Recently one of the regulars from JGO, OrangyTang, showed some fantastic work using a technique invented by the wonder Valve, see details on the post

Essentially it allows you to scale stuff up from tiny images, maintaining some pretty convincing detail levels. The magic is in another image thats generated from a big version of the image, storing alpha values describing the detail. As you can tell I don't really understand it, but with Orangy's help and a bit of code I've added generation of these fields into Hiero. You get this sort of result with low quality settings:



Ok, so why is this better than using true type fonts and generating them at run time. Well, it's not generically better - there are cases for both - the pro's of this are pretty compelling tho:

1) No generation at startup
2) Much lower use of graphics card resources
3) Fonts can be scaled up and down without regeneration

Great feature. Many thanks to the hard work of the folks at Valve and of course the Tang.

I'm still wondering whether we can get it to support a texture rather than the plain old image and of course whether it's possible to get back some antialiasing.

Slick has moved over to LWJGL 2.0b. This was for various reasons, but mainly to pick up the great work thats being done on making applets more viable.

See the forums for more details.

The platformer example is now commented up and tidied up to a much more useful state. The src is now browseable (and SVNable) here:

https://bob.newdawnsoftware.com/repos/slick/trunk/SlickPlatformer/

You can also get it as a zip here

So, there's a whole bunch of games being written and more people are slowly coming on board to try out Slick with their projects. Thats great!

However, theres now a whole list of things that needs doing to support these folks. The primary goal at the moment is documentation and examples. There's been a small tank scrolling example for a long time which users have found useful, but we're starting to get into more interesting areas now..

First, thanks to the community members who have decided to get involved and start adding to the wiki in the sections that they're either using or feeling needs some expanding. Great job guys! It's really appreciated.

Second, last night I found some time (around that Applet game, network library, slick updates and real life (tm)) to knock together a platformer example making use of Phys2D with slick. At the moment it's not optimisied and the code needs lots of expanding - but it's a start. I'm planning to update it again over the next few days to resolve the remaining issues where possible and document what the problems are and how they might be approached.

Enough text, an image speaks 1000 words:



It's available to try via Webstart. The source code is available but you'll need to get slick and phys2d yourself. Remeber also that this is just a first cut (and evening's hacking) so it'll get cleaner and more interested soon.

Slick is progressing nicely, we've a great body of useful and productive code which is slowly becoming stable. However, since there's a set of new games on the way we may see the code base growing and new feature adds in the near future. This might make the rest unstable again for a while, but it'll be better in the long run...

Honest ;)

Anyway, let me know if you're working on anything cool or need any new features (since we're in that mode anyway) let us know.

Spent a few hours yesterday refactoring how the internal code works for OpenAL and OpenGL. This is to allow the core of slick to be used as a utility library for LWJGL development outside of using Slick as a whole.

This has now produced a new artefact, slick-util, thats a library of stuff that Slick uses internally to load textures and audio. This might be useful to some one. The javadoc for this package can be found here:

Slick Util JavaDoc

Interesting new API for simplicty includes these two:

AudioLoader
TextureLoader

The packages (JAR and distribution) are available here

One of the Slick users is working on a great looking game, take a look!



Great stuff!

In the past I've used the Image Packer to pack my sprites into sheets. Unfortunately it doesn't want to maintain the alpha of my sprites in the latest project.

After hunting around for 3 hours I still couldn't find an alternative, so guess what - I wrote a primitive but good enough version:



It's in SVN, will be in the next release.