Retro Review: Beyond Oasis (Genesis)
Posted by Dimitri | Mar 13th, 2011 | Filed under Retro Games
Beyond Oasis is a Genesis (Mega Drive) game released in 1995 on the U.S.. It is a ‘RPG’ with very unusual gameplay mechanics for a game in this genre. As most RPGs, it starts with a backdrop story, showing Ali (the game’s main character) finding the Gold Armlet inside a cave. Then, it is explained that this armlet was used as a power source to fuel the magic of a sorcerer that defended the Kingdom of Oasis in a war against another powerful wizard that almost destroyed the entire land.
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Android: Changing the animation between Activities
Posted by Dimitri | Mar 9th, 2011 | Filed under Programming
This post features how to change Android’s default animation when switching between Activities. Before reading the rest, please know that the code that changes the standard animation be found at the API Demo that comes with the Android SDK. But since there’s a lack of proper documentation regarding this subject and it’s difficult to find a place explaining it, here is a post that helps in aiding these two problems.
So, the code to change the animation between two Activities is very simple: just call the overridePendingTransition() from the current Activity, after starting a new Intent. This method is available from Android version 2.0 (API level 5), and it takes two parameters, that are used to define the enter and exit animations of your current Activity. Here’s an example: Continue reading: “Android: Changing the animation between Activities”
Configuring openFrameworks add-ons in Codeblocks
Posted by Dimitri | Mar 5th, 2011 | Filed under Programming
At some point, when using openFrameworks to create interactive applications, one needs to use some of the bundled add-ons. This post will explain how to configure your Codeblocks project to use these add-ons and how to include the OpenCV add-on to your project. Before continuing, you should know there is an automated tool that helps the programmer in this process, specially designed to easily configure openFrameworks projects and add-ons at Google Code: ofcodeblocksplugin (official forum thread here).
Differently from this tool, this post explains on how to manually include the add-ons to your openFrameworks project. The process described here was done using Codeblocks 10.05 and openFrameworks 0.62 on a computer running Windows.
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Unity3D: Creating a GUI with both 3D and 2D elements
Posted by Dimitri | Mar 2nd, 2011 | Filed under Programming
This post explains how to create a GUI on the Unity3D game engine that has both 2D and 3D elements in it. Some may say that is just a matter of setting up a new camera with a dedicated culling mask just to render the 3D elements on the GUI. While this is partially true, adding a 2D image using a script with GUI function calls will cause the 3D image to be covered by the 2D image. That’s why this post will focus on how to set a GUI that has a 3D element with a 2D background.
As usual, at the end of the post, a Unity3D project is available for download with everything that was explained here.
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Revisiting ‘Star Wars: Dark Forces’ with DarkXL
Posted by Dimitri | Feb 26th, 2011 | Filed under Retro Games
The original Star Wars: Dark Forces was released back in 1995. The game is a FPS that takes place in the universe created by the Star Wars saga. It had long levels and impressive cinematic sequences for its time, good graphics and also featured awesome music and sound effects. In short, it has a great replay value, so after almost 16 years, why not play it (again)? Since this is a DOS game, you will need to use a emulator to play it, such as DOSBox. The game works fine with the emulator.
Running the game at an emulated environment is not exactly a bad thing, but what if you could execute Dark Forces natively on Windows, at higher resolutions and with other improvements? That’s why there is DarkXL, an application that does exactly that, created by the talented Lucius. As explained on the DarkXL website: Continue reading: “Revisiting ‘Star Wars: Dark Forces’ with DarkXL”