Posts on Zenithia

Time Slicers

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:52:57 +0300

I was reading back some of my oldest blog posts and found a few of my experiments with time + task management like Timetable Draft 3, throught out the last 15 years I continued this trend of working out new time solutions whenever I find I have free time.

My brother recently graduated and the second day after he was “free” for the first time in his life, and true to form he worked out a time plan that was going to be amazing, I laughed when I saw it because I knew how that’s gonna go. The time plan he sent me was extreme in that it attempts to plan every hour of every day of the week! I don’t think I ever got that far but I did get close:

Migrated to Hugo

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:43:17 +0300

I’ve been using Jekyll for this blog for more the 12 years. It was great at the time, but over the years I found myself getting more and more frustrated with the only constant in the Ruby/Gem/Bundler stack: never ending breaking changes. I don’t really know what’s going on in that space and that’s the second issue I had with Jekyll, I treated it like a blackbox cause I had no desire to get into Ruby and still don’t unless I need to professionally.

Godot GDScript/C# Benchmark

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I found this Godot little bench I created a few years ago to quickly evaluate whether Godot GDScript’s interpreter is fast enough for a commercial project that could possibly target Nintendo Switch. This was important because I’ve been biten by cpython in the past (py2.7) where a simple 2D arcady game struggled to reach 60 fps on certain underpowered laptops to my disappointment.. and GDScript while not python is almost identical in many ways.

Moved Domain from zenithsal.com

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve decided this year to let go of my original blog domain (zenithsal.com) and move the blog to my CMG domain: https://zenithsal.cloudmillgames.com.

I’ve been monitoring visits to the original domain and I was surprised to see so many visitors on a daily bases. My guess is it has something to do with the cheatsheets for tic80 and typescript that I’ve published on this blog a while back. It’ll probably take some time for search engines to point visitors to the new URL, but that’ll be fine as both cheatsheets have been “mirrored” in many other places online.

The Dead Internet

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Little by little the internet is dying. I felt like ranting on a private discord server which led me into a rabbit hole after. This was my rant raw:

man the internet really sucks nowadays, most forums are gone not even in archive, search engines are crippled with ads and target dumb audiences, every piece of software that’s not opensource is spying on us “to enhance your experience”, pretty much every social discussion network wants to be a walled garden like discord, reddit is almost there.. it seems most people have migrated from internet to social media focused on doom scrolling and pointless angry arguing. It feels like LLMs are the only good thing that happened recently.. but wait til they’re enshitified as well and start to cripple themselves (to enhance experience naturally), spy on us and push ads which will happen once their growth slows down

Updates on native mode GL on Raspberry Pi Zero

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

After last post I had a few realizations when I compiled raylib and tested the same examples on my aging Macbook Pro that I’ve revived. The module music example crashes the same way! so the RPiZ/3 were innocent. And the colored cubes example is very expensive to run on the Intel Iris 5100 too which is not a slouch. So I had to redo these two tests to make sure I made a correct evaluation.

Running native mode GL on Raspberry Pi Zero

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve always found the RPiZ interesting due to it being so limited and slow (lol) kind of why I like Amiga A500 or Atari ST.

My vision for the RPiZ was to use it like it’s a low level development gaming platform with a respectable GPU compared to older GPUs before DirectX9. The problem is that modern day linux (Raspbian included) is way too much for this little chip that it makes it almost impossible to use for GUI-based development and the super-outdated and bloated X11 tasks the hardware too much that any OpenGL performance is completely unpredictable and choppy.

Immutable Operating Systems

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 11:59:00 +1200

I’ve been using Fedora Kinoite on my main laptop for about a year now. Kinoite is a spin of Fedora Silverblue. This is the first and only immutable operating system I’ve used to date.

To explain why immutability is so important in my view, let’s take a look at some examples from other systems.

Mutability by bad decisions

Let’s start with Windows. In my opinion the worst wide-spread operating system of them all. It’s basically a collection of bad decisions upon bad decisions dating back to the 90s dictated by the requirements of back-compatibility on legacy features that enterprises wish to drag along with them forever.

GoVolDot postmortem

Mon, 23 May 2022 10:15:00 +1200

GoVolDot is out! Released it a few days ago after not doing anything with it for a few weeks.

I have this weird release hesitation sometimes, I think I’m worried to let a project go, let it fly out of the window into the wild harsh world.

GoVolDot was a very interesting experience despite its apparent simplicity. The goal I had for it besides that I always wanted to remake this game and actually play it, is to run a project through an entire production cycle in preparation for bigger things in the future.

Log 1 Dawn of a new age

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 13:10:00 +1200

I’ve recently decided to dedicate myself to my passion in GameDev and attempt to make it self-employed. This was approximately 3 weeks ago.

I will try to write weekly or bi-weekly updates logging what I’ve done so far.

Week 1: Set my heart a flutter

I’ve been preping this for a while and one unfinished thing I had to get through is figuring out a suitable pipeline for me to develop Android apps for tooling that I want to manage my time and budget.

State Management with Coroutines

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:55:00 +1200

Say we’re working on a GTA-style game and we want to create a behavior sequence for a mission:

Car (with an AI driver) spawns at location A and waits for the player to get in.
Car drives to location B.
Player gets out.
Car waits for player to get back in with item within 5 minutes.
Mission success!

Manual State Management

The problem with straight-forward gameplay programming is it’s made of an Update() function that gets called ±60 times a second.

We are not alone maybe #1

Tue, 04 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve always claimed that I have proof the universe is full of intelligent life (according to our definition of intelligence), and it’s simply that we ARE the perfect example of intelligent life in our universe as there is literally nothing about our existential circumstances that’s special or unique and most of our planet’s complex life evolved within the last 600 million years. Now look at all we know about the universe from its largest parts (galaxies?) to the smallest (quantum particles?), there is not one thing in our universe that’s one of itself. Everything has billions, trillions, and beyond, of itself; even at the scale of a single galaxy.

TIC-80 Cheatsheet

Sun, 02 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This a self-contained cheatsheet I created for TIC-80:

Here’s the PDF

And a hi-quality PNG:

Resurrection and Game Off

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I resurrected a bunch of old projects done for either fun or while job hunting:

Mr. White

This is a demo made to breath life into a mockup screenshot I found online. Don’t remember where I got the mockup from but I like the vibe :)

Demo is written using javascript/PhaserJS directly on the sadly-ruined-to-milk-for-money-by-amazon website Cloud9. I find it infuriating that rather than supporting the c9 platform and the growing community that used it for small projects, Amazon ate the service and now only allow using it through their hyper-complex-absurdly-massive AWS mess of enterprise stuff.

Benchmarking using simplebench script

Thu, 03 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I used a simple benchmark to very roughly compare performance on multiple platforms: PC-6002 vs 80s Computers Benchmark and got some interesting results.

Recently I got a Raspberry Pi 4 and wanted to figure out how its new CPU compare to other platforms so I went back to that simple benchmark I used, scaled it up by 1000x and used it in many different ways on many different devices and platforms. I think the results are noteworthy :) but it’s still just for fun, this is by no means a benchmark that should be taken seriously.

Tetris using TIC-80 on Shield TV

Sun, 04 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Weather not being so nice through this weekend with an upcoming quick 2 weeks vacation where it’s summertime, I thought I’ll do a fun indoors thing on Saturday.

A while ago I set up TIC-80 on NVIDIA Shield TV and hooked up a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, the idea is to do some light gamedev directly on the TV while chilling on the couch. It’ll be like the most relaxed form of development possible :)

Amiga A500: A520 S-Video Mod

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When I bought my Amiga A500 from TradeMe it came with a compatible monitor which had some old-monitor problems related to picture quality. I expected that as CRT monitors do tend to deteriote in quality over the years and also tend to die suddenly.

I was not proven wrong as the monitor did die a few weeks later with a click and a whine.

The Amiga A500 has a video-out port but puzzlingly it outputs in greyscale only.

PC-6002 Sprites Library: SPRITESR

Thu, 31 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

SPRITESR is a work-in-progress sprite library to automate drawing and animating sprites. SPRITESR is written to work specifically with N66 SR Mode 6 Screen 2 (Warka PC-6002, NEC PC6001 Mk2 SR, NEC PC-6601 SR, and NEC Mr PC).

SPRITESR Demo: disk for N66 SR emulator

Your browser does not support the video tag or webm videos.

To run the demo in the emulator, insert floppy disk image, go to mode 6 then type:

PC-6002 C Compiler Frontend: COMPILE60

Sun, 13 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

COMPILE60 is a simple front-end I wrote in Python/Tkinter to simplify C compilation and linking of PC-6002 projects.

Installation and usage instructions are in the readme.md file: COMPILE60 git

COMPILE60 requires z88dk to work and of course a PC-6001 emulator to run the binaries.

Limitations:

At the moment, N66 SR (Mode 6) support is listed but it doesn’t exist in z88dk yet (working on it).
Limited options that don’t include more advanced features like optimization

A few planned features to be implemented some day:

PC-6002 Extra History

Mon, 07 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I expected a troubled commercial history for the PC-60 due to the limited information about it, but I wanted to understand why and I’ve been researching the history of the PC-60 platform in Japan this last week.

My main source of information was the only related magazine I was able to find online in archive.org, IO Magazine. In every issue starting around page 200 there is an impressive amount of technical information about multiple platforms from that era as well as entire source code listings for software and games for these platforms.

PC-6002 PNG-to-BASIC

Wed, 02 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The PNG Pipeline

The first utility I wanted to build was a set of tools to convert any appropriately scaled-down PNG to be viewable directly in PC-60 BASIC.

I’ve used Python for the scripts that convert and generate the necessary data plus the 3rd party tool txt2bas.exe available online.

I was able to draw directly using the PC-60 palette using this palette profile I made for Paint.Net, then convert the PNG to a BASIC program for display.

PC-6002 vs 80s Computers Benchmark

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Benchmark

Didn’t have much time last week to finish working on a PNG-to-PC-6001 compressed bitmaps pipeline (next blog post) but I saw this video on youtube and thought this would make a great quick test of performance level for 80s computers! (mostly z80-based) to understand how they compare to each other.

I used the exact same program in the video:

10 FOR I=2 to 1000
20 K=INT(SQR(I))+1
30 FOR J=2 TO K
40 K1=I/J
50 K2=INT(K1)
60 IF K1=K2 THEN GOTO 90
70 NEXT J
80 PRINT I
90 NEXT I

This is mostly a test of the embedded BASIC interpreter rather than the processing power in these computers. I’m sure running compiled assembly code should deliver similar performance since all Z80 PCs are running at the same frequency.

PC-6002: The Pixels - Part 1

Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Toolbox

The most important tool you need is a good emulator! Here are two excellent emulators with all necessary settings and files as well as a collection of PC-6001 games and demos for testing here:

PC6001VW3: Full featured accurate emulator with a built-in debugger and many useful tools.
iP6+: Light-weight emulator, great for quick testing.

Of course both emulators use Japanese ROMs, maybe in the future if I had access to a Warka ROM chip I could dump it and use that instead. The main difference is language, the Warka had an Arabic font built-in while the PC-6001 had Japanese fonts.

PC-6002: Let's Begin

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A long time ago when I was 11 and lived in Basra south of Iraq my parents thought it was a good idea to get me into computers and programming. I’ve always been a gamer since birth pretty much so it fit nicely.

The year was around 1996 and Iraq was way behind the world in computing due to unfortunate circumstances.

During the 80s however, Iraq was a regional pioneer in digital technology despite the devastating 8 years war with Iran, this growth was led by a national group of companies collectively named: Electronics Industry Company or EIC (شركة الصناعات الوطنية).

Neuromorphic Artificial Intelligence

Sun, 10 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is mostly going to be an information dump. I’ve been researching this for a month or two and the amount of stuff happening out there these last few months is just mind-blowing. Progress achieved from mid 2016 till time of writing this post (end of 2017) wasn’t only impressive but paradigm shifting.

First off, this is not about robots or androids or skynet. This is about artificial intelligence that runs on software and hardware designed to resemble biological intelligence. Everytime you swipe through Snapchat’s filters, you’re running a variation of that intelligence that attempts to find where your face is, match its orientation and scale to superimpose dog-ears or makeup.

Week 45 Year 2016

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m always working on something but don’t usually write about it. Since this week I updated my Jekyll blog so it works again as well as a few other weby things.. here is a compilation of what I was focusing on last week.

Static Blog/Web Generators

So this blog is powered by Jekyll which is a static blog/web generator that is pretty straight forward and supported by github directly as it was actually developed by github developers. The code for this website is in a normal public github repository. Using some special flags github rebuilds the website using jekyll every time I perform a new push with some changes.

Mac OS X: Prologue

Sat, 28 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A word of warning: this is a very long post about nothing in particular, I just felt like writing something :)

Past Considerations

I’ve been mainly using Windows for most of my programming career starting with Windows XP. I also work on linux whenever possible but most game projects treat linux as a secondary platform to port to (if at all targeted) rather than a main platform of development so I always felt like my experience on POSIX-compliant operating systems was relatively lacking as a user and a developer due to less exposure despite a modest history of linux and open source community involvement.

Zenithia update - Rev 63

Mon, 07 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick screenshot showing some progress:

![Basic lighting shaders]({{ site.baseurl }}assets/screenshots/zenithia/zenithia_7102013_1.jpg)

I implemented a common shader library and 3 basic effects using shader model 3 and fx effects:

Basic per-vertex lighting: ambient, diffuse, specular, and emissive lighting. Shader supports 1 point light and/or 1 directional light per-pass.
Basic per-pixel: same lighting equation but calculated per-pixel.
Wireframe shader for gizmo rendering.

I also added basic camera and lights scene node objects.

Zenithia update - Rev 57

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today I worked on the mesh parsing section of Zenithia and got a basic scene-graph up and running that supports multiple nodes, meshes, subsets, and basic materials. The screenshot below is from a collada model exported from blender that includes multiple nodes, meshes, subsets, and textures.

The model is rendered using a simple fx effect and all resources are loaded in the resource thread and swapped to the scene at runtime by the resource system.

Assets in Zenithia

Sun, 29 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Dealing with resources is one of the most complex aspects of a graphics/game framework, this is due to the fact that:

there are a lot of resource types each could be using a different format.
some resources involve complex relatively expensive parsing.
some resource types need to be associated directly with a device object, and that introduces several caveats.

I wanted Zenithia to be a streaming-based framework, so basically what I do is load all data from disk without blocking the main thread.

Introducing Zenithia

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

What is Zenithia?

Zenithia is a Direct3D 9/11 framework that I’m currently developing using C/C++. The scope of the framework is unknown at the moment as I’m developing it specifically to develop and demonstrate my C/C++ and graphics programming abilities.

Where is it?

Here in BitBucket

Design philosophy

Zenithia’s main objective is to simplify and structure Direct3D API functionality providing a higher polished and practical interface for demos and games.

Jekyll.. is cool!

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

For the last two days, I’ve been looking at several solutions to setup a blog for this site, from blogging services like Wordpress.com and Blogger to fully fledged CMS-like solutions running on one of the many cloud-based platforms available today, I setup several blogs in the process to test and get a feel for it.

The solution that satisfies my needs without paying truckloads of money was Wordpress running on my own server rather than someone elses, and it works great! but Wordpress still doesn’t feel like a blog I would update frequently, something is missing.

It's been awhile :-)

Tue, 23 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2013 blog

Exactly 1 year and 13 days since my last post here, here’s an extremely brief overview of what happened in a year:

Left Small World Interactive and Egypt
Moved to Istanbul, Turkey and joined PeakGames (Flash/Actionscript3)
Made a lot of great friends
Crazy work hours (from 9am to 7pm) didn’t leave me much for anything, but the weekends of 2 days were awesome! I spent them all away from computers exploring nature and Turkey, I saw and did things I only experienced in my dreams :-)
Met an amazing girlfriend, spent a few incredible months together.
Girlfriend went home
Left PeakGames

Introducing Project Mystic

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2012 blog

Mystic is a new personal demo game project I’m working on, it’s supposed to be a multiplayer co-op variant of a space shooter, the exact details of gameplay are still not yet defined, but I already put a bunch of hours into it.

p.s. Mystic is the project code name, the actual name of the game is going to be different.

Secon Month!.. wait what

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2012 blog

How… did this happen? its only been a month 0_o I felt like it was 6 months, which tells me I should probably party more often hehe.. but with who? its getting lonelier :(

I am somehow back to working on Flash games, and I don’t even see Unity that much these days, I dig Flash… really… my actionscript 3 library is awesome and I’m constantly developing it, the last major addition was a mini retro game engine which I appropriately called “Retro” (I know I know, I’m very creative), other than that during the last few days I paid a visit to the hellish part that handles automatic pausing/resuming and muting of everything while playing well with Flash events, Tweener, Input, Sound, Flint particles, etc… and it didn’t smell good at all. Furthermore, these days, I’m haunted by this insane desire… to remake Volguard! one of my favorite games on my first BASIC only iraqi-made computer, the good ol’ Warkaa.

First Month!

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2012 blog

Yesterday was the last workday of my first month at Small World Interactive, so much stuff happened in the last few weeks, I met a lot of interesting people and made many new friends everywhere. I’m a little drained and low energy but I’m hoping it’ll get better in the next few days once I settle in my new place.

Life as a student had a much slower rate, it was very predictable and forgiving. Now it kinda feels like a jungle! I experience so many unknowns every single week and don’t really have time to slow down and process.. but I’m trying to enjoy this new life-style to the fullest, and I bet once I get used to it it’s not gonna feel chaotic anymore.

First Weekend

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2012 blog

Remember that interview I did under the influence of food poisoning? turns out I did great even though I don’t remember much of what happened :D

So you are now looking at the new Game Developer (aka. teh new guy) at Small World Interactive, still under evaluation so my job description will be specified at a later time. But this means my plans to leave Egypt are taking a backseat now, and frankly I only wanted to leave so I could work in my field of choice since my options were very limited here.

Globus - Diem Ex Dei

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2012 blog

Epic.

ٌReview Over!

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2012 blog

Well, it has been a very productive month, I successfully reviewed most of the relevant knowledge to my current professional direction diving in deeper and filling what gaps I have in these subjects:

Trigonometry
Calculus
Linear Algebra
C/C++
STL
Data Structures
Boost
Memory operations
Modularity
Portability
Multithreading principles and patterns
Windows API
Direct3D9

On the code front, I did some work on Zamron based on the beta feedback I got via FGL (Flash Game License, a dead website for selling Flash games to publishers) but I’m going too slow.. I’ll probably give it a little more focus this month, and I’ve also been writing a Windows API/Direct3D9 framework that I’ll be using and developing iteratively for my demos, today I’m implementing the Mesh class (D3DXMESH is mostly obsolete, completely removed in D3D11), handling window resizing and device lost state, and writing a Camera class.

The future of the games industry

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2012 blog

Attention spans continue to get shorter, apps start selling for 10 cents, AAA game teams get bigger, but the single player game gets smaller, all become subscription based.

Everyone on the planet with access to electricity releases an indie game, each game sells one copy to the authors mum. (LOL)

PS4 comes out, it’s an uzi with hdmi output, only plays ww2 fps shooters.

Happy New Year 2012 Everyone

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Ludum Dare 22 - Competition Ends - Aftermath

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

This LD is more awesome than the one before it even though I didn’t think beating LD21 was possible, until now there are over 700 games made in 48 hours around the theme ‘Alone’! that’s just impressive.. its gotta be a world record.

As I’m checking the games now, I’m finding truly wonderful games, and since the theme ‘Alone’ is rather abstract, the ideas vary widely.. yes you can still find many generic side-scrollers, but also many innovative stylish games built around a deep concept.

Hello Kongregate

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

So I woke up today at 6:00am, left the house and went to Google’s gegypt 2.0 Developers event, and here I am home again, only 16 hours of googley awesomeness later :D

On entering you see this, it was a little lonely, but stylish

Inside there are multiple “tracks” each containing different seminars and events, and in between there was the chill out zone, and many other activities, and you had to pass through this Google arc:

Building a Wall - Will Smith

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. You do that every single day. And soon you have a wall.

- Will Smith

Practical WebGL?

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

After taking a look at a few real WebGL demos including a quality platformer game, this thing is starting to look and feel even better than Flash Stage3D, and definitely faster since it doesn’t have the bloated Flash player underneath it. And because it’s based on OpenGL ES 2.0 it offers both a familiar API and a fully shader driven pipeline, it actually beats all past plug-in based approaches like O3D.

Creativity and Game Design - Chris Crawford (1988)

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Great talk, how this existed in 1988 is beyond me.. :)

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

The Job Hunt

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

It has been an exhausting few weeks looking for a job in game development, at one point I was talking to 4 interested employers at the same time, I could barely keep up, and I’m still talking and getting evaluated, no solid job offers yet though and only one of these companies apologized (apparently they gave the position I was being evaluated for to someone else, or maybe it was just because going there might take 2 months of embassy paperwork hehe) the rest are keeping me around for some reason.

Interview or Test, Can’t sleep

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Ok so I got “interviewed”/tested by game company X at around 3am today (due to the difference in timezones)… and now it’s 5:30am and I can’t sleep because I’m still running on “MUST STAY AWAKE!” fuel.

I was totally expecting a voice interview via Skype with verbal technical questions and discussions, and perhaps a few tests or assignments. I was preparing my microphone, and video camera just in case, warming up my voice and drinking hot chocolate. Few hours ago I reviewed multi-threading, network programming, animation, shaders, the whole thing..

The Universe is leaking memory

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

2 days of memory leakage hunting, I refactored at least 3 main components of the game (so far) and still about 4MB of memory leakage! who the hell is doing that??! I haven’t looked inside Away3D yet though..

As I’m digging deeper, I started to discover the horrors beneath.. you see Zamron had this life cycle so far:

started as a hello world to test pseudo 3D in Flash
developed into a proof of concept in only 48 hours, the first 24 hours of that was spent trying to get a pseudo 3D engine working correctly
decided to give it a few more days and called it wolf
arrived at a “pseudo” good experience for a flash game, so I started expanding it hoping to turn it into some kind of game, the biggest mistake I did was trying to use wolf’s code as is, I should have started from scratch here.. I guess I just wanted to do it quickly in the spirit of Ludum Dare
Zamron idea was born as my entry for ludum dare october challenge, I didn’t make it in time. But I’m pretty close to finishing it now

One of the worst problems I’m facing is the horrible base that was part of wolf, you’d think a retro fps should be simple enough to do, but as I’m adding more stuff to Zamron, those “simple enough” parts started to grow and get hairy.. which is where I am now, the only weapon I have against this uncontrolled growth is refactoring and more refactoring… :-/

Zamron + Flash Memory Leaks?

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

I’m having an issue with a massive memory leak about 8MB per level in Zamron, even though I’m making extremely sure to remove and nullify everything after a level ends… Away3D seems to not have a hand in it even though it’s what I’m using to render the game.

Going to investigate embedded textures and also look for any lingering events that might be causing this. Definitely had more productive days..

Didn’t make it for October challenge :-(

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

The number of games that has been submitted so far is 64! some wonderfully awesome stuff in there :D

Alas, I couldn’t finish Zamron in time and not even close (today is the last submission day but I’m still working on level 3!), but now I’m so determined to finish it anyway.. it’s personal :<

My development/time plans were sound but the reason why I couldn’t finish it is probably because I didn’t do much work during the last 2 weeks or so, it has been a crazy month… I was assuming that my engineering degree will take = (rand() % 10) + 2 months giving me enough time to finish Zamron, First Defense, and Escapor.. however, I got it right in the middle of last month! and everything changed :’(

The Birth of Zamron

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

This is how the main menu looks like in Zamron Encounter at the moment ;)

Hello World Molehill (Stage3D)

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Hello Flash 11 Molehill! :D

Written from scratch, don’t trust most examples out there they are either using API things that changed in the release Flash 11 or are just written using substandard Actionscript 3 (aka. stupidly)… in both cases you get an empty screen with stats showing correctly.

Setting up Stage3D on FlashDevelop 4

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

NOTE: Flash is killed by Adobe so I expect all URLs listed here to vanish

Since Flash 11 is released yesterday, I thought I might as well try the Stage3D (Molehill), at least to set my development tools if I wanted to do something with it in the near future..

The information out there about Stage3D and setting it up with FlashDevelop is confusing and outdated, google didn’t help much, I followed what seems to be the main method to set up the incubator playerglobal.swc and an unofficial flash player debugger which I couldn’t get to “debug” things, then I just found that Adobe did release an official player debugger and playerglobal.swc yesterday! but google didn’t show it in the results probably because it’s very recent and I couldn’t find a direct link for it easily within Adobe Flex/Flash developers pages today (probably because I’m blind), so here it is if someone missed it: https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

Back to the University

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

WARNING: this post is written while being very sleepy, my linguistic abilities deteriorate during this state, so excuse anything that doesn’t make sense hehe

Today, no sleep, and 7 hours of work, then I went to University to check whether my engineering BSc certificate is … made.. yet I guess, and it wasn’t, they postponed me to 1st of October (3 days from now, not bad).

Wolf is still alive…

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Yes, a 3 day project that lasted.. well a lot more than 3 days obviously. I’ve been logging a few details about progress in twitter for reference, working is going much slower than the initial burst of work because I didn’t plan for something this big :-S

But I feel like I learned things and solved new types of problems, so it’s all in good sports :) here’s a little brief on how things went so far:

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward 2011

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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The most revolutionary documentary I’ve ever seen about humanity, it’s problems, and it’s future, and it actually presents impressive technological solutions.. a total eye opener.. I’m actually joining the Zeitgeist movement~! :D

Wolf Timeplan

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Wolf gets 48 more hours of work now, so I need to concentrate on the basics of the game
I'm hoping to get to something playable at the end..
Processing.............................. .. . .
 
 \\\
I have a full plan dO_Ob !!
 |_|
 
Description
 
Day 1:
 Optimize rendering area 0.5
 up-down variation while walking 1
 much faster motion and rotation 0.5
 Custom billboard class 2
 Enemy test, class/sprite/in level 2
 Player vs Enemy collision detection 1.5
 Player-fire var Enemy collision detection 3
 Enemy can fire 0.5
 Player vs Enemy-fire collision detection 1
 
 TOTAL 12 hours
 
Day 2:
 Test trigger wall 1
 Player actions collision 3
 Triggering works correctly with id 1
 Windows 2
 Shotgun class/sprite/in level 2
 Random enemy motion, Pistol/shotgun working 2
 HUD showing health 1
 
 TOTAL 12 hours
 
In case Day 1 and 2 are successful,..
Day 3: 
 Add doors 1
 Doors openable with triggers 1
 Doors motion while opening 2
 Design 3 enemies 1
 Add 3 enemies to test level 1
 enemy behavior 3
 Main menu, prepare for multiple levels 2
 HUD notification text "You found a mighty pistol!" etc 1
 
 TOTAL 12 hours
 
This is getting rediculous
Day 4:
 HUD weapons 2
 HUD ammo 2
 Design level pack class 2
 Create a bunch of levels 3
 Design 2 monsters 3
 
 TOTAL 12 hours
 
... okay this is the last day
Day 5:
 Add 2 monsters class/sprite/in levels 2
 Monster 1 AI 2
 Monster 2 AI 2
 Custom cube geometry with hidden surface removal 3
 Create more levels 3
 
 TOTAL 12 hours
 
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Day 6:
 Fog experimentation, performance adjustment 4
 More levels, adjust for fun 5
 Throw in some music 3
 
 TOTAL 12 hours
 
Day 7:
 Release, then fucking die of exaustion 12
 
 TOTAL 12 hours
...
and to think I wanted to add spells and magic to it...

Wolf: Follow Up

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

I couldn’t sleep yesterday, I slept this morning around 10 am (being nearly 25 hours awake.. typical) only to be awaken by the gas company wanting to install the new gas line in my kitchen around 2 pm, that’s 4 hours of sleep… but all is well :)

I was kinda harsh on Away3D, that’s probably because I come from a native performance background, when I draw a polygon and watch the framerate drop 0.01 frames I freakout and start running and cursing. In addition to that doing this rapid gamedev thing kinda twists how I judge stuff, I want to get things done as fast as possible (within minutes ideally) and if a solution doesn’t act the way I think it should at the time, it costs me preciousss minutesesss, and then I start cursing more.. yep, there is a lot of cursing involved in gamedev :D

Wolf: Post Mortem

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Well I said I will stick to simple ideas, then completely went over that by trying to make a retro fps shotter with support for multiplayer in 72 hours max hehe

Read the experiment details here, for reference.

This is my first try, I called the whole thing “Wolf” not the game but the whole project. And of course, I didn’t quite make it, but I made something from scratch and by all means it’s an impressive result for 3 days of normal work, it isn’t a full game though, only a good base for one.

Our Little World

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Watching the little gamedev twitter world, I find notch working on Minecraft and releasing 1.8, Chevy Ray is enthusiastically developing a new game with a bunch of artists, John Carmack like usual mumbling about weird things related to displays and refresh rates, I think he’s creating an intergalactic space ship out of old CRT monitors or something.. whatever it may be, it can probably reach escape velocity.. IndieCade independent games festival is announcing it’s finalists! http://www.indiecade.com/index.php/2011/Finalists/ then accusing notch of causing their website to go down hehe notch is like a living breathing DoS attack And Terry Cavanagh celebrating because his game “At a distance” is a finalist at indiecrade! And I’m coding my own little thing, I couldn’t help but smile =) I like this little world, and I want to stay in it..

Experiment: Rapid Gamedev

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

It might be getting old, but I will again mention that participating in Ludum Dare was the best decision I made this year, I urge all game developers interested in the skill of making actual games (rather than just talking about it or making cute main menus -I did both hehe-) to try it and work hard at succeeding, the moment you succeed in finishing fun games within 48 hours,.. the results will surely send shockwaves into your future.. it’s such a pure concentrated experience in gamedev, it’s just beautiful.

Happy Eid

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Hi! This is the first day of Ramadan ending holiday, so happy eid!!! :D

After Prison Escapor, I had to come to Alexandria for the holiday submitting to my family’s demands, and at the same time I was interested in visiting a place in Alexandria (Egypt) called IdeasGym which is a wonderful project that concentrates on after-school activities for kids of ages starting from around 6 years up to 18 years.

Post Mortem: Prison Escapor #LD48

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

If I spend three days every week like I spent the last three days weird things will happen.. I’ve learned so much and I needed those lessons so bad, while I’m at it I finished my first flash game and the first game I design from scratch! and it only took 3 days.. Prison: Escapor.

LD#21 was wonderful, nearly 600 games were submitted, and I felt like I’m competing head-to-head in a race with so many great game developers from all around the world, some just starting, some with 10+ years of experience, some own game companies, and some are considered legends in game development/design.

Timetable draft 3: still going!

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

I’m exceptionally happy with how the timetable turned out to be much more suitable to me compared to the first one, I have been sleeping from 12-8 for about a week now. I managed to keep the timetable going in Alexandria.

Eventually though I started to get seriously frustrated with how slow working on the netbook was. I mean everytime I built the swf file as debug I’m forced to wait for 5+ minutes while the Netbook nearly hangs with all resources nearing 100% (RAM and two CPU cores!), by the last day I would take a break every single time I wanted to test the swf, that was not cool. But I’m back to my working PC now :)

Timetable Draft 3: Day 2

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Fantastic! I managed to keep a timetable this time.. yesterday was mostly spent on the way between Cairo and Alexandria, I met a new friend from south korea on board the train, had fun time with the cultural exchange, and got directions to a few korean restaurants in Maadi which serve Kimchi :)

Second day, today, I worked about 10 hours, I can say I really did work for about 7 hours of them? which is still pretty good, working on my Netbook usually goes well from a performance point of view but this time things were a little extra slow and extra unresponsive, turns out I’m out of ram! even though 1GB should be very sufficient for the apps I’m using, something was not right…

Experiment: Timetable draft 3

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Yesterday, I didn’t have internet, I sat down and analyzed what was bad about draft 1 timetable. The things I came up with are as follows:

It was too restrictive and quite inflexible. Everything depends on how strict I followed the timetable
It didn’t feel like I have a choice for the whole day
Some days I have an errand or two which would happen at a random time, sometimes there is an event or a party that I want to go to, either of these would throw the whole timetable off
There are so many different things to do every week, it causes a bit of confusion, and takes time from the higher priority things.

The only advantage of draft 1 timetable, is the balance between creativity and work. Which I admit felt really good, work is stressing, creativity is letting go. But I’m gonna try not to do that this time.

Experiment: Timetable Post Mortem 1

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

The timetable experiment was not a big success, maybe only a small one?.. But I think it helps me gauge my time better, I’m now thinking what to do next. Boy this is going to be a long post.

Fact is, I’m a very ambitious man, there is so much I want to do, experience, and master, it may take me my whole lifetime to go through just the major stuff. So now, I’m questioning my tendency to do everything and not abandon any of my interests no matter how silly, which seriously impacts the bigger goals I have. I think the reason for this tendency is that when I learn and build experience with something for sometime, say 6 months. Then not work on it for a year. Then trying to go back to doing something with it, I discover it’s as if I never really learned and experienced it. This is really frustrating for me, it feels like I lost all those months and now I need to lose more months and put more effort into getting it all back.

Experiment: Sixth Day

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Today was, am… not work day, I didn’t even look at the timetable.. shame on me. I’ll write a post-mortem tomorrow detailing my next step.

I spent the day researching the american constellation space program that Obama terminated (I blame Microsoft) which involved going back to the moon by 2030 using our new technology. It’s embarrassing that human space equipment in operation now are mostly 50s and 60s technology, very outdated. Alas, it has been canceled even though it entered the final stages of development.

Experiment: Fifth Day

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Today started with a beautiful TED talk about trying something new for 30 days, I was pumped with excitement! :D

I’m a bit out of energy today for some unknown reason, I don’t remember the specific details of what I did during the first 8 hours! but it involved playing guitar from written musical notes for the first time, I got carried away with the practice and spent nearly 3 hours plucking the strings, my fingers hurt a little and I didn’t feel them by the end of the practice but I could have carried on for 3 more hours. Maybe it’s that TED speech?

Experiment: Fourth Day

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Huh!? but where is the third day?

lol, I don’t know it just got lost somewhere, I considered it my day off or something. Which means today is work day! however, not much coding took place.. the reason is that I wanted to update Flash, and that process had fallout like FlashDevelop acting weird (turns out I must update it too) among other issues like my C: running out of juice, windows 7 somehow managed to suck nearly 50GB alone. I blame Microsoft.. again.

Experiment: Second Day

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

A mysteriously crashed Windows 7 which meant the Alarm software didn’t sound the alarm, AND the mobile battery is dead… meant I didn’t wake-up, and when I finally did, it was 3PM and I started cursing Microsoft for how long I slept (for once it wasn’t completely their fault, only partially, but they still get cursed. My rules).

Things went downhill from there, the whole day was backwards timetable wise, I started by spending 2 hours researching an idea of a music-based abstract game I’m planning for sometime now, a producer/music composer by the nickname hektikbeatz contacted me expressing his interest in collaborating in such a project if it ever became reality, take an eavesdrop here: Hektik Music

Experiment: First Day

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Things went surprisingly well! mostly… ehm… er.. I didn’t exactly stick to schedule, here’s how it went:

Waking up like a soldier, I was shaved, showered, worked-out, and started working within 15 minutes of bailing out of bed. Work and creative endeavors were so successful and precise to the minute (and my fingers are killing me after trying a few guitar chords), but I slacked in the AI study part, the two reasons I blame are: finding a russian band willing to compose awesome post-rock instrumental music pieces for games for the shear fun of it, and they are looking for a developer to participate.. ding ding ding proximity alert :D

Student Life and Time Experimenting

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

I’ve been living as a student for more than 20 years, 8 of them in University… I spent about 4 years jumping around majors, universities, and countries. This tends to embed loads of bad habits specific to students, like the habit of depending on university to control my sleep times, or the homeless-like life of eating what you can find when and wherever you may find it (my favorite hehehe).

Running Over Limits

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

I may have mentioned I’m developing my first flash game which will be released on Kongregate (or similar game portals), since this is the first one I wanted something small and simple that would take about a month to develop and polish including actually learning Flash and ActionScript…

When I started working, I took the simplest candidate idea I had, and under the principle of K.I.S.S. (Keep It Stupidly Simple) I overran all my limits.

Hello Kongregate

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

So here I was wondering today what steps are needed to upload a game to say.. Kongregate? and what can I change later? No better way to know than to actually upload a test game.. appropriately I have First Defense test lying around which served it’s purpose as concept grounds.. and.. done! here: First Defense Test

This doesn’t look anywhere near the actual First Defense I’m working on now, but the basic gameplay mechanic involving directing and firing a cannon is the basis on which both stand.