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One of the best third person shooters on the App Store is now on the iPad! Get Caster HD now in all its high resolution glory!
I am seriously excited for the iPad! Hopefully I will be able to get a hold of one soon and check out what may be the future of personal computing.
My good friend Mike has for many years had a pet gaming project called Caster which he has worked on in his free time for graphics experimentation and his own entertainment. And for almost as many years I have been working with him to port it to various platforms such as Mac OS X and iPhone OS (as of this writing I am currently poking around with a Dreamcast build of Caster). Recently Mike gave a presentation we co-authored called iPort: How to Bring Any C++ Game to the iPhone at the GDC Austin 2009 iPhone Games Summit based on our experiences with porting Caster to the iPhone. Even before the GDC presentation Mike and I thought it would be cool to write a postmortem on porting Caster to the iPhone. At the time we thought we could turn it into a blog post or web article or something. After being accepted into the iPhone Games Summit at GDC we adapted a lot of the notes and material that we had produced for the postmortem into the presentation slides. The presentation went well and the slides were jam packed with a lot of good tips and tricks for both iPhone porting newbies and experts alike. However, I thought it would still be fun to use the original material to organize a story-like postmortem.
After a long time coming, Caster 1.1 for iPhone was released about 2 weeks ago to the App Store. A lot of care has gone into listening to feedback and deciding what can be addressed now. It is a really nice update that should be a delight to existing customers and more enticement for new purchasers. Changes include:
We learned a lot at GDC Austin 2009 about iPhone optimization, development and marketing strategies so be on the lookout for more updates in the future with improvements with regard to both technical aspects and content.
My good friend Mike has released his 3rd person action game Caster on the iPhone App Store! The entire desktop experience has been faithfully reproduced and tuned for play on the iPhone with remarkable performance. The game is really fun on the Mac and PC but it really shines on Apple’s handheld devices. The graphics performance is amazing and the relatively complex control scheme has has been adapted perfectly for the touch screen without sacrificing any functionality and is arguably easier to use.
If you are a fan of fast paced action games be sure to grab Caster. I think you will dig the gameplay and love the unique pseudo Mega Man/Anime art style. It is only $5 but there is also a free Lite version with one playable level if you want to give it a test drive first. The best part of all is that the value of your purchase will increase over time as it updates with episodic content for free.
At long last my friend Mike’s game Caster has been released to the world! It is available for both Mac and Windows as a free demo or for $9.99, a full version with episodic content. Caster is a fast paced third person action game featuring fun weaponry (such as terrain deformation guns), nifty music and slick graphical effects. Mike has really poured his heart into the game and it is truly impressive to think that one person engineered and authored almost every aspect of the it. Yours truly handled the Mac port of Caster and it was a really great experience to watch Caster grow up into a full game. I am looking forward to seeing where Caster will go in the future!
My friend Mike over at Elecorn has been working hard for a long time on an action game called Caster. Fairly early on I started maintaining the Caster Mac OS X port and have had the unique opportunity of experiencing the game evolve over its development cycle. Caster has really matured into quite a fun and graphically impressive indie game. Mike has made use of a lot of neat techniques that produce slick looking graphical effects without shaders or vendor specific extensions. This emphasis on back to the basics GPU effects means that Caster runs pretty well even on older systems and doesn’t break compatibility across GPU vendors or even operating systems.
For the month of November, Mike has instituted a Caster fan art content. Caster itself has a neat feel to it and I am looking forward to seeing what people come up with. The winner gets to have their art featured in the final build of the game as well as a free copy! So if any of you out there have an artistic streak in you, see what you can come up with and it might get published in the game!
That means that Language Aid can now grab text from it and perform lookups. It has been a long time coming and it a significant enough change that Steve mentioned it in his keynote at the music event. This is somewhat less significant these days because there are two other ways independent from the Accessibility API that Language Aid has to grab text from applications. However, the fact that iTunes was a first party app made it quite a big omission. To its credit I suspect that this was due to the entire interface being implemented independently of any OS frameworks to allow for easier porting to Windows and higher consistency in behavior between the app on the two platforms.
There are a few major apps that still do not fully support Apple’s Accessibility API fully (Office, Firefox, I am looking at you…) but every little step helps.
The changes included in this round are the usual bug fixes for stability/performance and the like. There is also one major change involving the results window. The results windows are now normal Mac OS X windows with typical window behavior instead of the previous overlay window style. This allows you to put other windows in-front of the results windows instead of them always floating on top of everything. With that there is also the change that you can use command-W to close the results windows in addition to the other methods of dismissal.
Almost all of the feature or behavior additions/changes that have gone in to Language Aid updates have originated from user feedback. I am very grateful to my users for their suggestions and requests so that Language Aid can continue to grow and improve. Thanks and keep it coming!
Deadlock is the name for my copy-protection/registration framework that I have been using in Language Aid since version 1.0. It has worked faithfully for me since then and I have have decided to share it with other developers who might be looking for such functionality or looking to bump up their protection a little.
I have long heard many developers argue that most of the time pirates wouldn’t purchase your software anyway and so you shouldn’t bother putting that much effort into fighting it except for the most basic and obvious of protections. In most cases it just isn’t economical. I generally agree with this but the reason that I put so much effort into Deadlock to protect a $20 program was more personal education and entertainment than anything else. I must admit that I had a lot of fun thinking of how to hack the program, come up with a countermeasure, then come up with a circumvention of that countermeasure and then engineer a protection against that back and forth over and over again. I mostly just thought of the kinds of reverse-engineering that I have performed on other software for entertainment and then researched methods to prevent such fun. In the end I thought I had a pretty good setup of minimally invasive mechanisms to prevent piracy for my software.
Deadlock has been refined over the course of Language Aid releases and as of Language Aid 1.1.1 it was built out as its own separate product. I have wanted to refine it and add more diverse functionality to it for a long time. To accomplish this Deadlock needs more clients, preferably applications outside of Aoren Software. In the future I also plan on productizing my payment processing engine (works hand in hand with Deadlock) that makes paying for and registering Language Aid easy, fast and instant (no serial numbers, no confirmation emails, just instant gratification). I wanted to end this post by citing one of the many insightful quips from Bruce Schneier in order to emphasize that security invasion is inevitable and that defenses are simply deterrents. Instead I give you this:
The user’s going to pick dancing pigs over security every time.
— Bruce Schneier
The latest update to Language Aid includes a plugin that really shows off its power and utility. Version 1.1.3 includes a plugin for Google Translate which performs general language translation in a multitude of tongues. One of the great features of Google Translate is that it can auto-detect the source language on its own in many cases. What this means is that the next time you are surfing the web and see text that is in a language you don’t understand, you can immediately see the translation of it in your native language. This addition greatly widens the potential user base for Language Aid by significantly expanding the language capability from just Japanese and Chinese dictionary lookups. “Your” language is now supported.
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