Great developments on the VorbisPlayer. To reduce the download time of Slengo, the bitrate of all sound in the game was reduced from 44.1Khz to 16Kh. Although the quality of the sound is lower, it still sounds quite good. 1.87Mb of data was reduced to 0.99Mb.

Another advantage is that the VorbisPlayer uses less CPU at this bitrate, and performs much better. On high-end machines, people did not have much problems with performance, however on lower end machines the sound could stutter. With a lower bitrate, this problem solved for low-end machines. The VorbisPlayer was modified to allow for lower bitrates.

A new release of the VorbisPlayer has been uploaded on CodePlex:

The game I have been developing the past months is now online: Slengo.

As I wrote before, in this game I have introduced some basic audio techniques for seamless audio looping (the music), the short-sound problem in Silverlight and sound latency. However, the solution does come with a performance cost. Decoding the sound while doing a lot of graphics animations, may be a burden for performance.

Anyway, Slengo has 20 levels, 5 NPC’s. A pathfinding routine was used to navigate the enemies through the maze.

Pathfinding was also used for NPC’s for breaking-icecubes mode; where the NPC gets a preference to move over the icecubes. About a 1000 images were rendered into animations, compressing about 4Mb into 1.92Mb image data. 15Mb of music data was compressed into 1.72Mb ogg vorbis files.

The player character is called Mr. A, or Senior A for the Portugese speaking people, because the character is like a walking letter A, with winter clothes. Watch out for Bob the policeman, as he can clone himself like a one-celled organism.

Hope you enjoy the game!

Over the weekend, I completed my new webdesign. It was incorporated into the website and also into the weblog. I hope everyone likes it this way. The design has two stylesheets, one for 1024x768 resolution and one for 1280x1024 resolution. If you have a higher resolution, you'll see the 1280x1024 stylesheet, because I cannot test these resolutions myself.

I've also added the Captcha's challenge for comments, as I was receiving a lot of comment-spam. This challenge requires a person to enter the two words in a distorted picture, before a comment can be submitted.

I call this the Neon-design. It is actually metal, neon-light, to give a little 80's arcade-hall feeling. For the website, I have removed the categories feature. The main page now just display all games. Clearly I do not have enough games to put them into a category. I hope the new design is able to attract more visitors.

Today I have limited to enter responses for articles. Main reason is that I've seen a lot of spam coming in. Reaction time is 14 days. I will take anti-spam measures later, when I have time.

A lesson learnt. I added the Youtube extension to my BlogEngine.Net software. Then I published it to the website. This operation flushed all the articles I have written so far. Fortunately, I didn't write very much articles until now. The articles will be republished at a later moment in time.