By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-06-15T12:32:14
For many games, in particular multiplayer games, one of the most customer-friendly approaches to monetizing those games is by implementing microtransactions. In recent years, free-to-play has become particularly popular: Playing the game is free but you can buy in-game items for a little money ... read more to find out why Bitcoin might be a great alternative to existing payment methods like PayPal or credit cards.
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-06-07T22:06:08
Yesterday, I saw the iCloud announcement in the Apple WWDC Keynote. At first, I wasn't too interested because IMHO, cloud services are kind of over-hyped. However, iCloud does look really promising. It could be a game changer. The question is only: For better or worse. Personally, I won't use it unless I know for sure that they do their best to protect my privacy ... so ... inspired by the keynote I thought about what would make me feel like my privacy is properly handled by iCloud.
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-04-14T14:36:23
The mobile versions of Traces of Illumination are coming along quite nicely. Currently, I'm doing some optimizations for the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play which has a real game controller perfectly suitable for my game. My iPad 2 testing device should arrive tomorrow - but today, I'd like to talk about the Amazon Appstore for Android and why Traces of Illumination won't go there.
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-02-17T09:42:24
Smoking sucks. Seriously. If you ever went into a location in which hundreds of people were smoking and the air was soaked with smoke - and you had healthy lungs - … then it won't surprise you that iPad and iPhone are also choking on smoke. It's just way too many ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-02-15T00:53:03
Now that was a really amazing coincidence: I was playing Traces of Illumination on my iPad while waiting for the very first build for Google Android - and this time, I completed Level 03 in single player mode ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-02-12T16:55:45
I thought I'd quickly post some results of tests with my iOS builds that I first created yesterday. I'm pretty amazed how well this is working giving that this is the very first time I put Traces of Illumination on mobile devices, and when I first started developing the game, I hadn't considered ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-02-12T16:10:58
Diversity in Creativity - music, audio-design, modelling, texturing, gui-design, story-design ... oh wait ... read for yourself ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-02-12T15:39:48
This morning, I showed a friend the new iPad version of Traces of Illumination, and he mentioned that Bullet Time kind of had not so nice associations. Well, it does have pretty nice associations with ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-02-11T20:20:44
And, surprisingly, it just runs. It doesn't run particularly great (in the startup screen, I get 3 FPS, haha) - but in the actual game, I'm getting around 20FPS which, given that this hasn't really been optimized, yet is quite amazing IMHO. Funny enough, I'm even getting the water effect ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-01-28T23:16:57
I'm still in the process of optimizing the level geometries, in particular apples and power ups. And guess what (revolutionary truth on this channel): Profiling pays really really well. Like, it's common knowledge that in Unity, it's a good idea to cache any of the convenience properties (which misleadingly look like variables) like ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-01-27T20:43:14
I already started optimizing the levels in previous releases but V1.1.2 has a main focus on optimizations, so now I'm really doing the best I can (at this moment, this will change as I'm learning). While Level 01 - The Square was really trivial to optimize, and Level 03 - The Cube was pretty easy, Level 02 - Plus Ceiling had a somewhat more complex geometry and took me ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-01-23T18:06:50
Optimizations of Traces of Illumination are progressing nicely: I've completely redesigned Level 02 - The Square and took it down from 72 objects, 11354 verts and 21611 polygons to 9 objects, 1830 verts and 1299 polygons ... This posting, however, is on the subject of time and money ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-01-17T21:41:16
The networking part in the V1.1.2 release is now pretty much done. I've done a lot of testing and fixed quite a lot of issues, some of which ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-01-15T14:21:20
This is to keep you updated on progress on Traces of Illumination V1.1.2. This release is focussed on two major areas: Performance optimization and minor fixes in the area of networking to be able to ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-01-02T00:44:54
V1.1.1, while being a "minor release" comes with a pretty long list of changes, some of which are really significant. You can always see the current list of changes in thedownload page - but here, for the history, the full list ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-01-02T00:19:30
I've completed the "tasks" I had planned for V1.1.1 and deployed the version the first time late this evening. Unfortunately, there were quite a few issues that didn't go too well with this release ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2011-01-01T16:24:26
Today, after an incredible New Year's Eve (went to bed at 06:30 after a great party and a very awesome "night", got up at 11:30 and finally got home around 3pm), I'm heading towards releasing V1.1.1 of Traces of Illumination.
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-12-25T22:40:25
Design of the Awards-System started almost a year ago, Feb 14th 2010 - and now a first version is finally online. While many of the awards cannot really be earned, yet, the list of awards should already give you a pretty good idea of what's to come when Traces of Illumination is finally finished.
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-09-29T18:39:03
A couple of days ago a friend shared a book called Erebos with me. I'm currently in the middle of reading it but wanted to share some of the thoughts I'm having on this while reading ... so, here we go ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-09-29T15:30:49
Unity 3 was released 2010-09-27, so I can now finally release new Web players of Traces of Illumination. Unity 3 has quite a few great new ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-06-28T12:23:23
Well, the NDA for Unity beta-testing has been lifted as announced in the UT blog ... and ... the temptation to get a Google Nexus One with the Unity Android Pro license was just too great to resist, so ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-03-27T19:12:09
Today at 8:30pm (local time, where ever you may be), it would be nice to join the world in giving a signal for more awareness of saving energy. This is a yearly event and it is getting bigger every time. What I like most about Earth Hour is that you can really feel the world unite - even if it's just for one single hour.
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-02-25T19:25:54
I've previously mentioned that I'm currently working on an Awards-System for Traces of Illumination. I don't want to go too much into detail, yet, but keep you posted on what's going on in that area. So here we go ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-02-24T22:49:08
I've planning to do that right from the start. Now I finally got around to doing it: Get a proper SSL-certificate and install it to the Webserver for www.ramtiga.com.
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-02-18T22:38:45
In order to make this portal more "connected" I have now enabled OpenID and LiveID. This should allow anyone who wants to use their OpenID or LiveID accounts to directly sign in with www.ramtiga.com. Unfortunately, this is not working perfectly, yet: ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-02-05T21:49:23
Traces of Illumination has a pretty unpleasant bug in multiplayer: When you switch levels, the first time you enter the new level, all players spawn in the middle of nowhere ... so ... the level is unplayable. The good news: Everyone equally crashes after a little moment and you get to try it the next time. And then it should work. The even better news: I found it and fixed it. But if no one minds I'll wait with deploying that fix until I have a few more things fixed/improved.
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-01-29T21:41:01
As you can see, I've ditched the V1.0alphaX version numbers and moved back to a more conventional version number sequence. That should help keeping things a bit more orderly than they were during the last year ... and a half ... so what's new in this version?
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-01-29T21:37:32
This clearly is by far the longest time Traces of Illumination had between two releases - so I thought it might be a good time to dive a little into the history so far: The last release was V1.0alpha9b, released 2008-10-12. That's about 1 1/4 years. Until then, I had pretty short release-cycles ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2010-01-13T23:50:08
More than a year ago I did a series of load-tests to find out how many players my game-server could take. My goal was to be able to host about 150 players per server. Unfortunately, in the last of those load-tests it turned out that around 70 players things got really ...
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By Jashan Chittesh on
2009-12-24T12:58:37
What's that? Everyone's crazy with christmas and I write about a Unity workshop? Well, it's been a busy week so blogging had to wait until I had time ... which is ... NOW! ... so, anyways, here we go ...
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