Updated: Jade:DS/Little Indie launched (See last posting)

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Updated: Jade:DS/Little Indie launched (See last posting)

Post by SunSailor »

I'm working for aprox. three years now (The last year fulltime) on a digital distribution system, called Jade:DS, which combines aspects of Steam, Facebook and the Battle.net. This is a hell lot of work, but now I reached a point, where I can start to promote the project in a serious way. A closed beta is straight ahead, followed by an open beta. A central point for this promotion is the OGRE Sample Browser. This marvellous piece of software is ideal for my purposes. First, it comes very close to a real game. It combines a lot of assets under one executable. Second, it is open, so I can make it available to everyone without extra invests or own work on a sample application. Third, it uses, much obvious, OGRE. Jade:DS primarily focuses on independent developers and OGRE is widely used in this segment. Further, I have a long experience with OGRE myself. In conclusion, it was logical to provide a full integration for the OGRE engine first, which consists of a lib and a header, wrapping up the native SDK. The forth aspect is the great resource system, OGRE is built around. So, this is a good point and time to thank all the developers of OGRE, and especially omniter for his effort to build this unique Sample Browser.

What have I done to integrate the browser? My goal for integration was always to keep it as simple as possible. The result is a set of classes, an archive factory, an archive and a stream file class, which hook the application to the deployment client. Step one for the transformation is to build archives from the assets. For this, I unzipped the packs and placed them in a parallel hierarchy to the single files. Now all the files were bundled with wxArchive, the archive builder tool of Jade:DS. The generated archives are preprocessed and optimized for the revision base deployment mechanism.

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The next step is to add two lines to the sample browser, which create and destroy the archive factory. This represents the connection to the client and can be accessed from the resource.cfg by prefixing a JadeDS: to the path. The two lines are added to the SampleContext.h file and not to OgreRoot.cpp, as the constructor contains the product name to connect with. I choose initApp and closeApp for this. Another change I made to the samples was to add a boolean return value to initApp, but that's only to allow a message-less exit from there. Now the project needs to be compiled once more and the binaries can now be packed into another archive. I choose to use a seperated archive for the binaries because of two reasons. First, this makes the result more platform independent, we only need to pack the binaries for the upcoming mac os and maybe a future linux version. Second, the binary archive can be excluded from the in-game resource list. The only extra file needed for this archive is the setup.xml, which contains the installation script. This script defines, which files are decompressed to the real file system and which are verified before each launch for modifications.

Image Image

There is a third, very small archive, which needs to be generated before deployment, which contains the product.xml, a file, which defines the association of all archives, their mount points and the in-client presentation of the game. This includes multi-language titles and small thumbnails for preview. The images for this are included in this archive as well.

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Finally, the generated archives need to be registered with the system and by assigning the desired revisions to the deployment channels, the samples are ready to be shipped to the client immediately.

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Within minutes, the whole sample browser is downloaded to the client and can be started from there. All necessary files will be installed during the first launch.

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For regular updates on the progress of the beta and the public release, you can visit the development blog and follow me on twitter. Don't hesitate to contact me in personal (andreas.podgurski{at}mediaguild{dot}de), if you are interested in participation in the beta or if you have a game you would like to publish yourself. Things will progress now pretty fast, so be sure to gain your first row seat for news!
Last edited by SunSailor on Sat Sep 03, 2011 4:52 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: OGRE Sample Browser deployed with Jade:DS

Post by Brocan »

Great app!!

Deploying games on your system, seems to be very easy. :D

Congrats! Nice work! :P
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Re: OGRE Sample Browser deployed with Jade:DS

Post by Brutal »

Looks incredible mate, very nice job!
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Re: OGRE Sample Browser deployed with Jade:DS

Post by oiking »

Wow, thats pretty cool! First real screenshots and the whole deployment process looks pretty easy, can't wait to get my hands onto the beta!
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Closed Beta starts

Post by SunSailor »

Just a little update on Jade:DS, the closed beta starts today. I did some complete test runs with the latest revision yesterday and the servers are running in daemon mode now for 24 hours. Visually, not much has changed, but the final logo has been added to the client, so I added this screenshot:

Image

This is the first of several beta runs, each one extending the number of testers. I'll raise a call of beta testers later, but if you're already interested in joining the beta, simply drop me an personal message or mail to this beta at jade-ds dot com. I'll add more here, after I extended the sample browser with some extras, so keep in touch.
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Sample Browser with Achievements

Post by SunSailor »

Hi there,
a lot happend, since my last update to this thread, so it's time for some OGRE related updates. As we're approaching the very important third beta-cycle, I extended the demonstration of the OGRE sample browser. Now, the browser provides over dozen achievement one can gain during playing through the samples. Altough pretty meaningless, this shows how easy the status API of Jade:DS can be used - implementation took aprox. one work day for over a dozen achievements. Because of time constraints, the implementation is yet pretty simple, I'll make it a bit more sophisticated after the third beta is out of the door. But let's enjoy some screenshots first:

ImageImage
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There is a big gap of time between beta-2 and beta-3, which is caused by the windows vista/7 compatibility. After the third beta, there will be very soon a fourth and (hopfully) last one, which will fix the discovered beta-3 bugs and add some minor features. This last beta, whch I expect somewhere in the second third of july, will be followed by the first release candidate. I'm very optimistic at the moment, that we'll go live with the system on the end of july - then you'll be able to use the modified sample browser without being a participant of the beta cycle.
With that, a new portal called Little indie will launch. The portal is run by Z-Software and provides, beside the basic distribution features of Jade:DS, a complete package of marketing activities for their customers. They will launch with a five games and extend their catalogue on a weekly basis. They already have twenty games scheduled for the portal, so there's a lot to expect. A good chunk of the games are based on OGRE. If you're interested in joing them, please contact them.
For more information, see the platform homepage, follow my twitter account or simply send me a PN trough the forum.
Last edited by SunSailor on Thu Jun 16, 2011 2:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Updated: OGRE Sample Browser on Jade:DS, with Achievemen

Post by jacmoe »

This is great!

Looking forward to seeing lots of Ogre powered games on Jade:DS. :)
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Re: Updated: OGRE Sample Browser on Jade:DS, with Achievemen

Post by SunSailor »

jacmoe wrote:This is great!

Looking forward to seeing lots of Ogre powered games on Jade:DS. :)
Said and done :). We have successfully launched the platform and the portal, deployed the first updates and are now busy to integrate a lot more games. At the time of this post, most games on the platform are Ogre powered:

Arachnophobia
Pudding Panic
Snakeworlds

The last weeks were pretty hard with the launch and the initial fix phase, but things calm down a bit now. I'll prepare the integrated Ogre samples for a public release soon, so everyone can have a test drive on them. Further, there are demos available for Arachnophobia and Snakeworlds, so simply register and you can get them for free. If you have a game yourself, you would like to see on Jade:DS/Little Indie, please contact devs@littleindie.net for submission. There is a C#/XNA wrapper already available and a Game Maker extension in development, beside the Ogre support and the native API.
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Re: Updated: Jade:DS/Little Indie launched (See last posting

Post by jacmoe »

Congratulations! :)
I can only begin to imagine the amount of work required to get this far.
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Re: Updated: Jade:DS/Little Indie launched (See last posting

Post by duststorm »

This is great! Hope business will go well.
I'm really happy I can finally buy Pudding Panic for PC :)

Are there any plans to release the platform on MAC or linux?
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Re: Updated: Jade:DS/Little Indie launched (See last posting

Post by SunSailor »

Yes, there are plans to bring a Mac client in the mid-term future. I need to finish some internals to make the client more efficient in handling large numbers of games and cache sizes. Following that, we'll add multiplayer features to the system, leading into the port to Mac and maybe linux over the time.
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