launch problems that many apps are experiencing right now are being furiously ironed out by Apple as I write this.

I’m currently working on the next release, which will address some minor bugs that have been found since 1.0. I will also be adding the much requested option to have the button controls at the bottom of the screen, and (thanks for the idea Ed) will be removing the targets from the hardest difficulty to add a bit more challenge!

So thanks everyone for your support. I have no sales figures yet, but all up I feel it was a very successful release.

Has anyone completed the hardest difficulty yet?

Today I submitted Chopper 1.0 for the iPhone to the App Store.

Chopper will be priced at US$7.99 and should be available when the App Store goes live.

There are many things that make the iPhone/iPod Touch version different from the desktop version. I hope that everyone who tries Chopper for the iPhone thoroughly enjoys the experience.

I’ve today started working full time on Majic Jungle and FluidMac!

My first priority is Chopper for iPhone, and then it’s back to FluidNoise 2.0. With the vast quantities of time I can now commit to development, expect to see much more progress in the coming months.

The Majic Jungle website has been updated with previews of Chopper iPhone. The new iPhone games page is at: http://majicjungle.com/iphone.html

Huge amounts of progress have been made in the past few weeks, and Chopper is really starting to feel at home on the new platform.

I recently did an interview with the guys at Touch Arcade about the new version of Chopper for the iPhone / iPod Touch. It reveals a fair bit about the process involved in the port and how the control system works.

And now back to work!

For those of you who haven’t tried it out yet, here is a brief summary.

Every computer-based graphics artist should have a tool for generating fractal noise in their arsenal. Noise generators create images that mimic nature, and as such can vastly increase the realism of a CG image, by taking away that hard computer generated look.

FluidNoise is just such a noise generator. It takes a bunch of random numbers and turns them into a natural looking image. It does so with a powerful collection of controls that can tweak the output to create a vast range of different images.

Where FluidNoise really shines though, is in its tiling/looping ability. All exported images and animations from FluidNoise can tile without any seams. This means that a FluidNoise image can be mapped to a 3D model and scaled up or down without any artifacts. A small, quick loading image can be plastered across the background of a web page without ugly seams. For any application where real time graphics performance or a tiling natural pattern is required, FluidNoise is invaluable.

This version fixes stability problems with animation export, particularly image sequences. It also adds a much requested feature: saving the last used export codec settings for next time.

Sometimes, changes in available technology warrant a change in priorities.

That is all.

Since Chopper Assault and Backyard Racing were announced, I have had many enquiries about the status of both projects, so this is an honest account of where they are at.

In its current state, Chopper Assault has a complete physics engine, renderer and UI manager. What needs to be done is to create levels, graphics and AI for the enemies. Backyard Racing is nearly, but not quite at the same stage.

I stopped working on both Chopper Assault and Backyard Racing about a year ago, when I realized I could not do a good job of it only in my spare time. Creating decent game levels and other assets requires continuous attention. Like many other creative areas, a realistic overview of the project at all times is really important for the best quality result. Working 40-50 hours a week on something else makes this near impossible.

So both projects are sitting ready with a solid code base, but they both need a few months of asset and gameplay creation and testing.

My situation is that I am nearing the end of a contract coding for an interactive museum exhibit. I have at least four months of full time work on my own projects after the contract finishes.

My priorities for this four month period are directed towards prolonging that four months by getting enough registrations that I can work on majicjungle and fluidmac for longer without getting more contract jobs to survive. Currently my priorities are:

1. Finish FluidNoise 2.0 - release June/July 2008
2. Finish Chopper Assault - release Oct/Nov 2008
3. Finish Backyard Racing - release dependent on Chopper Assault success. Start of 2009 earliest.

It is highly unlikely that another release of Chopper 1.x will be made, or that iSight Screensavers will receive another upgrade. FluidNoise 2.0 is currently receiving the majority of my coding efforts.

And a final note, A $10US discount for Chopper Assault will be offered to all registered Chopper 1.x players.

This is just a small update that fixes a bug which caused 32-bit tiff export to produce (perhaps ironically) random noise.

A technical description: The function CGBitmapContextCreate requires a flag to decide whether to create an image for PPC or Intel, and I was passing the wrong one for PPC. Also I have some optimizations that align the row size of pixel buffers to the cache line size available. I wasn’t allowing for this increase in row size when passing it to that function.

A non-technical description: I should’ve more thoroughly tested FluidNoise on PPC before releasing it in the first place, but at least it’s fixed now!

Download and release information at:
http://majicjungle.com/chopper.htm

Chopper 1.2 was so short lived I didn’t even get a chance to blog about it!

There were a couple of critical bugs in 1.2 which should now have been fixed in 1.2.1. Overall though I’m pretty happy with this release. So much had changed under the hood that it is not surprising a couple of bugs popped up.

Being not particularly happy with how the caves level was looking I actually ended up creating a whole new look at the last minute. Of interest is that the tiling cave walls in the background were created with a current build of FluidNoise 2.0 using the environment mapping functionality.

I hope you enjoy it.