Hostable

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Aaron Weiss

I recently began work on a small project that would help develop the technologies necessary to create a much larger idea. That small project was completed fairly recently, but I’d like to give a link to it here and describe it in more detail. The project can be found here on my Hostable account. The project has been named 2640, as that is the number I received for my Hostable account. Essentially, 2640 allowed me to explore the possibility of using Google as an OpenID provider as opposed to making an entire registration and login system by myself. Beyond that, I will also be able to do similar things with other OpenID providers in the future. I definitely like how simple it is to implement once you understand it and how versatile it is, in that I don’t have to develop a full, secure user system. It’s also easier on the users because they can spend less time filling out forms and more time using my service. I’d like to mention that the large, possibly open source, project will definitely be using OpenID for it’s account system. There may also be a second project, equally large if not larger, that may crop up after a stable iteration of the first is released. You should expect more information about both projects in the days and weeks to come. However, I’m going to New Mexico tomorrow, and then St. Louis the following week, and may not get as much of a chance as I’d like to work on these projects. However, those interested should definitely keep an eye out.

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Purpose

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Aaron Weiss

It has come to my attention that apparently the purpose of Deviant Core may be misunderstood. I do not in any way put making money as a priority for this site. The website is intended to be a release front-end for what is almost entirely (or at the moment, is entirely) freeware. I believe that at this moment in time, trying to monetize something such as this would be a waste of my efforts and would be counterproductive to my goal. All of my projects, at least for the time being, will continue to be released completely free of charge. If you like what I do, you can feel free to donate to me, but I absolutely don’t require it. On a less related note, I have some new ideas for some web services that you should expect to be cropping up soon. There may even be something larger, and perhaps open source, on the horizon. Keep an eye out, even though I have a tendency to not post very often here.

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Breezr

Posted on January 2, 2011 by Aaron Weiss

Yet again, it’s been quite awhile since I last wrote something. I’ve been meaning to write something up for the past two weeks or so but I hadn’t gotten around to it until now. Ether has been placed on a temporary but indefinite hold as I search for an artist to make the sprites for it. However, if it is to be completed, I’ll most likely spend some time rewriting the engine. More importantly, I’m starting a new project which can and hopefully will be completed without the need for an artist. This is because the chosen art style is based on simple polygons making it possible for me to complete the project on my own. I’ve created a git project for it on Codaset which you can find here. The game itself is a new twist on generator defense games but I can’t say much more than that at this time. However, there’s nothing to worry about as I have every intention of finishing this project and have laid out and am continuing to lay out a solid direction for development. The project is starting to build up a small team but for the most part, I will be spearheading the development. I’ll also try to make sure the wiki is updated and contains information whether it be myself or another project member managing it. More information will be released about the game at a later date, but as of now I’m trying to keep things within the team to avoid building up expectations unnecessarily.

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Ether Update

Posted on October 25, 2010 by Aaron Weiss

It’s been quite some time since I mentioned anything about Ether, or wrote anything for that matter. Progress on Ether has been coming along rather slowly as I’m currently in search of a pixel artist to replace the current batch of sprites taken from Pokemon. Along with school, I haven’t had a particularly large amount of time to work on it. I pushed back the estimated release date to Quarter 2, 2011, hoping that I’ll be able to find someone by then. I’ve put in a lot of work on the player and I’m trying to make sure everything is cleanly coded to make future updates easier. The development at the moment is sticking to optimizations as I’m fresh out of ideas. Suggestions are more than welcome, as always. I went ahead and replaced the old, small player sprites with a new set which I think looks a lot better. You can take a look at that here. Movement is working now but it has some issues that I’m working on fixing and I’m in the process of regulating the animation speed with the physical movement speed. There’s still a lot of work to be done but a beta version may be ready as soon as Quarter 1, 2011. Let’s just hope I manage to stop playing Minecraft long enough to get things done.

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Deviant Core Redesigned

Posted on September 6, 2010 by Aaron Weiss

I have redesigned Deviant Core yet again. This time the design features a totally new color scheme which actually matches as well as some design changes. The back-end has also been replaced. I’ll be continuing updates on the site over the next few days. Expect some cool new features and some more news on future projects and the upcoming game codenamed Ether. I’ll be sure to add a feedback page that will allow users to contact me with questions, comments, and concerns about both the site itself and my various other projects. There’s some other cool stuff planned as well but I’m going to keep it a secret for now. Check back soon for more updates!

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Project Ether

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Aaron Weiss

I recently started work on a graphical roleplaying game using SFML. It first began with a technical demo that showed the drawing of a single map featured numerous tiles as well as a working message box implementation. Soon after I began the technical demo, I started a repository with Git using Beanstalk. After a few revisions where I was trying to prepare the demo to be converted into an actual engine, I decided to scrap most of the code and instead rewrite everything. It took about two days to get this conversion done but the engine is now up and working. I was on vacation so there wasn’t much time to be working on it, but there were some minor improvements with the conversion. I fixed up the font loading and the fonts now appear crisper and less blurred. There were some tweets from my twitter account that featured images of my progress and those are still available. It should be noted however that I now use Myriad Pro as my default font for the message box and not Arial as seen in the latest screenshot. Building a load order for fonts just in case is on my to-do list as well but is not a priority at the moment. Expect a Beta release in the near future. I’ll be working on the player next. Keep an eye out on my twitter for more information. Also, please note that Ether isn’t the name of the game but rather the name of the project. Ether is a codename as well as a placeholder for the real game’s name. I’m open to suggestions.

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Nethra Beta

Posted on July 17, 2010 by Aaron Weiss

After putting Nethra on hold for a little over a week while I worked on other things, I’ve finally gotten back to it and it’s now in a state where it’s ready to have a beta. The source code is released with the beta so that others can contribute to Nethra before release. Some contributions may be made by wobbier for example. For those who don’t care about any of this and just want to get playing the beta, you can download it in the form of either a 7zip or a standard zip archive. The archive contains the source for Nethra, a pre-compiled executable for Windows, Linux, and OS X, the license for the software, the readme, and the change log. I highly recommend reading the readme as it includes some extra information about Nethra. You can also view it inside of the application before you select your campaign in the main menu. This beta version features two campaigns, Tundra and Lone Ranger. I already talked about Tundra and I’d recommend just playing Lone Ranger to figure it out. This build of Nethra is 2,547 lines of pure C++. Future versions may contain an optional Python tool to check for updates. You can send any ideas or bugs to aaron@deviant-core.net and you can expect a reply within 24 hours. I’ll do my best to incorporate suggestions and to squash bugs as fast as possible. Please remember that this is a beta build and accordingly may have bugs or be lacking in features. Thanks for reading, check back soon!

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Pushed Back

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Aaron Weiss

Nethra has temporarily been pushed back due to the arrival of a more urgent project. Nethra will be released for certain before the end of the month but is postponed as work is put into projects of more important matter. If you were looking forward to Nethra, please don’t fret. It will be finished, I promise. I was just recruited recently to design a website for an up and coming Xbox Live clan though and as a result, I’ll be working on that for some time. Nethra’s development for Windows came to a screeching halt though when I went to compile it on Windows. I’ll have to look into some libraries for coloring the text on Windows as the method I’m using for the POSIX versions (OS X and Linux) does not work. Aside from that, Windows throws some odd exceptions but I’ll get by that issue. Nethra may see an initial release for OS X and Linux followed by a delayed release of Windows though if I find the work too daunting. If it is complete for a platform, I may as well release it anyways. I’m sorry about this inconvenience for anyone who was looking forward to Nethra, but you have my word that I will be finishing it before he end of the month. Thanks for reading and stay on the look out for more updates.

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Nethra

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Aaron Weiss

Remember that new project I mentioned? Here it is, Nethra. I’m sure you could’ve guessed it based on my last post, it’s a text-based roleplaying game. It’s another successor to ReFRACT. The main point of it is to see how my coding style has changed and things like that, so I decided to redo a concept I’ve already done. This post unfortunately isn’t a release for Nethra but an explanation. I’ve been working for a few days now on it and it’s turning out pretty nicely. I’m making steady progress and it should be done quite soon. One of the new features that pretty much marks it off as a successor is the inclusion of color which obviously was not in ReFRACT. The entire structure of the program is also more evolved. I built a base campaign with most of the game structure in tact so making a new campaign is as simple as making a copy of the file and changing some stuff around and making some modifications. In it’s current state, Nethra features two campaigns aside from the base campaign and both of them are themed to be quite silly. However, the game will also be released with a third campaign which will be serious. One of the campaigns is called Tundra. Tundra is based in Canada and features quite a bit of Canadian jokes in the form of random encounters. There’s not much else I’m willing to say at the moment as I don’t want to spoil anything but the project will be open source and will also be pre-compiled for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Lastly, I’ll just leave this here. Thanks for reading and remember to check back soon for the release!

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Quick Updates

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Aaron Weiss

I’ve been on vacation for awhile and I haven’t really been around now since it’s the summer to keep everything up to date. That being said, since I got back from my vacation three days ago, I have pushed quite a few updates to both the site and SrcDL. First of all, the main site’s projects page now features actual descriptions of the projects! No longer do you have to guess what it is or download it just to find out! It was a long time overdue but I finally got around to putting it in. Second, although I abandoned ReFRACT a long time ago, after a discussion with my friend about it “not working,” I went to compile it again. This time, I compiled it under OS X Snow Leopard. I tried it and of course, it worked. It compiled and ran without fail. After that, I decided to update the package containing ReFRACT to contain a version compiled for OS X as well. ReFRACT is now my first project to be compiled and released on Windows, OS X, and Linux! Lastly, there’s been quite a few updates to SrcDL since it’s original release. One of the biggest is that it now features Half-Life 2: Death Match. If you would like to see all of the updates for SrcDL, check out the change log. Along with all of these updates, there’s a new project on it’s way. I’ll keep you posted on it’s progress but not much is to be said at this time. Thanks for reading!

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