Pixbros preview release!

It has been quite a while since I told you I was working with Pix Juegos' Pixel to bring you a preview release of Pix Bros for Wii, but it's already arrived for your gaming pleasure!

As I said earlier today, it's still a preview so be sure to understand that what we're releasing today is only a preview of the game: when the final version is released, bugs will get fixed and the game will look much prettier. It is, however, a very playable version of the game: It's running at 32bpp, with MP3 music and it will even open the designer's group website when asked to! (more on this on a later post. If you want to give it a try, give an eye to the game's code).

Today's preview does have a few limitations, though. Fonts are not working as one might expect them to, so we've released a version of the game that uses the default system font. That font is basically available for debugging purposes, so it is barely visible and looks plain wrong.
This game also showed some issues with the joystick handling routines which might be caused by the SDL port. To avoid them, only one player can play at any given time, sorry for that.
On a final note, the game seems to slow down a bit at certain points. This is caused by it running at 32bpp: looks like we hit the Wii's limit when processing graphics without its GPU. In case we can't solve this, we might have to release the final version with 16bpp mode set by default.

On the bright side of life, you'll enjoy the latest and greatest version of Pix Juegos' game, which has gone through major improvement since its last release. I can promise you the game is really, really entertaining. I've been waiting for it on the Wii for a long time :)

For the rest, the game is completely playable. I haven't finished the game (those Rarutos keep killing me...) but it seem pretty rock-solid. It's really encouraging to see that :)

Both Pix Juegos and me wish you an absurd level of fun, but remember this is only a preview and things might be broken. If that's the case, please let us know so that we can fix them.

The screen grab below shows the state of an early build of the game (it's really the same one as shown earlier). 

Get the game from here.

WIP sign for your games

When we released the EEEEK! EEEEEK! HOOOOOOK!!! preview, many people liked it and took it for what it was with bugs and all.
Many people downloaded it and found it playable to the point that some user uploaded the preview to the Homebrew Browser, the author of the game grew concerned that many people would play a pre-release version of the game that contained known bugs and featured no notification on that regard.

The final version of the game for the Wii was released a few days later with many enhancements and all the known bugs fixed, but we were left with the doubt of whether many people wouldn't upgrade from the pre-released version just because they thought it represented the overall quality of the game.

That's why, for the launch of a Pix Bros preview (coming later today) I've created a pretty straightforward sign, which can be seen below:

And here's the original SVG image. It probably won't display correctly in your browser, it works just fine with Inkscape. Feel free to add it to your projects (even if they're not Wii-related) and treat the image as public domain.

For example, here's what Pixel you'll see in Pix Bros when you download the preview:

Enough, will be back with some real news (Pix Bros pre-release, a code status update and I'll tell you how to open web addresses from your games directly in your Wii!) later today.

On yesterday's post

Yesterday, I posted an entry with a photo of Pixbros working in a Wii with the latest SVN build.
There are a few bugs to fix yet, but there are some things that it's worth noting:

• The game is working pretty well in 32bpp mode.
• scale_resolution seems to not work at all in the Wii, don't try to use it yet :)
• In the photo, you can see there are two characters playing. This is, in fact, a bug as there was only one controller present. Libjoy was reporting incorrect values for joysticks that weren't present. I've uploaded some changes to the SVN repo and this issue seems to be fixed.
• You might notice that the score counter is blank. There seems to be some problem with FNT loading or displaying. I'll have a look at it as soon as possible.
• The game is using music in MP3, as recommended, and those are encoded @48KHz, which is the new default frequency for BennuGD games in the Wii, starting with the next beta release.

If you really, really, want to give it a try, you can compile the latest BennuGD for the Wii from the SVN repo yourself and then compile pixbros from their SVN repo, otherwise you can just wait a little bit; it shouldn't take us long to have everything ready for release!

This game is pretty big and uses many features from BennuGD, so I'm pretty excited to see it's working that well with very little effort on the game author's side. So thanks him a lot for taking the time to make the game Wii compatible.

PS: The game is so cool that it's even been featured in Spain's public TV (Pixbros appears @ 1:21)

PS2: As the cow points ot, there are now more than 20000 users of BennuGD for the Wii. Future game release will only make that number bigger and bigger, so big thanks to everybody!

Pixbros

I asked for it long ago and, well...

Have fun!

PS: It's not ready yet, but it's definitely working quite well. It'll arrive soon!

Pixdash

The guys from Pixjuegos have released a BennuGD tech demo for a platform game. It's still in a very early phase of development and I really hope that the graphics are not final but most of the gameplay is there and working well.

The interesting part is that all their code is open source and can be retrieved from their project page, so you can use it as an starting point to create your own platform games or as an entry point for BennuGD programming.

In case you want to have a look, a Cid2Mizard from Nintendomax has been kind enough to upload a video of the gameplay and upload it to Youtube:

Thanks, Pixjuegos! But you know that's not the game I'm expecting from you ;)

More than 12000 users!

According to these stats more than 12000 people have, as of this writing, downloaded a copy of any of the games that are available for Wii through the Homebrew Browser!

Most of them have downloaded the impressive "King of Fighters: Flames of Courage" game and as more great BennuGD games get packaged for the Wii that figure should just keep increasing.

I shall soon package and upload Puzsion, you can see it running on my Wii below:

I'm also eager to get Pixjuegos' excellent PixPang and Pixbros running on the Wii again, I really enjoy playing them. The author is busy porting his game to the Caanoo right now, but he's promised he'll get the games running on the Wii ASAP.

Pixbros working on the Wii

A shortish video that shows how the port is doing. You can see Pixjuegos' Pixbros working on the Wii. As you can see in the video, some colors are now showing well (I did some digging and some things got fixed) but I must work on others.

Judge for yourself: