We are also looking for contract work for any type of short to medium term projects. This includes game development, Python, Android, and a wide variety of technologies. Contact us if you wish to get a quote and discuss the work.

Here are the new things that I’m working on for the next release (v2.0.0):

• A new name: “Tower X”
• You will now be ranked against everyone else in the world using Game Center.
• Achievements are always fun. Give me a yell if you have any good ideas.
• A few graphics improvements, including support for iPhone 4 retina display.
• There will be many more levels.

There are more features on the planning board, but I won’t mention them yet. Please tell me if you have any suggestions or problems with the game.

UPDATE: Geo Command development has been discontinued. Sorry folks.

Progress

I’ve been fairly quiet in the last few weeks, but don’t fret! Here are the list of features that have been worked on:

• We have a new logo! Check out @geocmd to see it.
• A new web layout and visual style. Here is a screenshot.
• Font rendering in WebGL. There will be blog post about how to do this soon.
• Partial map scaling, where you can be zoomed in between “major” zoom levels. Google Maps doesn’t even do this!
• Slightly nicer texture rendering with mipmapping and correct clamp values.
• A fair amount of infrastructure and deployment work.

Still Looking

We are still collecting people who want to test Geo Command when we start public testing. If you’re interested, please follow @geocmd and demand to be an alpha tester.

UPDATE: Geo Command development has been discontinued. Sorry folks.

The Time-Lapse Video

As promised, here is the time-lapse video of my screen while developing Geo Cmd. To see it in Full HD, hit the full screen button, then turn on HD.

The audio track is called “Liquid Night” by Redshirt Theory. Check out his website if you want to hear more of his excellent music. There will be a follow up post on how this video was made, so follow @slowchop or subscribe to the blog if you’re interested.

If you prefer YouTube, the link is here, but the quality isn’t so great. For some reason, the text is choppy at 1080p.

Progress

Right now I’m on a loose schedule, since it is difficult to work out how long this project will take. Here are the features implemented for the past month:

• Import OpenStreetMap data into PostgreSQL (1 week)
• Create the server in Python (1 week)
• Ensure adequate unit tests for the Python server
• Server to not allow building placement in water
• Create a Python prototype in PyGame and OpenGL (1 week)
• Begin developing the HTML5 and WebGL client (1 week)
• Render a scrollable and zoomable map in WebGL
• Detect your GPS location
• Draw simple objects on the map for bases and units
• Use HTML5 local storage to cache some client side data

Alpha Testing

I’m still collecting people who want to test Geo Command when we start public testing. If you’re interested, please follow @geocmd and ask demand to be an alpha tester.

def main():
    print 'this runs only when executed directly'

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

I asked on Stack Overflow, but the general answer was “deal with it”. After a quick discussion of the problem, @dsturnbull and myself worked out that it was possible to import a module and use a decorator in place of this if statement.

The module is called automain, and here is an example of its usage:

from automain import *

@automain
def main():
    print 'this runs only when executed directly'

I threw it on github, and Python Cheese Shop and it can be easy_installed:

easy_install automain

How does it work?
The source code of the decorator looks like this:

def automain(func):
    import inspect
    parent = inspect.stack()[1][0]
    name = parent.f_locals.get('__name__', None)
    if name == '__main__':
        func()

Basically it inspects the parent stack frame, and checks if __name__ is ‘__main__’, then executes the function. Otherwise it does nothing, as expected.

Internet Trolls
Interestingly enough, a random internet troll rated the module 0/5 on Python Cheese Shop and started his comment with:

spookylukey (2011-01-24, 0 points):
Seriously? Is this a joke?

1. Your implementation can’t possible work – it is going to do the same if the module is imported as a library or if it is run as a script.
[..snip..]

All I have to say is that it does work and I find it much better to use. Thanks for the terrible and incorrect feedback though, spookylukey!

UPDATE: Geo Command development has been discontinued. Sorry folks.

You probably know by now I’m a fan of time-lapse video, so in the coming weeks I’ll be posting time-lapse videos of my screen while coding the game. I’ve seen other game developers do this and I think it’s great. Alongside the videos, I’ll mention any cool stuff I’ve had to do and features implemented.

UPDATE! Here is the time-lapse video.

The plan so far is:

• Create design document (done!)
• Create the server in Python
• Create a prototype the intitial game in Python with pygame HTML5 and WebGL
• Once the game is balanced and fun, write it for the iPhone and iPad
• Release to App Store!

I will be releasing the Python client to anyone interested in playing the development version of the game. There is a Twitter account called @geocmd for the game, if you want to get some super secret information about it.

I signed up to the Mac Developer Program, packaged Gravit, and uploaded it. Soon after, I got an email mentioning:

2.5 Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected

The following non-public APIs are included in your application:
CPSSetFrontProcess, CPSGetCurrentProcess and CPSEnableForegroundOperation from the ApplicationServices.framework

After a quick search on the net, and some investigation of the code, it turns out that SDLMain.m (which is the entry point for Cocoa SDL apps) included these functions. It was trivial to fix, just by commenting out a define:

#define SDL_USE_CPS 1


Resubmitting the app worked fine, and it *just* made it into the Mac App Store for opening day. It was even ranked 35th in top downloads in Australia!

Aftermath
There were a few bugs in Gravit, and some problems with using the function keys. I quickly fixed up a few things then tried to resubmit to the Mac App Store. It failed to upload. Something happened with either my computer, Gravit or their servers:

An error occurred on the Apple server while trying to authenticate the package: 411594302.itmsp
An exception has occurred: Error invoking operation:
java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.axis.attachments.AttachmentsImpl cannot be cast to org.apache.axis.attachments.Attachments: Exception trying to invoke operation: validateMetadata
Could not connect to Apple’s web service.
Unable to authenticate the package: 411594302.itmsp

I tried asking on Stack Overflow, the Apple Developer Forums and attempted to use the “Apple Developer Technical Support (DTS) team”. No responses from Apple, after two weeks.

So now Gravit in limbo and won’t be receiving updates until this problem is fixed.

App Store link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dark-fighter/id376611717?mt=8
Website: http://darkfighter.com/

The main problem is that my head is not positioned exactly in the same spot every time the photo is taken, so the average frame becomes blurry. I looked into facial recognition and found OpenCV which is a free “computer vision” library written in C++. OpenCV comes with face detection, eye detection, and all sorts of different image and video processing tools. It also has wrappers for languages such as Python, Ruby and C#, so I decided to give the Python interface a go.

Compiling it took a fair amount of work on OS X with working Python bindings, and it was completely worth it. Once OpenCV was ready to go, detecting a face was trivial. It gives you a rectangle for each face that were detected in the image.

Usually it’s pretty accurate, but when I attempted to run this through all the webcam frames collected, it would sometimes think an inanimate object was a face:

There are ways to tweak how sensitive the detection is, but I thought it would be cool to also detect my eyes. Eye detection appears to be more inaccurate, so I made it count if there are 2 eyes detected within the detected face rectangle. The white squares are detected eyes (the label says “in”) and the blue squares (“out”) are eyes detected outside the face rectangle. The eye detected on the right does creepily look like an eye!

Once a correct face is detected, the position of the face is moved to the center of the image, so that my head is always in the center for the time lapse. I filtered out any images that didn’t detect a face or if the face was too small on the screen. I also set it to only pick 10 images per day, ending up with 1280 frames. It took me a weekend to do all of this, and here’s the video:

All the data is backed up to Amazon S3 just incase the laptop dies, so I plan on continuing this project, possibly for the rest of my life! I’ll be interested to hear what other ideas you have that I can do with these images. My next plan is to do more frame-average videos similar to the first video posted.

The code for this is fairly messy since it’s all mostly a hack, but you can access the script on github. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me on twitter: @gakman.

Even though Gravit has worked on Mac OS X for a while, I didn’t get around to actually making a bundled application for it until now. Normally you would have had to compile it from source, usually with some tinkering of the source code and build settings.

The UI needs some more work to make it more like an OS X application, but I don’t have time for it at the moment. For now, here is the gravit-0.5.0.dmg universal binary and a quick tutorial on using it. Don’t forget to hold down the fn key when dealing with function keys, and if you have any problems please tweet them at me. Enjoy!