{"id":789,"date":"2011-01-18T00:38:41","date_gmt":"2011-01-17T23:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/?p=789"},"modified":"2011-01-18T00:38:41","modified_gmt":"2011-01-17T23:38:41","slug":"penguin-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/?p=789","title":{"rendered":"Penguin Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Happy new year, blog following types! We have been hard at work doing all sorts of magical things, and the first fruits of our labour are now ready. Behold, proper Linux distributions for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/downloads\/?game=ultratron\">Ultratron<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/downloads\/?game=titan-attacks\">Titan Attacks<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/downloads\/?game=droid-assault\">Droid Assault!<\/a> You should be able to simply double-click to install .deb files on Debian based systems, and for other Linux systems, you&#8217;ll have to unzip the .tar.gzs and figure it out yourself. I can&#8217;t manage RPMs yet I&#8217;m afraid. Webstart still works, but it&#8217;s crap, so stop using it \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>I shan&#8217;t link them all directly here because there are many files involved. Instead, just head on over to the relevant downloads pages (linked above).<\/p>\n<p>There are a couple of small internal changes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The location the games save their savedgame files and so on is now all lowercased, and spaces have been replaced with underscores, which makes it a little easier to deal with from commandline shells. Unfortunately this also means your existing prefs and savegames, er, won&#8217;t be where they&#8217;re supposed to be. Ah well. It&#8217;s an excuse to play them from scratch, no?<\/li>\n<li>On Windows I&#8217;ve finally gotten sick of the Creative OpenAL drivers breaking all our games, so I&#8217;ve renamed our OpenAL dll, and now there won&#8217;t be any confusion as to what it&#8217;s supposed to be using. <em>Please note we haven&#8217;t done this yet for Revenge, that&#8217;s coming out in a week or so<\/em><\/li>\n<li>And finally I&#8217;ve fixed an accidental breakage in our &#8220;DRM&#8221; which was causing the games to not failsafe properly in the event Puppygames is hit by some form of low-orbit ion cannon.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We&#8217;ve also added a couple of nifty features which got lifted out of Revenge of the Titans, which work on both Windows and Linux:<\/p>\n<h4>Specifying Viewport Coordinates in Fullscreen Mode<\/h4>\n<p>Adding the following voodoo to your commandline:<\/p>\n<p><code>vx=&lt;integer&gt; vy=&lt;integer&gt; vh=&lt;integer&gt; vw=&lt;integer&gt;<\/code><\/p>\n<p>will put your game into a fullscreen mode where the viewport (the bit that shows the graphics) is specified by the coordinates you give. This is useful for multimonitor setups which fool our games into thinking you&#8217;ve got one giant monitor. You can screw things up completely like this, so just be aware you can hold down ESC for a couple of seconds to quit any of our games.<\/p>\n<h4>Specifying Alternative Save Game Paths<\/h4>\n<p>This is particularly useful as it works across <strong>all operating systems<\/strong> &#8211; which means you can point all your games at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\">Dropbox<\/a> and they&#8217;ll sync across all your machines automatically. For example, add this to your Windows shortcut commandline paying careful attention to the quotes and slashes:<\/p>\n<p><code>\"home=\\\"c:\\My Dropbox\\\"\"<\/code><\/p>\n<p>and similar voodoo for the Linux commandline.<\/p>\n<p>The whole commandline needs to be enclosed in those outer quotes, by the way; hence the internal quotes being escaped with backslashes.<\/p>\n<h4>What Else Have We Been Up To?<\/h4>\n<p>We have also been extremely hard at work making <a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/revenge-of-the-titans\">Revenge of the Titans<\/a> a better game for everyone. This includes shooting a few sacred cows and generally radical alteration to the entire game, which we have fearlessly done, even though some of you will no doubt spit flames over it.<\/p>\n<p>The main things that are changed are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Research is now free<\/li>\n<li>There are another 20 research items, and another (small) building, &#8220;tangleweb&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>You no longer have to collect money from refineries, nor reload turrets. It&#8217;s all automated.<\/li>\n<li>More balance changes than you can shake a stick at to accommodate these fairly radical changes<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Although you won&#8217;t be able to see it for another week or so, I&#8217;m entirely confident the new game is far more awesome than it ever was. At first I worried that removing all the manual clickery was just going to lead to a dull game&#8230; it turns out no, it doesn&#8217;t change the game at all, it just makes your mouse finger hurt less. It&#8217;s still completely mental, but now the difficulty levels are very finely tuned to your actual abilities and how you want to play the game, rather than you always being broke and at risk of sinking ever deeper into the spiral of fail.<\/p>\n<p>In short, <em>you&#8217;re gonna love it<\/em>. Patience!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We have been hard at work doing all sorts of magical things, and the first fruits of our labour are now ready. Behold, proper Linux distributions for Ultratron, Titan Attacks and Droid Assault, and a way to move savedgames around between computers and OSes. Also a sneak preview at the changes we&#8217;ve been working on in Revenge of the Titans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=789"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":791,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789\/revisions\/791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}