Thiago Marques' Blog

Hey everyone, after a month of hard work I am happy to release this new version of DT3K!

Most notably, this is the first version of the game with sound support. On DOS, sound effects are delivered through the OPL2 FM chip that should be compatible with most Adlib and Sound Blaster cards, and even some onboard sound chips from the Windows 95/98 era.

For modern Windows and Linux, I have written custom FM synthesis code that tries to stay true to the Adlib aesthetic, but with a few perks like slightly detuned operators and tweaked LFOs that the OPL registers wouldn't allow for. There is also music streaming with OGG files, and all of this is done through OpenAL.

There has been huge performance breakthroughs since the last release as well, with special focus on optimizing the DOS version and its VGA rendering code. YMMV, but overall framerate counts have *doubled* on all platforms I have tested.

https://thiagovm.itch.io/death-taxi-3k

Hey everyone, I’m excited to share a project I have been working on for a while now! It’s an arcade racer that runs on an oldschool raycaster engine.

For the first time I am allowing one of my personal game projects to be monetized because I believe I have something special. It is currently on a preview version and as such it will remain free, but the final game will be priced.

Also for the first time I intend to launch a project for a retro platform, in this case, MS-DOS! This first demo already has a limited working and playable prototype for DOS, but the port will continue getting developed and optimized further.

I am also decided to do a limited-run physical relase, in CD-ROM format with redbook CD audio soundtrack, if only for myself and close friends. Of course, if the project gains enough traction I will take online orders!

MCMap unofficial patch

I was looking for a tool that generated isometric renders of Minecraft maps with Linux support, but none existed that was up to date. MCMap’s latest beta update is from 2015, so I picked it up and started patching in a few of the missing blocks or the ones with wrong IDs. I don’t guarantee it will be totally compatible with 1.12.2, but it seems to have all the blocks I use in creative mode.

You can pick up this unofficial patch over at my website.

16px custom Texture Pack

This is the resource pack I use for all of my maps. I have been working on this on and off for 5+ years, with a focus on having a warm and balanced color palette, with matching colors between wood planks and wood-like materials (like chests, crafting tables, jukeboxes) and matching color tones between concrete, terracotta, wool and glass tints as well. Biome colors are completely disabled.

Latest download link is here!

Here’s a little experiment with my heightmap engine. I took some real world geodata (of Lake Paranoá), treated it a bit and exported to a TGA file that can be imported by the game. The results are actually really nice!

Progress on my terrain sandbox is coming along nicely, by now I’m just fleshing out what the engine can do. The land is getting more complex without looking too unnatural, I added walking paths to all maps and changed once again the vegetation model so that it generates more chunky patches of trees.

Other than that, I’ve also been working on new textures, adding sprites for vegetation, fences and mobs! Their only purpose will be to walk around and make the world seem less static, but they also give me an opportunity to look at how stuff like physics and collision are working other than from a first-person perspective. For instance, I had to properly model gravity to get the bunny to hop!

Excited to share a new project I’m working on! details coming soon, but it’s kind of a mix between Minecraft and the exploration game Proteus with an original terrain generation algorithm.

This is how the music is coming along in the Tetris project.

So for this game I wanted to work around imposed limitations. I created a very simple rule: this game won’t load any external resources at all! Every graphic, background, sound or music must be procedurally generated or baked into code somehow. I am working with the standard DOS font that is part of Freebasic, and that’s it.

It’s not really hard to do procedurally generated graphics and textures that look good, but sound is a completely different matter. I am very passionate about signal processing, though, and on a previous game I had algorithmic music which also generated its own samples through FM synthesis.

This time I am sticking to primitive oscillators, square waves and noise generators. I wrote down the Tetris theme (”Korobeiniki”) in a series of note values and assigned them to channels, then put together a very basic sequencer. Timing is an important issue, but I found running the sequencer code every other game cycle gives a good and stable playback speed.

However, we start running into accuracy issues. OpenAL isn’t the greatest to begin with, so unless I start doing my own mixing and streaming straight to the sound device, notes will sound a little bit rushed or delayed in places. For now, I am just going to try to optimize the game code as much as possible to leave more room for the sound processing.

I also realized another issue when exporting the music to post here: since every note playing event is generating its own sample on the fly, that can significantly delay the playing of the other notes on the same bar! Here is a clear example of a square wave playing before the other channels kick in:

In drumming terminology, that is called a “flam” -- a very slight delay that can’t really be measured or distinguished as a separate note, but changes your perception of rhythm, sort of like a short echo. And since we are dealing with harmonies here, it also changes the perceived timbre of the attack.

After a long while of just experimenting with browser games, I wanted to go back to making a dedicated, stand-alone game. Not only that, but all the previous games I made like that were 3D, as I was learning OpenGL. I wanted to get back to doing an old-school 2D game with a set of self-imposed limitations.

So here is my main idea for this project: it’s a Tetris for the multitasker. You control two playfields at once. If you lose on either of them, then it’s game over.

I am kind of a sucker for punishment, people always say my games are too hard at first and I need to dumb them down. What can I do? Most of the time, my enjoyment out of making games is doing something that will challenge me in a way that other games don’t.

I always loved Tetris, but the regular way of making it harder is just by speeding up the game. That makes you think faster and memorize strategies, but it’s still the same game. What if you gave the player more stuff to do? That mixes things up.

Crazy Taxi is on sale on Steam this week!

This is how I got the Steam version of Crazy Taxi working with my Logitech G29 steering wheel and pedals. This might solve the issue for other people experiencing crashes with their G25s and G27s.

So there are two issues with this game. One of them I was aware of from reading the reviews on Steam, but decided to take a gamble: the game has no analog control support at all! Kind of like Codemasters' Colin McRae 2 mobile port.

Fortunately, there is a simple fix for that. One kind soul posted on the Steam forums a hacked EXE which restores the analog input. He found out the game does read the analog joystick data and keeps it in memory, so all he had to do was find a way to map that memory directly to the variables that hold the accelerator and wheel inputs via assembly language. I have tested the hacked executable, it works and is harmless; if you still have any issues with the game, it is NOT caused by this unofficial fix!

That leads us to the second issue: as some other people posted on the forums, the Logitech is not an XInput controller, so it is simply not compatible with the original game. I didn't know there was a difference between DirectInput and XInput controllers until now, but apparently that's it! However, the game launcher that comes with Crazy Taxi Steam DOES support DirectInput and the Logitech wheels will show up as a recognized controller, but all of that goes to crap when the main game is loaded and is handed a setting for a controller he doesn't recognize, so it crashes to desktop as soon as the menu pops up.

The fix for that is also rather simple: use the Xbox 360 controller emulator, or x360ce. Now, it took me a while to figure out how this thing actually works, so I'll try to lay it down:

I recently found out about wallch, a script for Linux that lets you do a bunch of cool stuff with your wallpapers. One such thing is the Live Website feature, which renders a snapshot from a website as your wallpaper every few minutes.

Now that doesn’t seem particularly useful, do you want to look at your e-mail inbox or a news feed as your wallpaper? That wouldn’t be very pretty.

But if you have some knowledge in web development, then you have endless possibilities to customize your desktop without having to resort to conky scripts or coding with anything more complicated than plain HTML+CSS!

One thing to remember is that this is still a static image, so your webpage needs to be static as well. I don’t think there is an easy way to do a real-time live wallpaper with animations, javascript and clickable links... however, the static nature makes it perfect to script things with PHP on the server side.

Ok, so here’s what I did so far:

From 2010 to 2012 I worked on my own Minecraft texture pack, keeping it updated on every new block roughly up until the halloween update. Since then, Minecraft’s texture pack format has been modified several times and my old packs have remained broken or unplayable ever since.

I am now going through all of the previous versions of my files, putting together the most complete version of the pack, remastered for the newest resource pack format.

There is no new art ever since I left it around 2012, but I did create a lot of duplicates and small variations on older art (like the different shades of wood) to make it more consistent overall. Even if it is not a complete reskin of the game today, I think it blends quite well with the default content where the textures are missing.

My focus on this project wasn’t just on the individual tiles’ shapes, but also on the overall color palette when all tiles come together. There has been lots of jumping in and out of the game to adjust levels, and the color tones shine when you do a side-by-side comparison (pictured: vanilla on top, mine on bottom). To that effect, I completely disabled Minecraft’s varying vegetation tints to retain the original palette, instead of converting the vegetation art to monochrome, the way it is usually done.

I bought myself the Logitech G29 to replace my trusty old G27. There was nothing wrong with it, it still works fine, but I have been abusing it pretty bad over the last 3 years. There was some wear on the leather already, I was using quite a lot of deadzone on the pedals to make up for the shot potentiometers, so I felt it was time to start looking for a replacement before it gave up eventually.

Now even though I was excited at first with the announcement of its successor, I resisted on the G29 due to reviews that dubbed it a repackaged and overpriced G27. However, where I live, none of the other offerings (Thrustmaster, Fanatec) are worth their price more than the Logitech unless I were to get one second-hand.

So anyway, here are my impressions on how the G29 fares with its predecessor!

Hi folks, just letting you know that my website has been updated with new versions of my Freebasic projects, Road3D and Kosmo Rally. I have been working on these updates all throughout the year, but only now have I got around to making new Windows builds - which may or may not work for you, read below.

First of all, I got a new domain (thiagomarqu.es) and gave my website a new look and tumblr theme to match!

Kosmo Rally still had a few features missing from the menu which were added, and the gameplay has been tweaked extensively.

Road3D got a long needed update to the track editor interface (video coming soon), more balanced AI, some art updates and a new menu song.

About the new Windows builds:

Menu music has been disabled from Road3D. I’ll get that to work again later.

Sound may not work at all on Kosmo Rally on 32 bit systems.

Remember when I was looking into procedural track generation algorithms for my racing game project? Well, probably not, but now there’s a new game coming out that is based entirely around that premise!

It’s interesting to see how they are going for a different approach to what has been done before, ditching splines and going for a method more akin to city-building, that gives the tracks unique, “Tilke”-like features.