Winston Wolfe Award
Get yourself hired as a Problem Manager (I’m Winston Wolfe. I solve problems. )

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We like your skills, but You must like dogs

Orbital Decay Data

I’m afraid there’s no easy way to present these because the game’s pretty complex, however, feel free to ask and I’ll be happy to help.

In the sprites folder, there are a bunch of  “.xsprite” files. These are sprite definition files used by an internal tool, which won’t be publicly released. But feel free to ask and I’ll explain the format

As for the code, I’m afraid it will not be released in the near future, if ever. Main reason is that the game was sponsored and, even if the game was released 3 years ago, the sponsor won’t be happy to see source code floating around (competition, eh). Also, I’m not able to offer support for a possible source code release, as I already have a bunch of open source projects, and because the source code is based on an ever-changing internal library which requires way to much work in order to “beautify” it for a public release.

The license that the Orbital Decay Assets are released follows below:

“Orbital Decay Data Files” by Stefan Dicu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.pirongames.com.

#1, “Never Stop Learning”, while true for any human being in existence (ffs, even V.I. Lenin thought this way) storms out with an out-stretched comparison of the said words of wisdom with Kirk defeating the Gorn captain using a handmade black-powder powered cannon.

Out-stretched? Well, staying in the realm of entertainment, here’s Mythbusters take on the matter: Gorn Cannon. It’s fun to watch, but to save 15 minutes, the conclusion is the hand cannon couldn’t have worked.

This is a particularly funny comparison because building a cannon is a tech thing, which is opposed to the leadership. Building or standing behind a wrong tech solution, as a boss, is particularly troublesome for the people you’re trying to lead because: IT’S NOT YOUR JOB TO DO IT! (unless you actually have the skills to, which is not always the case, but even if you do it, IT’S STILL NOT YOUR JOB!). Coming to think of, TheDailyWTF is full of such stories.

To push this a bit forward, the final blow  is that the hand made cannon is/was lethal to wielder Couple this to #3 in the original article (Risk is out business!). Does is spell…disaster?

The game was released about a month ago and pretty much forgot to update the blog. But I know you do visit the arcade, so you probably know about this already If you don’t, go and play Loose Cannon Physics, then come back to spill your thoughts.

Credits

Programming, Game/Level Design and Art
Stefan “Karg” Dicu

Character and Logo Art
Alex Mazilu

Main Menu Background
Mike Legan
(I totally forget to credit Mike in the About section of the game. Sorry, man. Credits go here for the ultra-cute background )

Music
Danny Mattissen
(The two music pieces are called Fairy Fantasy 1 & 2 and are used with permission)

Additional Credits
The game uses FlodXM, a library to play XM tracker music. AS3 code originally written by NeoArt, which was ported to HaXe by me (Piron Games).

So, I’ve ported the aforementioned library to HaXe. Grab it from the here.

There are  a couple of small bug fixes and there is a speed optimization for the mixing, by using the flash.Memory class (Alchemy bytecodes, bla-bla-bla). The processor load, using the standalone debug Flash player, as seen in Process Explorer tool, is 4%, compared to the AS3 version which does 8% (the machine is an AMD 3200XP with 2Gb RAM running WinXp).

Apparently, NeoArt, the guys that made Flod stuff, will release Flod 4.0 (soon?). Porting, again, will be such a funny task

Update: apparently, according to Nicolas Cannasse, Adobe removed Alchemy opcodes from the latest Flash player (11.2), so if you compile for this target, you have to revert to using Vectors instead of the flash.Memory API.

Now, if I’d only learn to make games all the other people like to play…