Chickensoft

Posted by ElPolloDiablo, February 5th 2003

I am glad to announce that Chicken Soft is now officially up and running. The entire basic design of the site, directory structure, file naming conventions and minor scripts are up. By the end of the month we should have our forum running, and most likely have instructions in our games: Starcruiser and Java Pong. Later we will set up a newsletter to announce new games and updates. Enjoy.

If you experience any problems with Chicken Soft up untill February 9th it might be problems regarding server migration. My host Phantasyworks Hosting is merging with Insider Hosting. And all Phantasyworks Hosting sites are being moved to the Insider Hosting's servers in Dallas, Texas.

Posted by ElPolloDiablo, January 20th 2003

Well, site design has been done. Opera and Netscape works, although the top right corner logo is not vertically aligned correctly. This was tested with Netscape version 7.01 (Obviously it's based on Mozilla 5.0), Opera 6.05 and 7.0 and MSIE 6.0

I decided to use a simple design for these webpages, I manually removed some of the optional fields from the PNG's used on the site to make them load just that crucial millisecond faster. Altogether about 4k of graphics needs to be downloaded to view a page.

The two games: Starcruiser Classic (Or simply Starcruiser) and JavaPong (JPong) will soon be uploaded. These two games are both Java Applets, and will work without the use of JRE plug-ins on most browsers. For Starcruiser it is recommended you turn off the Java plug-in (at least if you have the 1.4 or later JRE), as frameskipping and laggy graphics has been experienced when trying to play sounds using the old AudioClip class.

Starcruiser and JPong will get some minor new features added later, and might be recoded as Java 1.4 JApplets or Java Applications. Among others High-Score lists have been planned for Starcruiser, possibly graphics mods, more levels and Options to change certain features like number of particles and stars, stereo or mono sound (if converted to JApplets).

Also a few new games should appear throughout the year, some titles that have been considered are: Starcruiser+ (The sequel to Starcruiser), Starcruiser: Ground Patrol (A sidescrolling shoot'em'up) and Magus (A platform/puzzle game). Other small game titles (similar to JPong) will probably also be created: perhaps a Nibbles clone and a puzzle game in the same style as Tetris. Networked titles have been considered, but none has yet to be thoroughly planned, and no network game releases are likely to appear within the first year, but we have yet to see, it all depends on many different factors.

<<First <Previous