Merely five days after our first update and here I am with even more updates from the developers' fringe! Most important is that Jon, formerly known to many of you as "Air's Other Roommate, the One Who Drew the Pictures and Stuff", has make his departure from the 'scene' here in Phoenix, Az in favor of his home town of Spring, Tx. I'm sad to see him go really, but at least now I can sleep easier at night knowing my pastries are once again safe from that carnivorous fiend (I bet you didn't know eating doughnuts and cup cakes classifies you a carnivore). What impact will this have on our development schedule and productivity? Only time will tell...

Today's token gamedev morsel revolves around audio. I use my own audio system (a super-hacked version of the Mikmod Sound System, to be exact), and this week I decided to introduce it to Ogg Vorbis. I use the term 'this week' lightly because really I figured it would only take a day to complete the task-- after all it only took a few hours each to introduce libpng and libjpeg to the VDRIVER. But alas, it took several days. And so is life when you are at the mercy of one of the best examples ever of a very dated C-language coding style. I'm serious, Vorbis is one step from being Class-A Spaghetti Code. We're talking goto's out the wazoo.

[I'm sure the guys at XIPHOPHORUS would be pretty peeved if they ever read this... and don't think it is too unlikely that they would. The way search engines work, who knows; this very well might be one of the top Google hits for 'vorbis' in a week... heck, we get hits to Hour 13 for things like 'Become a Stunt Double' and 'sombrero' ]

So Vorbis and Mikmod are now friends, and good friends at that. Using a VBR quality setting of .26 yields some spectacular results. Modules are compressed to about 1/5th their original size, and the sound effects in Chicken Little are now 1/8th their original size-- with a slightly noticable, but perfectly acceptable, minor loss in audio quality. I noticed that Vorbis has a pretty big header block (about 3-4k), so I disabled compression on any samples that are under 6k by default. That little trick improved both the compression ratios and the output quality.

Anyways, for you all this means smaller, faster downloads! So maybe some of you gamer types might be a little less reluctant to download a 9 meg CL installer over the old 12 meg one... one such as myself can only hope.

- Air

Witness an event to be remembered by all ages! The said event being none other than the very first update to the Developers' Journal here at Hour 13 Studios. Actually, I guess it isn't technically an 'update' since that word kinda implies that there was something already here to be updated. This would instead be more appropriately worded as, perhaps, an exciting and new site addition here at Hour 13 Studios! Yeah, that's definitely a lot more accurate.

The main focus of our efforts the past few weeks has been on Mr. Incredible and things are going pretty smoothly. We're about two weeks behind our initial schedule, but considering Chicken Little is about two years beyond it's original schedule, we haven't started to panic just yet.

Recently completed tasks:

• Collision Detection System
• Projectile Entity [manages most generic bullet-type projectiles]
• Enemy Scripting Language and Basic Enemy Behaviors

We all know what it means when we have a list of things which have been completed... that's right. Yeah. That means we have screenshots, also known as gamedev pr0n among some of our more hardcore fans. Whatever turns you on. Admit it, we know you visit Hour 13 because of the articles, but a few peeks don't make you a bad person, right?

Collapp - The Collision Rectangle App. This little thing was made in about 10 days and allows us to easily mark off which portions of each frame of animation are 'sensitive' to contact. We choose collision rectangles over other forms of collision because of their speed and versatility.

The very first screenshots of the first playable version of Mr. Incredible. There's only two waves of enemies right now, just serving as a little bit of cannon fodder while we perfect the scripting, projectile, and particle systems. As you can see, there are already some blobulous particles in action.

- Air