Monkey Bubble

So, did some upgrading and dinking around tonight. This has taken up quite some time, and I find myself writing this at 1 in the morning. Technically, it's Thursday, but I'll count this as Wednesday's post.

It all started when I wanted to watch the ClearType team and what they're all about over at Channel9. Of course, MS didn't have the downloadables going, so I was left with an MMS stream. Having compiled the latest MPlayer and the latest codecs (so that I could get Windows Media 10 sound) just last night (as in Tuesday night), I was happily watching on my computer. Then some quiet guy came on (Scoble should invest in a $2 microphone, seriously) so I tried to rewind. Rewind a stream, in MPlayer, when you're dealing with MS codecs. Not a good thing. So I had to restart my X server. Restarting my X got me into a new KDE that I had installed several days ago, but never booted into. So that got me thinking: why not point rpmdrake towards Cooker (unstable) and get the latest KDE, now that I'm here (in a state of not having anything open on my desktop). So KDE 3.3 and gcc 3.4.3 get thrown on the system. Then, with the new KDE all fired up, I'm browsing around, checking out the new features in my menu, and the stuff that I can get from Cooker. Then I see Monkey Bubble, which is one of those "fire a ball and try to get three of the same colour connected to get them to fall down" games. Like Frozen Bubble, only Monkey Bubble uses SVG for its graphics. Seeing as how I've been interested in Scalable Vector Graphics for quite some time, I figured it was about time that I tried out this Monkey Bubble. I must say that it is quite good! Graphics are good, could use some spit-shine, but the scalability is nice. Going from a small window on my screen to the full 1280x1024, the game maintains its graphics clarity and resolution, just as good SVG should (try running Frozen Bubble at 1280 - yuck!) The game seemed to run fast, and I am confident that simple SVG like this game can easily be put to use in games. SVG rendering engines are still not very optimized, as there are few people interested in the technology (Windows LH Avalon will use it though). With some good render engines (come on Cairo!), and some great vector artists, SVG is a plausible way of doing graphics for games. Go get Monkey Bubble!