Tag Archives: axmol

It was time, thought Luxor, it was time.

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I know this is a long time coming because as usual I’ve been quiet for the last year. Anyway we are heading for the Spring Equinox release 2.0.9, and although we seem to be dropping in to a habit of one annual release, I figure that’s better than nothing at all; so I thought I’d take a moment to give a brief overview of what to expect.

  • Axmol port
  • #246 fix crash when recruiting soldiers from depleted stronghold
  • #238 Balance safe area on the horizontal
  • #237 Adjust think terrain position on phone
  • #220 DDR character slain by a lords object is not displayed correctly
  • #244 DDR guidance potentially showing info on dead lords
  • #253 LOM Dreams open up fey
  • #252 refactor for tunnels
  • LoM Novel Scenario

So the big one here is the Axmol port. That has taken some work. Firstly thanks to the team at Axmol for giving me all the assistance needed. And also to Francisco Rosa who is becoming an essential right arm for me. He has taken care of all the Windows builds and installers for some time now, makes sure any code changes I make still work on windows, and created the Windows Axmol project for me this time around.

Moving to Axmol is huge. The las SDK cocos2dx still hasn’t been updated in over 4 years so was becoming very stale with no bug fixes or improvements. This new engine, which is a fork from Cocos2dx being everything up to date, and hopefully secures a few more years of continuous development allowing me to keep up to date with Apple’s and Google’s requirements.

A number of bug fixes. A bit of a nasty crash when recruiting soldiers from a stronghold. Some minor screen adjustments. A fix for not displaying who killed a lord, or how he was killed in DDR. A fix for Shareth keep showing up in guidance even though she is dead!

#253 – Dreams open up the Fey, is a new gameplay rule, thanks to Franciso Ross, that is eyeing the Novel scenario. Basically you can choose to play the game without the ability to recruit the fey, or you can only recruit them once Dreams is recruited. This is experimental as we have no real idea how it will affect game play.

#252 Refactor DDR for tunnels – this is connected to the LoM Novel scenario and is about decoupling the tunnels feature from DDR so that it can be available in other scenarios. See this post here about it.

LoM Novel Scenario will be a work in progress as there is still a lot of work to do. But currently tunnels are supported and impassible mountains around the Plains of Doom. Basically you can’t get the Ice Crown without using the tunnels. You can follow progress here #171 should you be inclined.

They think I am a foolish old man with a hopeless dream

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A spring release for The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge. Version 2.0.8 has hit the stores. There are a number of LoM changes but it’s a huge DDR update. Check out the last post for full details of all the changes. Last thing for me to do with this update is to get it back one GoG.

Unless there are any problems then this will be the last Cocos2d-x release. Don’t worry – there is a replacement plan…

As you will be aware if you’ve paid attention to my many troubles with development over the years, I moved from Marmalade SDK to Cocos2d-x a few years ago due to Marmalade getting out of the SDK game. It’s been two years since I managed the v2 release which was the first under Cocos2d-, and. it was six years ago that I managed my last Marmalade build.

Well Cocos2d-x is pretty much no longer supported. After they released v4 they have not done any updates in 3 years. As we all know, mobile platforms move forward very quickly, and there is always the chance that either Google or Apple will change something enough that the games don’t work anymore, and then even though it’s open source you’ll need to be luck enough that someone fixes the problem for you, or you are deep in to it yourself. However, changes are usually just small fixes, if Apple decide something fundamentally needs to change in the system, low level c++ SDKs are going to need a lot of work. There are already bugs in the Metal implementation that have dogged my port since I released it that have never been addressed.

Luckily, there is a new supported fork of Cocos2d-x called Axmol. They’ve pushed the SDK forward and fixed a huge amount of issues that existed in Cocos2d-x. I’ve been eyeing it for a while but I finally took the plunge earlier this year and have ported to it. It was a relatively smooth transition as far as most of the engine was concerned. Because it’s based on Cocos2d-x it was mainly about getting the project setup file correctly formatted and not much about the code. However there were a number of issues with the OSX port, which is the one I started with, that were probably unique to me. I say that because I suspect at this stage not many people have released Mac games fully through the App Store with Axmol, or indeed Cocos2d-x to be fairl. But the team were fantastic and we got them all ironed out relatively quickly.

I just have some tweaking on the Windows version which is more to do with building with multiple assets, (my projects are setup to be both LoM and DDR which is not quite the expected process for Axmol). But I expect to be fully operational across all platforms very soon.

I’d like to get test versions out soon, and will likely start that process in the next month.

With the move to Axmol I believe that the games will be safe on the current platforms for at least a few more years yet. I actually think it’s remarkable that it’s been 11 years since I originally released LoM on iOS.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the latest updates…