Raydium 3D Game Engine

I'm proud to present you the first playable version of my new game project called Cuby.
At the beginning it was an ugly hack trying to create some kind of a 3D cubic puzzle game, but after some time and a small code cleanup, I've decided to enhance it to a full logic cube game product, where you have to solve several a-maze-ing levels.

But please don't expect to much at the moment, the TODO list is quiet long. At the current release state some things in the GUI are only dummies, for example the randomize check boxes in the game options. There could be

• a score system with local only and/or online highscores,
• level selection,
• autosave: continue last game,
• UNDO functionality,
• general game option configuration file with window/fullscreen resolutions, texture filter settings, ...
• some ambient music

and much more in further releases.

More information about the game including screenshots and downloads of different target packages are available on the newly registered project page at SourceForge:
http://cuby.sf.net

Critics, comments, ideas, bug reports and patches are welcome. Please report everything thinking about it.

I hope you have some fun playing the available levels, can you solve all of them?

Best regards,
st

Nice game!
It hung once but the game itself it funny ;D Good game.

Btw. I think maybe we can put a new section in the main webpage, something like "Games/products using Raydium".

Brilliant ! I'm a big fan of such games that seems very simple at the beginning ("but where's the challenge ?! this is obvious ! was the author afraid of its own concept ?!") and then becomes quickly more and more challenging. It works perfectly for me, just wanted to try the game one minute or two at work ... and 15 minutes latter I was swearing at my screen, trying to resolve a cube in the middle of the second "campaign"

A few quick observations:
+ Game is already very polished, it's impressive ! Does not looks like a 0.2 release
- As a player, I was quite "lost" at the end of the first set: "back the menu ? so soon ?". It's perhaps a good idea to make the game directly "jump" to the next set ?
- there's no real "drama" at the end of a cube, apart from the sound FX. Perhaps need some visual FX to ?
- I would remove the Raydium logo / signature and FPS counter ... the global design is very light, very smart, it does not fit with all this overlay. And the small cube logo is great !
+ audio ambiance is simple AND excellent ! And this is a very important point about a game to me, great job.
- "3D Logic II" and "Hyperframe" not found (you probably know it, but ...)
- really need autosave ! Particularly while playing at work
+ binary runs perfectly on Mandriva 2009.1.

So far, excellent job ! With a bit of advertising, you're probably creating here a small "Linux blockbuster" that we may see in a few distro packages in a not-so-distant future

WOW! Thanks for the positive resonances, you motivate me more and more, I'm flying right now.

The "pathfinding" routine and some other things have to be optimized. Currently an exception handling mechanism is counting the subroutine stages and will stop the search after a specific amount of steps depending on level sizes.

That would be a great "extra additional" advertising for Raydium and their projects based on it.

I'll try to push the version numbers with nearly every bigger thing on the TODO list. I think I'll start to advertise for it, on several gaming sites, with the next release.

Your totally right, my plan is to show a congratulations/unlock "bonus" set of levels window with chances to play the next set of levels if available and to go back to the game options.

Agree here, too. I'll try to create a simple explosion of the cube or fade current cube out and fade new cube in effect. First I thought about a "kick cube away with the mouse" or something, but better load the new level without user interaction events, so user is able to concentrate on the game.

I'll check how it looks like. The stuff you mentioned is not very important for the user the whole game long, perhaps I'll implement a simple loading screen, where all resources are loaded, there I could show this things. I'll try without such elements ingame, so less is more sometimes, right.

Thanks, I've already played it with a gentle ambient music loop (about 20 seconds), but I find it better without music in the background. I think I'll let it go without music for now.

Correct, that sets of levels aren't completed right now.

Yeah, really needed. Continue button would be highly appreciated.

Thank you very much for your comments, I'll post something here when a new version is available.

Showed the game to a few people, very positive feedbacks so far
I had a few crashes too: some sort of infinite pathfinding loops (2 or 3 times) and a real crash (1 time, under win32). Can't reproduce these bugs yet, so it's just to inform you
Another small but important point: php.ini is missing from win32 release, so CURL does not work and the game cannot download its data.

Thanks for reporting. Next release will hopefully come shortly to fix this issues.

Hello,

Good work.
I run it under Windows vista 32bit and it crash systematicly. I've got this message in the console.

Hi batcox !

As said a few posts above, the win32 release miss the php.ini file. You can get its content here:
http://raydium.org/svn.php?f=/trunk/php.ini

Just paste this in a file named "php.ini" in the game directory, it should then work. Hope to see you soon IRL, batcox !

Thanks for the feedback and giving support for the game.

A new release is out. This release is (hopefully) more a bug fix release, than a feature release, to announce it to the masses.
You can view the full change log in the news section at the project page:
http://cuby.sf.net

No continue last game button this time, sorry. I'll concentrate on game flow in the next version.

Thx it works

see you soon

Protonux informed us on the IRC channel that Cuby is on The Linux Game Tome.
So, if you've an account, please rate Cuby at http://happypenguin.org/show?Cuby

Thank you very much.

Small update:

Today I finished the new set of levels. There are now over one hundred levels available.
You can try to solve the new levels using the current release version.
To enable them, only delete the Cuby level container file called "cuby.clc" in your Cuby directory and restart the game. The container and level files will be automagically downloaded from the Cuby data repository and you should now be able to select the new set of levels in the game options.

While working on the next release version, I'm currently thinking about to add an environment mapping texture to the cube. But I'm not really sure about it yet, thinking about the possible assets and drawbacks. Technically it should be no problem I think, but there is not a real visual environment in Cuby that could be mirrored on the cube.
I'll try to create an environment texture that will fit Cuby's look and feel, so we can make a decision about it later.

A reference note for myself to not forget the iPhone topic.

Are you just trying to turn us completely mad ? More than a hundred levels AND NO "RESUME" FEATURE ?!

About the envmap, to stay in the "smart is beautiful" style of the game, maybe some spotlights would do the job ? Like in a photo studio. Just an idea ... I'm so bad when it comes to artistic choices

Hello

I checked out the cuby svn, since there is no source release and want to compile it. I see a cuby.c file, but no instructions on how to build.

I have raydium installed. Do you know how I can compile Cuby?

Hi,

Which platform do you use ? (Linux, OSX, win32, ...)