Legend of Grimrock is a modern take on the classic dungeon crawling RPG in the style of Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. Today is the release of version 0.1.2 of the Grimrock Graphics Atlas Toolkit (GGAT), an application built on Qt and the Nvidia Texture Toolkit to collate PNGs into graphics atlas files and then export them as DDS files for use in Legend of Grimrock mods.

It's unfortunate that Apple do not provide a charting library bundled with their frameworks, for I suspect that would save many developers the trouble of finding a charting library and deciphering the documentation. I've come to the conclusion that CorePlot is the best bet at the moment - it's powerful and compatible with both iOS and OSX but unfortunately the documentation for isn't great. So, we're going to go through the process of adding a simple scatter chart to an iPad application.

When I first started integrating Box2D into my Cocos2D project, I found the whole process a little jarring. While I'd used C++ before, this was the first time I'd seen it mixed with Objective-C. This code snippet simply wraps the standard Box2D Debug calls from GLES-Render.h (included with Cocos2D) in it's own CCLayer, so that you can implement it quickly and easily. It also allows you to turn the layer on an off easily as you would any other CCLayer.

I recently ran into the situation where I wanted to call NSObject's performSelectorOnMainThread with multiple arguments. While it wasn't massively difficult, it was a bit more fiddly than I first expected - you have to get your hands dirty with NSInvocation. I've built a category that adds an additional method to NSObject which will allow you to call a performSelectorOnMainThread method with any number of objects as parameters. Feel free to use it in your own projects!

In a game that a friend and I are working on (Knight Terrors) we wanted a system to pre-load animations into CCAnimationFrameCache without having to hardcode any of that configuration. This means that our designer and artist, Jackson Matthews, can add and remove frames from a creature's animation without having to come back to me with a frame list to paste back into the code. I will assume you have knowledge of CCSpriteFrameCache and CCAnimations within cocos2d before embarking on this. If not, you can read up on them through the provided links.

I recently took it upon myself to write a small application, a bit like Photoshop Express, for Android as a mechanism for learning how to develop on the Android platform. One problem that I stumbled across along was with saving (and subsequently loading) my custom images, which could consist of a number of different layers. At the heart of my application were a number of layers which consisted of android.graphics.Bitmap layers. I wanted to be able to save (serialize) this data without simply saving the masses of raw binary data from the Bitmap obje

NSObject is the base / root class for nearly every hierarchy of classes in Objective-C applications. NSObject provides the basic functionality that you take for granted when using Objective-C, such as providing the ability to retain and release objects. From first time iPhone developers to Objective-C gurus, it's hard to deny the usefulness of NSLog() and 'gdb> po' when trying to figure out just which part of your application is causing problems at a given time. NSLog works wonders for outputting strings combined with integers, floats etc. For ex

I'm making this post in the hope that it saves someone from the hour of pain that I've just been through with StarCraft II. I was running StarCraft 2 version 1.02 and have been playing it on and off for the last week or so (it's great by the way!). I figured I would have a quick blast before cracking on with some programming this evening, and was annoyed to find it wouldn't launch. The game would load, I would catch a glimpse of the login screen then the game would crash. I'm running Windows 7, so I tried the following things that have reportedly he

I recently added the ability to an iPhone Application that we have been developing to allow the end-user to send email to their contacts directly from our application. This turned out to be trivial using the MessageUI Kit that Apple provide with the iPhone SDK. Here we detail how we implemented this in our application.

There are many pages of discussions around the internet about whether or not you should use global variables in your applications. I'm not going to to into the depths of these discussions, but I have come to live by the following ethos when it comes to using global variables in my application; Use them sparingly; Having too many global variables floating around makes it very hard to keep track of what's going on. I never use more than one global object for each logical section of my code - even if that object contains a handful of other objects from

Having devoted much of my time over the last few months developing for the iPhone, I thought it was time to start collecting a small library of useful code snippets here on my blog. I'm mostly posting these for my own use, so that I don't have to keep searching Google to keep finding the useful bits of code. However, I'll try to make the posts as accessible as possible, with some explanation where necessary. Launching Safari from within an iPhone App The openURL method of UIApplication is a very useful and valuable method. It provides a quick and

Following on from my previous post about Vendetta Online, I've spent a large portion of my day working on a new skin for Vendetta Online. I've always found the default skin fairly mediocre. While it's nice, it doesn't scale overly well to my 1080p monitor. Now, in the modern day, it's not unusual to have a high-resolution monitor, and to have the radar sprites aliased and upscaled to fit the screen was my equivalent of scraping nails down a blackboard. So, instead of bitching about it, I thought I would 'simply' fix it. Now, I leafed through a coupl

I've been playing Vendetta Online for a couple of months now in the little spare time I have, and I wanted to put a little bit of background onto my blog before launching into some screenshots of the skin that I'm working on for this game.

A good evening to you all from behind a warm mug of tea, late at night here in the UK. If you've visited here before, you may have noticed that things are looking a litte bit different here today. This fantastic evening marks the begining of my revisited blog. There is still much for me to do on the blog design before I could consider it done (adding dates into the template in a friendly fashion to start with). Anyhow, this is all leading up to some posts about XNA programming from dicussions that I had a while ago over at xnachat.com. Anyhow, it's

We are making strong progress on an XNA Community Game title that we are working on and I have just spend a good 30 minutes trying to figure this out. Hence, I'm writing this as a future reference for myself and in the hope that it might help any coders out there trying to achieve the same thing.

I have spent a few hours today trying to use a Remote Desktop Connection from my Macbook to my Vista X64 machine on the same local network. After countless hits of exceptionally slow speed, I realised that it wasn't network bandwidth or even heavy CPU usage that was slowing down my experience. After a few searches on Google and many failed attempts, I found that the following command instantly fixed my problem; netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled I'm afraid I have no real idea what other impact this might have on your machi

Some tips about the plethora of ways to capture an image of the desktop (or parts of the desktop) on a Mac Book / Apple's OSX.

Mono allows users of Linux and OSX to run .NET Applications written in C# and Visual Basic on their computers. While not perfect - it opens up a whole batch of applications to users of Linux and OSX.

My initial experiences with a MacBook and the infuriating lack of a hash key unless you know the hidden knowledge of the mac.

After purchasing a Vodafone v1605 (aka. the HTC TyTn / Hermes), I tell my story of getting my new toy to work on the 3 Mobile Network - with Planet 3 and all.