The Adventures of Bruto

Amber commented on a previous post, expressing interest in playing the game I mentioned there. Here is a link to download it:

• The Adventures of Bruto

You will need to have the Isis Game Engine installed in order to play. Unzip bruto.zip and double-click bruto.iss to launch it (if you didn't use the Isis installer, run bruto.iss with the 'ivmconsole' program).

You control the dragon and must protect your hometown from marauding invaders. Fly around using the I, J, K, and L keys. Spacebar breathes fire, and the F key sucks in air in order to shoot fireballs (if you don't like those controls, you can edit dragon.iss in notepad and change them). You win after defeating 20 ships, or you lose when your town and castle are destroyed.

If you don't want to download the game but still want to see it in action, here is a WMV video of me playing. Note that the video has no sound because the game has no sound. Here's a low-quality YouTube copy of the video:

Isis

A couple of people were curious about the game engine behind Osiris, so I have written up a little page about it:

• Isis Game Engine

There's not much on that page yet, but it has an introduction to IsisScript and a couple of sample games. There are also links to the installer as well as the source code if you are interested in checking it out.

Osiris

I've been asked a few times for a copy of Expedition: Osiris, an educational computer game I worked on while in college. Unfortunately some of the images of Egyptian artifacts that are in the game are copyrighted by the university, so the game cannot be distributed publicly. But, I did get permission to create a "public domain" version of the game, as long as all the artifact images were obscured. Today I finally got around to doing it. Here are download links: (they are about 17 MB each)

• Osiris for Windows (Installer-less version)
• Osiris for Mac OS X (PPC only, sorry)

The system requirements are pretty modest: a 1 GHz processor and a 32 MB video card should play the game just fine.

Here is a medium quality WMV video of me playing the game for a few minutes: Osiris Video. It's a big file but it should stream OK. Here's a low-quality YouTube copy:

The purpose of the game is to teach the basics of a freshman 'Archaeology 101' class. You play the role of a college professor who organizes an Egyptian dig and are supposed to learn how to do the following things:

1. Acquire funding
2. Create a team of graduate students, specialists and local workers
3. Manage the digging process to maximize efficiency and minimize artifact breakage
4. Fend off attacks from mummies, crocodiles, scorpions, thieves and evil genies
5. Manage team morale and energy while keeping within the budget
6. Interpret your findings
7. Publish your results in respectable journals to increase your prestige

Here are a couple of screenshots:

Setting up the team

Managing the dig

FSAA mini-benchmark

Have you ever looked at the FSAA settings in the control panel for your graphics card and wondered what the real visual difference is between them?

I was curious myself and decided to do a mini benchmark test. I pulled up a game I wrote a while ago called "The Adventures of Bruto" where you fly around as a dragon and fend off a naval attack. All of the graphics in the game are vector images, so it is a good visual test case for FSAA:

I took screenshots of the game at each FSAA setting level for a comparison. Here are closeups of the castle at 0x, 2x, 4x and 8x:

0x

2x

4x

8x

Overall the screenshots seem to confirm the idea that "more is better" when it comes to FSAA, but once you get past 2x the improvements don't seem to be that noticeable. I'll probably leave games on 2x or 4x and bump up other settings like model/texture detail if I need to make a tradeoff.