Jump To Pass - New 2.5D Game Powered by Z-Ground Engine Released!

OBJECTIVE:
Navigate the bouncing ball to pass over the road obstacles within the 60 seconds time limit. There is the no way backward.

Use less time to get high scores, this game has infinite number of randomly generated levels.

TIPS:
The camera view is "First Person", so the ball's on ground position is exactly the edge of the screen. Keep looking forward, make sure you won't fail on your next jump before pushing the ball. Use mouse control only is recommended.

INSTRUCTIONS:
Left Mouse Button Down (Hold) or Up Arrow Key to Push the Ball Forward
Move Mouse Left/Right or Left/Right Arrow Keys to Roll the Ball Left/Right
Right Click to Turn On/Off Bouncing/Menu Sound
Enter Key to Pause Game

About:
Z-Ground is not dead!? 4 years after the first announcement of Z-Ground, the first game powered by the engine, with full source code, is finally released!

Z-Ground is the 2.5D Mode-7 engine I've been working on since 2008. At that time, there is no hardware acceleration, and flash 3D is not so common while many old school 3D tricks, such as mode-7, ray-casting, are popular among flash developers. I created Z-Ground engine for exploring these pseudo 3D technologies. But soon, lots of things changed rapidly in the flash world as you may know. Papervision, Sandy and Away3D came out, Flash 10 introduced some simple 3D API and finally there is Stage3D. Z-Ground is out-dated and actually I've stopped developing it much earlier than those big events because I found a much more exciting direction - voxel, that's why there are only a "prerelease" version and some demos released since 2008.

There is no "updates" of this release. The engine is almost the same as it was in 2008, just a little better than the prerelease version. The difference is the prerelease version used masks for ground slices, as many old mode-7 engines in flash 5-8 did, while the new one uses bitmapdata fill. So the new one should be much faster than the previous version.

The game "Jump To Pass" is firstly made for Kizi FGL Developer Competition - making a game in 48 hours, with theme "Passage" and "60 second (or less) time trial", "Mouse Control Only" as game rules. Then slighted modified for 2012 Mochi Summer Contest.

As I said, I've stopped to maintenance the engine - it is still slow and with limited function. There is no point to upgrade it for competing with modern flash 3D engines. I used it for making the game just for commemorating the first engine I worked on. The source package contains full source code of the game "Jump To Pass", as well as the engine's rendering core (but not everything, the full engine in 2008 is already much "advanced" than this, with sprite rendering, walls, ceiling, lighting, water, terrain, real 3D, simple physics and even a map editor. I may clean them up and release these functions later).

Download the source code: 
https://flaswf.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Games/JumpToPass/JTP.zip
Warning: The source code of the game is very messy, because it is a game made within 48 hours.

Haxenme Installation Notes

1. Download the standalone installation package NME-3.4.0-Windows.exe at
http://www.haxenme.org/download/
(Haxe [2.10], Neko [1.8.2], NME [3.4.0], HXCPP [2.10], Actuate [1.43], SWF [1.13])

2. Click and run to install.
(2013/3/15:
Tips: For updating NME from an older version, the simplest way is to download the new setup package, and reinstall. Uncheck the things that are already newest here, e.g., Haxe, Neko. Then select the same folder of the old installation.
http://www.nme.io/community/forums/feature-requests/eficient-way-to-upgrade-nme/)





3. Setup HaXe:
Go to D:\Motion-Twin\haxe, run haxesetup.exe


Done! Now let's test it.

4. Go to cmd:
haxe

nme


5. Now download the sample file at
http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/02/22/nme-game-example-pirate-pig/
to test.
Unzip the source code "jgranick-PiratePig-9deb597.zip" to D:\TEST_PROJECTS\jgranick-PiratePig-9deb597.
cmd commands to build the swf:
cd D:\TEST_PROJECTS\jgranick-PiratePig-9deb597
nme test "Pirate Pig.nmml" flash


and to build html:nme test project.nmml html5


6. Use Flashdevelop for nme projects. (You should install Flashdevelop at http://www.flashdevelop.org/ first)
Open Flashdevelop and configure haxe path:

Open "Pirate Pig.hxproj" and build the project:


7. To use haxecpp target windows, you need to install VC++ (nme setup windows) at
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/visual-cpp-express first.
After that
cd D:\TEST_PROJECTS\jgranick-PiratePig-9deb597
nme test "Pirate Pig.nmml" cpp

Alchemy v0.5a Installation Notes

Got a new notebook, so I will post some notes for future reference. Here is the one for Adobe Alchemy,

Environment: Windows 7.
Official Instructions:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Alchemy:Documentation:Getting_Started#Windows

1. Go to http://cygwin.com/install.html, download the "setup.exe" and install cygwin (to C:\cygwin) with the following packages:
zip (archive), gcc-g++, make (devel), perl.


2. Downloaded alchemy package at http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/alchemy.html,
(Backup: https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B5V2PrQ8xX_EN2NCWHkySGlMclE/edit)
unzip it to D:\alchemy-cygwin-v0.5a.

3. Open Cygwin Terminal, input the following commands:
cd D:\alchemy-cygwin-v0.5a
./config


4. Test alchemy with the commands to build the sample files:
source /cygdrive/d/alchemy-cygwin-v0.5a/alchemy-setup
alc-on
cd D:/alchemy-cygwin-v0.5a/samples/HelloFlash
gcc HelloFlash.c -O3 -Wall -swf -o HelloFlash.swf

and

cd D:/alchemy-cygwin-v0.5a/samples/stringecho
gcc stringecho.c -O3 -Wall -swc -o stringecho.swc

It works and successfully generated the swf and swc files!