Wii Internet Channel and Nintendo DS/DSi Browser Homebrew

Since I have not posted to this blog in a while, it may seem like my projects have sat dormant. Since that is far from the case, I felt that I should give an update on the status of a few projects:

HULLBREACH ONLINE
For the most part, HB has seen little more than bug fixes over the past two months. For what the game does, no technology supported by the Internet Channel will allow me to push the bounds further without considerably hurting the framerate. In the HB forums, several gamers have mentioned that they'd like to see a WiiWare version. Well, I'm already one step ahead of them. I've applied for developer status to Nintendo with a local software company. That was in late January, and warioworld.com says to expect a fee months to hear a response. I'm just playing the waiting game now.

WII OPERA SDK
For the past month, I've been dabbling in raytracing in both JavaScript and C++. Although raytracing itself is very slow (yet produces graphical results well beyond traditional rasterization methods), I am going to attempt to incorporate a hybrid engine into the SDK's flat shading functionality. I believe that I will be able to add realtime shadows to meshes. The possible speed is unknown but will obviously be slower than using just realtime flat shading. I have some other plans for the SDK in the pipeline as well. And of course I keep tweaking it for speed on a weekly basis.

Stay tuned for more upcoming news...

A significant backend/frontend communication update has been completed for HullBreach. Now everytime a player makes a hyperjump, the database passes information about all the planetary objects in the sector. This is a big breakthrough because it opens many possibilities for further development this weekend, such as the following abilities:

• Landing on planets
  
• Contacting inhabitants
  
• Accepting missions
  
• Outfitting ships
  
• Scanning space objects
  
• Trading goods
  

Until a useful method of converting a string passed from the HTTP request object to a two-dimensional array was discovered (and found to not really be too painful after-all), none of this was possible. This method is much more efficient than originally envisioned, so expect the beta release date to move up significantly.

Over the past month, several other indie developers have jumped on-board with production of games using the Wii Opera SDK. I've been in contact with a few of them on a regular basis. Once they are ready to share a demo of production information, you will be the first to know.