BrainWave

Gift of the Magi

2011-01-06T00:00:00.000+01:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

Today Lucera gives you all it's games and applications for free!

Hurry up and download them for free from the AppStore:

Cristmas Mishap
Hugh's Shop
Geek Wars!
Invisible Runner: (published by Devilish Games)
The Galactic Melody Catcher: (published by Devilish Games)
WeightControl
LittleGame: iPhone and iPad

Christmas Mishap 1.1 available in the AppStore

2010-12-23T14:19:00.000+01:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

We picked up the criticism and advice from the users to improve the user experience of the game, and these are the changes we've added:
- Now It is nearly 40% easier to select gifts.
- Now you can play again from the record entry screen.
- Now the game stores the last name entered in the record text field.

Besides this, we added some animation and sound effects to make the game even more fun.

We hope you like it!

Hugh's Shop on sale

2010-12-17T14:18:00.001+01:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

Hugh's Shop is the game that we developed together with Cheesecake Games and today gone on sale in the AppStore.

Hugh's Shop is a fun game of skill where you have to move our hero: Hugh, so the fruit that falls from the tree will finish on his cart, and thus help keep his shop open.
In the game we will face different seasons, each with its own peculiarities, which makes the game more entertaining and dynamic.

Here you can see a video of the game in action:

Videogame web: http://www.lucera-project.com/en/hughshop.php
Buy for iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hughs-shop/id408244996?mt=8

GeekWars! available on the AppStore

2010-12-17T14:18:00.000+01:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

Today GeekWars! has been approved on the AppStore.

GeekWars! is an arcade game based on: Rock, Paper, Scissors but with two new elements: Spock and Lizard.

The rules are simple, each element can beat two other elements, draw or lose himself with the two remaining elements.

But it is not what it seems, there is not a turn-based game or anything like that, it is a shot'em up where you have to shoot quickly the appropriate element for each of the enemies that come in waves.

The game has exceptional music and graphics.

Here you can see a video:

We hope that you enjoy it.

Videogame WEB: http://www.lucera-project.com/en/geekwars.php
Buy for the iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/geekwars/id408245857?mt=8#

Christmas Mishap is ready for sale in AppStore

2010-12-14T14:17:00.000+01:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

As you will know, this is a Christmas-themed casual game with beautiful graphics and amazing music that works on iPhone 2G, 3G, 3G, iPhone 4 (leveraging Retina Display) and iPad. Taking advantage of the different resolutions.

Let the Christmas spirit take over you playing this fun game with Santa Claus!
We hope you enjoy it and you can enjoy it.

We remind you that the address of the website dedicated to the game is this:
http://www.christmas-mishap.com/

And we leave the link to the AppStore:
http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/christmas-mishap/id405898484?mt=8

Happy Christmas!

Christmas Mishap

2010-12-08T14:16:00.000+01:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

We present our latest game: Christmas Mishap.

In collaboration with Grupo Enfoca we have developed a game for Christmas and not a seasonal adaptation. The idea and the concept are originally from Grupo Enfoca and we have taken part on the development tasks for iPhone/iPad.

In the game you must help Santa Claus to retrieve the gifts that are dropping from the bag, it has a brilliant soundtrack, with nice and fluid graphics, and a global score ranking. Will be available as soon as validated by the process of reviews of Apple at a price of $0.79/$0.99

Below you have a promotional video, hope you like it.

Game Site: www.christmas-mishap.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/christmas.mishap

Sound Track for LittleGame

2010-10-16T14:16:00.000+02:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

We had a great update to the game LittleGame, this time we added sound. In collaboration with Machinet, a great professional, which has been commissioned to compose a melody in the line of the type of game. The soundtrack is great for the game for its simplicity and subtlety, is a music that accompanies the game perfectly, adding fun and entertainment.

We bring you a video so you can enjoy it.

We improved our streaming audio system for iOS

2010-10-08T14:14:00.000+02:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

Currently we are using OpenAL API for our audio driver, and thanks to the AL_EXT_STATIC_BUFFER extension, at least offered in MACOS X and iOS, we achieved a 2500% gain in performance when transferring audio data.

What is offered by this extension?

Basically the function alBufferDataStatic, that allow us to send to OpenAL directly a memory buffer managed by us, so that OpenAL does not have to reserve extra memory (the corresponding malloc or realloc), and make a copy of our data (memcpy) in its own reserved buffer. Thereby achieving a performance boost (around 2500% in the iPhone).

We have seen some controversy on the Internet about using this extension.

On the one hand it is recommended by Apple in their Technical Note: OpenAL FAQ for iPhone OS, but many people (in the Apple forums) seems not to understand well what does this function, misusing it, and therefore do not getting the desired results.

A clear example is to send to OpenAL a buffer (using alBufferDataStatic) and afterwards release it, (which is exactly what you have to do when using alBufferData). In this example, of course, the sound can't be heard well...

Rule of thumb:

If you use alBufferData you must release your memory.
If you use alBufferDataStatic you must handle your memory.

Some bad practices with the use of this function are contained in the blog of Ben Britten: alBufferDataStatic: Why You Should Avoid it, which in our opinion does not say do not use it, but do not use it unless you know exactly what are you doing.

In any case, we have concluded that we are able to reserve a memory buffer and then do not forget to free it, or use it after being released, so we will use it ^_^

LittleGame new update

2010-10-06T10:12:00.000+02:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

Apple has finally accepted our updated “LittleGame for iPad” (since late July).

The problem was that Apple initially accepted the name “LittleGame iPad”, but later decided that this name was invalid and we had to change it. But we are not allowed to change the name of an application that was on sale! Finally, after more than two months and after talking with three different departments of Apple, they has allowed us to upload an update with a valid name: “LittleGame for iPad.”

Hope you enjoy!

http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/littlegame-ipad/id384950602?mt=8

Invisible Runner on sale

2010-09-29T09:56:00.007+02:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

Enjoy the iPhone / iPod Touch version of the successful and innovative online game Invisible Runner created by Devilishgames and ported to the Apple platform by Lucera Project.

Invisible Runner is a platform game where the character is invisible. During the game you have to go through 25 levels full of surprises, using your skills, intuition and some items that will provide visibility to your character for a few seconds.

The online version of the game has been played by more than 1 million people and was “Game of the Week” on the popular gaming portal Newgrounds. Invisible Runner for iPhone / iPod Touch adds many new improvements and features, and the gameplay is perfectly suited to the touchscreen.

You can buy it on the AppStore for only 0,79€

http://www.youtube.com/v/vWEBqK0zeic?fs=1&hl=es_ES

Next project: Hugh’s Shop

2010-09-22T09:51:00.001+02:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

This is the port to the iPhone platform from a flash game, the game is the brainchild of cheesecake games where we will have to help Hugh, our Neanderthal friend, to collect all the fruit you can along the four seasons of year, you must be skillful and quick to pick fruit and prevent it from falling to the ground.

Features:

Powered by Box2D physic engine.
Appeal, from Casual (girls game & kids game) to hardcore players (hard difficulty mode).
Easy to play (RIGHT & LEFT cursor).
Four different seasons with different gameplay (Spring, summer, autumn & winter).
3 difficulty levels.
Nice climatic effects (rain, wind, snow).
4 different fruits to pick up.
Fast and challenging gameplay.
Giant Dinosaurs.
Original music.
Achievements to achieve.
Hi-Score table.
Website support.

New version of BrainWave

2010-09-04T09:39:00.001+02:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

Finally we have updated BrainWave, our 3D audio library. Highlights in this version include:

Streaming audio (AU / SND, CAFF, AIFF, WAVE, OGG).
Improvements and optimizations in the codec system (signed / unsigned integer 8, 16, 24, 32, 64 bits, float 32, 64 bits, A-Law, Mu-Law, IMA-ADPCM, MS-ADPCM. Big Endian and Little Endian. Mono and Stereo).
Fixed some minor bugs.

New versión of LittleGame

2010-08-09T22:20:00.000+02:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

You will be able to enjoy LittleGame's new version with support for iPhone 4 (retina display) and for iPad.

These new versions include improved graphics and a better user experience, especially in the iPad version that has delighted children in all our preliminary tests.

We hope you like it and your children enjoy the game.

- iPod Touch / iPhone 2G/3G/3GS/4 (retina display support included)
- iPad

Geek Wars!

2010-04-15T15:12:00.001+02:00

(copied from our new blog, please visit it)

Soon finally we will have our new game available for iPhone: Geek Wars!
A game that combines geek humor and some action, accompanied by some nice graphics.

Today is a great day for Geeky, he woke up early to be the first one in buying the new iPan. What he does not know is that there are many more geeks who have long queuing.

Will you be able to help Geeky to obtain his new iPan?

Our first app is out!

2010-02-05T13:11:00.003+01:00

(copied from Lucera's blog)

This time is not a game. There were several companies asking us if we are able to do iPhone apps, and then we make this one.

WeightControl is an application to track your weight visually, making it the perfect complement for people starting a diet or sportmen who want to grow their muscular mass.

WeightControl is an application to track your weight visually, making it the perfect complement for people starting a diet or sportmen who want to grow their muscular mass.

WeightControl is designed for people who want to gain or lose weight, or just want to keep track of this. Thanks to the historical weight measurements you will see your progress, for weeks, months or years, easily graphically and can also observe the trend of your weight in certain moments in history. You can also view your weighing in a list, where you can watch the progress of your weight over time.

Another interesting aspect is the application that lets you define milestones to help motivate you to reach your ideal weight.

Finally, the units of measurement and targets can be easily changed in the application preferences.

Here is the link to the AppStore:
http://itunes.apple.com/es/app/weightcontrol/id353410223?mt=8

And here are some screenshots:

Our first game is out!

2009-12-31T17:37:00.001+01:00

(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

2009-12-22T17:33:00.001+01:00

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

2009-12-13T18:33:00.004+01:00

(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

2009-11-24T00:52:00.002+01:00

(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

2009-10-08T20:05:00.003+02:00

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

2009-09-27T21:56:00.004+02:00

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

2009-09-27T12:38:00.000+02:00

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

2009-09-23T22:28:00.001+02:00

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

2009-09-22T22:06:00.001+02:00

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

2009-09-16T23:39:00.001+02:00

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

2009-09-12T14:28:00.001+02:00

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

2009-09-08T17:28:00.001+02:00

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

2009-09-07T17:14:00.000+02:00

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?

2009-09-03T10:58:00.001+02:00

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

2009-09-02T22:53:00.002+02:00

BrainWave is part of Lucera-Project