July 18th, 2008 by aeiowu
Dinowaurs-wise we’ve been furiously working on performance to make a much larger private beta more realistic. We’ve done that. No word on when the beta will open up to the proportions it deserves, but it will likely be relatively soon. If you had problems running the game previously, definitely give it another shot. I can run it competitively on my P.O.S. PowerBook G4 1.67 ghz 1GB of RAM. Before these performance optimizations, I wrote off ever being able to even load the game up on my Mac, as I have plenty of trouble even doing that with the majority of Flash games. Someday we will find a pot of gold somewhere and I will be awarded an intel-based Mac that can play any indie game, ever. But until then, let us all congratulate Mike with a warm “hoooooray” [ala Pink Floyd] for kicking some ass on this one. It was painful, but that’s the name of the game. Perhaps he’ll go into some detail as to what was techincally going on, but for now, we just wanted to post this sigh of relief.
July 15th, 2008 by torncanvas
We’ve posted an article previously about free music on the Internet Archive. But I’ve recently found something else: music you can use in your games through a collection on the Internet Archive called Open Source Audio.
Much of this is music, and it’s licensed for some sort of free usage, depending on the licensing terms selected by the artist who uploaded the work. Most entries use various Creative Commons licenses, and some of them can be used commercially in your games.
If you’re looking for music for games, there seems to be 3 general directions you can go: custom music created by professional musicians (most work in the tv/film industry), stock music created by professional musicians, and recorded music created by musicians (often times amateurs doing it for fun). In the first two cases, someone is making music specifically for a purpose, and that purpose is either decided by you or the musician, respectively.
However, in the last case, the musician is just making the music he/she/they wants to make, and then recording it. This sometimes results in more expressive or artistic music, which can do a great job of influencing a game with the same goal. I think the music in the Open Source Audio collection tends to fit this third case, and best of all, it’s free! Check it out here: Internet Archive Open Source Audio.