BennuGD for Wii RC1!

It's time to release RC1 of BennuGD for Wii.
You can seed a list of changes below:

• The code is now much easir to mantain thanks to a slightly redesigned design (more on this to come) and is fully up to date with the upstream sources and overall, the port should feel much more stable.
• Finally found the reason to why some FNT files weren't loading: seems like there's a bug in zlib for Wii that prevents it from working as documented (try to open file as gzipped, if that fails, try to open it as a raw data file). Somewhy it ends up reading from the file in incorrect places. To avoid that, always make sure your FNT files are gzipped. You can know that they're gzipped if you open them with your favourite uncompressor and they open correctly.
• Small bugs fixed here and there.

I'm calling it RC1 as I consider it to be ready for public consumption, even there's a problem triggered with multiple Wiimotes that I must fix.

To sum up, here's a full list of things that you must know when porting your existing game to the Wii.

• Make sure you've read the Getting Started page on the Google Code project site.
• Make sure your FNT files are gzipped. They'll also take less space. To be on the safe side, also gzip you FPG and your MAP files.
• OGG might work, but it's safer to use MP3. Also, recode the MP3 and WAV files @48KHz. You can use a program like Audacity to recode your music. Module tracker formats such as S3M, IT, XM... work just fine.
• The builds don't include mod_debug. If you need it and cannot compile the code yourself, send me an email and I'll send you a copy of the runtime with mod_debug enabled.
• If you need a more integrated experience, you can always use the bundled mod_wpad. That way you'll be able to query info about the controllers such as battery levels, accelerometer input, available controllers...
• You can open websites on the user's Wii.
• If something goes wrong and BennuGD crashes badly, you can send me a photo of the crash and that'll be helpful!

Get BennuGD for Wii RC1 from here.

So what now? For the next releases I'm planning on:

• Trying to fix the joystick bug in SDL. Right now SDL seems to give wrong info about the number of present joysticks and when they were pressed.
• Improving mod_wpad to support button state reading and include Wii MotionPlus support.
• Integrating mod_chipmunk into the build for reallistic physics simulations.

Hope you liked the news! Have fun.

Puzsion for Wii RC1 [Updated with video]

After finding the cause to the FNT load bug, today I'm pleased to finally release Puzsion RC1 for Wii.
I'm calling this RC1 because the game still needs some testing and might undergo some minor tweaking to further adapt it to the Wii but to my knowledge there are no bugs and it's perfectly playable.

Please let me know in the comments section if you find any issue with the game so that I can fix it.

Download Puzsion for Wii RC1

[Update] Cid2Mizard has created this video of the game in action:

Thanks for taking the time :) Also, I forgot to mention Hokuty and Amzg for their job in the game, all credit goes to them.

Hope you like it!

As to give you a small progress update, I'll upload a new binary version of BennuGD for Wii later today, which I'll be calling RC1.
Work on Firewhip for Wii/BennuGD in general is going great; together with the author I've squashed quite a few bugs related to the Fenix->BennuGD conversion and the game feels great in the Wii. Hopefully we'll be able to relesae it soon.

FNT loading seems to be fixed!

With quite a bit of help help from my brother, I've just found what appears to be the cause of the failure in font loading in the Wii!

I will do more testing tomorrow, but if this is really working we've killed the last standing big bug in the BennuGD port for the Wii.
Expect a RC very soon :)

PS: @beredezebe And Puzsion is working great now!!! I'll just make sure the musics are encoded at the right freq and release it in the next few days.

Firewhip

I just took this photo of Firewhip running in my Wii.

To my knowledge, it's the first time this very cool game is being run in a Wii. There's still a lot of integration work to do (controls, mostly) and bugs to fix.

I just thought it'd be cool to show that the game seems to be running well with the cleanup I just finished doing to the new architecture (more on that to come, but to sum up I changed a bit the way the whole monolithic system works to make it even easier to mantain and updated the code to match the latest upstream version of BennuGD).

[Updated] This game's just so cool! I've adapted the controls for the Wii in a matter of minutes and spent a few minutes playing it... Things look nice!

Vigoroth le livreur

Beredezebe lets me know that user blabla (cool nick!) has posted a note in the French BennuGD forum about a game he's ported from microlua to BennuGD. It's called "Vigoroth le livreur" (Vigoroth the delivery man, if I'm not mistaken) and you can read all about the game here [fr].

My french is not as good as it used to be, but from what I can understand, this is a collection of 4 mini-games where you must help Vigoroth with his deliveries.

As I'm still busy with my university exams, I haven't been able to test it just yet but I promise I'll write a post about the game after I've played it.

Meanwhile, you can get it from here, and you can see some screenshots for the game below:

I'd like to congratulate blablabla for his game and thank beredezebe for letting me know AND for packaging the game for the Wii.

Also, as I said in the last post, the project is far from dead and right after I finish my exams I'm planning on doing a few nice improvements to the port. Right now I'm using the little free time I have to clean up the monolithic design I created so that it's much easier to mantain. I'll try to write more on that later.

Also, forum user Prg has created a physics module (wrapping around the Chipmunk physics library) which seems pretty cool. I'll try to bring that to the Wii, too.

You can have a look at what Chipmunk can do in the video below:

Happy coding!

PS: Sorry for the off-topic, but IMHO it's important.

Just using the screenshots I've posted above might be considered a copyright infringement and might be used as a reason to close this blog without any judiciary intervention once the new Sinde law [en] is passed in the Spanish Congress (even if the Congress rejected it last december, the two major parties have brought it back to life). They say it's a way to fight "piracy" but it could just as well be used for censorship. This is not good. If you live in Spain, you might consider not voting for PSOE, PP, CiU or any other party that supports censorship in the upcoming election.

[Update] And the law just got passed today. As I said, if you can vote in Spain, don't vote for them [es].

Tutorial in french

Just writing to note that work will resume after I finish my exams (I plan to work on fixing FNT loading, improving input handling and Wiimotion Plus support).

Anyway, if you are new to the project and speak french, you might want to check out beredezebe's tutorial about working with BennuGD in the Wii here.

Beta 3 released

I've uploaded some binaries I like to call beta 3. Chnages from previous beta include:

• Proper support for the Wii Balance Board (see here for a usage example). Thanks to the guys from devkitpro for fixing this in the latest libogc 1.8.6
• Default sound frequency has been changed from 32KHz to 48KHz. Had to do it because newer versions of VLC refused to resample the audio to 32KHz. Also many popular audio programs seem to handle 48KHz sound much better than 32KHz ones. Please note that as OGG Vorbis sound playback was failing, you are now encouraged to use MP3 and module music formats instead.
• Updates from upstream Bennu. I've re-sync'ed many things from upstream BennuGD. Please note that this build corresponds to revision 146 from SVN, and not the current one (190). The changes between this versions derive from the SDL 1.3 support I added to trunk to gain iOS compatibility and I most probably broke something so latest code is not working as expected. I'll fix this soon.
• Bennu can now open websites if the user has installed the (free) Internet channel.
• Some other misc bugfixing.

Hope you enjoy the changes and the proper balance board support and sorry for changing the default sound freq. it was just needed.

You can find the binaries here.