Thanks!

This is an update to my 2009 asteroid shooter.  Below are some of the enhancements.

• New Enemies
• Boss fights
• 2 additional player ships
• Training best scores
• End game
• End game bonuses
• Graphic and lighting enhancements

Good antivirus on devices is very important, especially on windows machines. At work we used McAfee Enterprise for years with good results even though they’ve not remained the best solution. We initially went with them as at the time, nobody else offered Enterprise level support for both PC and Mac. They were always high in system resource use, something I can’t have on my Home PC.

So at home I’ve used VIPRE for sometime as they originally had minimal resource use and gave good protection. Over the years they’ve seem to have lost ground when compared to other products especially with zero day exploit detection. That said, I’ve had good results with them and my machine stayed clean but I’m also pretty careful about the sites I visit.

My subscription for VIPRE expires in 2 days so I’ve been looking for alternatives. The renewal is $39.99.

I think I’m going to give Webroot Antivirus a shot for the sale price of $19.99… It’s and Editor’s choice at PCMag but I’m a little concerned about it’s lack of participation in 3rd party testing though. I like the technology behind it and PCMag did get very good results and reported 2 good third party results as well.

A couple of people have asked for a linux version of Texpac… Since I don’t have a functioning installation I’ve decided to just release the source code under creative commons attribution 3.0. It compiles under BlitzMax version 1.41 and MaxGUI 1.41. Don’t forget to move dmaz.mod to the modules folder. Check the Texpac page for the download..

ugge has been coming along very nice and it’s very easy to use but I’ve run across a problem. I’ve coded the scene graph nodes to have a number of default objects like a vector for position and a rect for size and objects for all kinds of other things. each node allocated 9 object by default. the problem is that on phones, that’s a lot of objects for the monkey GC to handle. I was finding that I couldn’t use a node for a lot sprites or for sure couldn’t use them for particles. I could only do about 400 nodes until my frame rate dropped while I can process and draw a couple thousand if I stuck to native datatypes.

So, I’ve decided to refactor my base node and ‘unroll’ the component objects right into the base class. this will take some time to do, bummer!

I’ve uploaded a version of Texpac that’s been sitting on my computer for quite some time. It has experimental graphic filters that I use like basic gradient and outlining. I’ve also uploaded a quick and dirty port to monkey of my bmx pacimage module… with simple example. I have a more complete version in my ugge framework.

I’ve been having some great success with my framework lately and things are coming together very nicely. I put a bug report on the forum and Mark said it’s an undocumented feature! this is great as that was the answer I was looking for. so that and his recent changes to generics mean I’m going to go back and rewrite/refactor a few things.

I’ve updated the texpac mod for bmx and included a mac download as well.

oops, forgot a link to the Texpac tutorial page… Texpac old tutorial