Our first game is out!

(copied from Lucera's blog)

We are very happy to announce that finally our first game is out!

Its name is LittleGame. It's an educational-entertaiment game for kids. It contains four games and it's cheap, please buy it!

Here is the app description:

The game is vital in many aspects of social, emotional and intellectual development of children and has a significant impact on academic learning. It is one of the most powerful vehicles that children have to good try and learn new skills, concepts and experiences. The game can help children develop the knowledge they need to connect meaningfully with the challenges they discover in the school.

The children's game is an activity that can be approached from many points of view, one of them is education.

LittleGame incorporates four different games designed to develop different abilities of children:

- Pairs:
  - Develop the capacity of attention.
  - Facilitate a strategy of memory through image association.
  - Develop the skills of classification, recognition and assimilation of concepts.
  - Develop the capacity of short-term memory and to form partnerships and relationships.

- Silhouettes:
  - Ability to object recognition.
  - Discrimination of shapes, colors, sizes and positions.
  - Ability to play models.
  - Analysis, hypothesis, comparison, trial and error.

- Mazes:
  - Develop the skills of children and their powers of observation.
  - Improves concentration.
  - Develops creative thinking and constructive.
  - Increases dexterity.
  - Develops sensitivity, imagination and creativity.
  - Improving the development of perception.

- Sudokus:
  - Stimulates and enhances their math skills, logic and critical thinking.
  - Excellent learning tool that helps strengthen the skills of reasoning and calculation.

Alea jacta est

Finally we finish our first game in time and submit it to iTunes Connect. Now we can only wait the validation process from Apple.

Maybe now is time to end the port of our libraries to Android and submit it to Android Market.

Unfortunately, as we do not have an operative web, we don't have an easy way to distribute our application for Windows, Linux or MacOSX. Although in this case would have to redo the graphics to higher resolution.

In any case, our Christmas holidays begin!

Merry Christmas to all!

We are back

(copied from lucera blog)

Hi!

After theese days trapped in bureaucratic issues, finally we are back to work.
We want to finish our last game and we want to publish it before Christmas. We are conscious that there is a lot of work ahead to be able to finish the game but we think it will be posible.

Wish us luck!

Trapped in the bureaucratic spiral

(copied from lucera blog)

The last week there have been no news because we were involved in bureaucratic issues and we are attending an intensive course in management and business administration that will finalize the next week.

This has prevented us from making great advances in recent days, despite of that, we have been making some small internal changes and we have been testing some of our latest features added.

Unify blogs

As you know we started with 3 blogs, one per each engine (MindShake 2D engine and BrainWave sound engine) and one for the project. We have realized that it is not comfortable for the users to see our progresses. For this reason we have decided to unify all the blogs.


All the next post will be on lucera-project.blogspot.com.

See you there!!

Embedded Tremor

Today we embedded a reduced subset of Tremor library, an optimized integer-only implementation of the OGG Vorbis decoder, thought for embedded devices.

Then, now we have our fourth optional library:

• With OGG Vorbis embedded.
• With Tremor embedded.
• Without OGG Vorbis nor Tremor embedded, that permits you to link with the original libraries or your own implementation.
• Other one without any OGG Vorbis support (small size).

This version takes only 97 KB in size.

Embedded OGG Vorbis

We are noticed that there are some people who are bothered with the fact of have to link with multiple libraries (libogg, libvorbis and libvorbisfile) only for have support for another audio format.

 

For this reason we made a reduced ogg vorbis library subset only for decode it. And then we included this code inside BrainWave. We said reduced because it is only 135 kb in size.

 

Note that the sizes of these libraries are (MinGW GCC 4.4.1):

• libogg_static: 15 KB
• libvorbis_static: 1313KB
• libvorbisfile_static: 28 KB

Total: 1356 KB

 

Due to the fact that there can be some people that maybe want to use these 3 libs for his own purposes, or because there will be some people that maybe don’t want ogg support at all, we made three separated libraries:

• One with OGG Vorbis embedded
• Other one without OGG Vorbis embedded that permits you to link with the original libraries.
• Other one without any OGG Vorbis support.

In this way, the BrainWave users can select the best choice for his app.

Added OGG Vorbis sound file format

Today we added support for a new file container (OGG) and for a new codec (Vorbis).

With this codec you can add great quality sounds with small size to your games or applications.

There are some people who loves this audio codec because its high compression ratio, up to 10:1, and for its great sound quality. Read the Vorbis FAQ to know more about this codec here:

Improved codec system

As promised we have improved our codec system.

Now all parsers & codecs have less lines and more clearer source code and they are simplest to understand. Furthermore, we can easily add more file formats to parse or add more audio formats to decode.

Added .AU sound file format

We are noticed about some people needs support for .AU files on MACOS (or .SND files on NeXT or some *NIX systems). For this reason we added support for this file format.

Adding this format we have realized that the system of codecs could be improved, shortly we will update it.

Congratulations! Now we have another common audio file format for BrainWave and we will have an easiest audio codec system.

Easy 3D Sound System

BrainWave  incorporates  a simple system to position sounds in a 3D space:

First you must define the radius of the sphere, or spheroid, which wraps the listener.

pSoundListener->SetWorldRadius(radius);
pSoundListener->SetWorldRadius(xRadius, yRadius);
pSoundListener->SetWorldRadius(xRadius, yRadius, zRadius);

Out of the defined spheroid, the listener will not listen anything.

Later you must define the position of the sounds:

pSound->SetPosition(x, y, z);

Finally you can change the position of the listener (default 0, 0, 0) and the position of the sound objects that appear in the screen.

Native support for audio file formats

BainWave includes readers for some standard audio file types like WAV, CAFF or AIFF. Furthermore it includes native support for PCM, LPCM, MS ADPCM, IMA ADPCM, A-LAW and MU-LAW.

BrainWave supports mono and stereo streams of 8 and 16 bits.

Sound eXchange

Sound eXchange (SoX) is a great tool for convert between different audio file formats. SoX is a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, MacOS X, etc.) command line utility.
We apreciate a lot this tool that permit us to test our library.

Thanks!

What is BrainWave?

BrainWave is a lightweight multiplattform sound engine for games.
 
In it's first beta version it will run on several operating systems including Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Linux, some others *nix, MacOS X and iPhoneOS and it will work on several compilers including GNU GCC 3.x - 4.4 and Microsoft Visual C/C++ 6.0 - 2008.

BrainWave joins Lucera-Project

BrainWave is part of Lucera-Project