Rough Sea Games

The Rough Sea Games team wishes you a Happy Halloween 2009!

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Hello out there,

my name is Thomas and I am the first programmer in our new R&D department. Like most of the other guys here at Rough Sea, I’ve worked on games for consoles (Nintendo DS and Wii) and PC before. I’m very excited to develop sophisticated software that helps us to make state-of-the-art games. Of course this is only technically, but I’m pretty sure that Rafael and Jan will assure this for the design part too.

I assume you’ve read the headline already, so you know what the R&D department will work on in the coming months. We’ve decided to do some research on the iPhone, because we think the way you use the iPhone is almost the same as how you play a browsergame. You get your iPhone out of your pocket, use it for a few seconds and put it back again. You have nearly the same procedure with browsergames: you open your browsergame window/tab, change a few settings and go back to work.

So the first thing to do is getting your working environment running. The only legal way to do this is to buy a Mac. I’m not really happy about that, because I’m a Windows guy and there are some differences in using MacOS instead of Windows. Maybe Apple only invented the app store to sell some of their Macs to iPhone developers. Nevertheless after some adjustments the Mac became usable. The nextStep (pun indended) was the installation of the iPhone SDK and all the tools that belong to it. It’s quite easy to get from the installation of the SDK to the first Hello World on the simulator (especially if you compare this to console development).

We at Rough Sea use test driven development and continuous integration to assure that we always have  a deliverable product at hand. Unit Tests are already integrated into the SDK and it was easy for Ole to set up a build server on a Mac Mini with hudson and the makefile-like shell tool xcodebuild. You don’t have a makefile: the tool just uses the settings of the project file to know how to build. Another thing is that you can add and change text macros for the XCode IDE. Text Macros are very useful to write code much faster. For example, you can add an alloc-init call [[class alloc] init] simply by typing the letter a and then escape. There are macros for if, for and while too. Because we have different coding guidelines than the apple guys, I had to change some of the macros. You find them in /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/ PlugIns/TextMacros.xctxtmacro/Contents/ Resources. Copy the TextMacros.xctxtmacro folder to Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Specifications in your home directory. Just open the *.xctxtmacro files with a text editor to change the macros. You can add your own file and project templates too. This is very nice, because you can set up a default project with many settings, like Unit Test Targets, already in place, and use this project to create new ones with only one click. To add a new project template, create the project the way you like it and copy the whole project folder to Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/XCode/Project Templates/GROUP_NAME/PROJECT_NAME. For file templates you should just copy the File Templates folder from /Developer/Library/Xcode/ to Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/XCode/ and change or add the files you like.

Next time I will write about Objective-C and libraries from the iPhone SDK like UIKit.

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We are hiring:

• QA Manager
• Lead Programmer (R&D department)

Just click the links for more information.

Cheers,
Matthias

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Hi there,

our company website is online since yesterday.  More improvement and updates to the website will follow. This blog will get an overhaul as well, in the upcoming weeks .

Cheers,

Matthias

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With the first full-price browser-game title, Rough Sea sets out to redefine the standards in browser gaming. With a high four-figure budget and more than five interns they are bound to produce a straight shooter that will win the hearts of critics and gamers alike. So far, they have announced neither the title nor the setting of the game, but leading industry insiders suspect that it will probably have the word “Wars” in its title. CTO Bruno Schwarzritter of Schadenfreude Interactive GmbH says: “They’ll probably smash something together and then call it Something Wars “.

Some of the revolutionary new technical aspects are:

• multi-platform support (even Linux, MacOS X and AmigaOS)
• fully animated 3D progress bars
• animated buttons with localized texts (that actually fit into them)
• revolutionary summation algorithm to calculate any kind of specs correctly (even on Pentiums)
• inbuilt automated grind management (as formerly seen only in big PC titles such as Progress Quest)
• multi-account support
• game-content that will fascinate players for weeks (like quests that last one week)
• user-driven account management (everyone is an administrator)
• user-created content (Rough Sea is not going to provide a lot)
• root-kit based copy protection

The game will be released on DVD and bundled with a browser to play it with. Rough Sea Games is negotiating right now with several browser companies but have not yet determined which company will pay the most. To play the game the user will also have to have a working Internet connection for the spyware online activation to work properly.

[ Take the stuff out that I marked as "crossed out" or you will be fired. The rest of the article is ok, though. Ed.]

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We talked a lot about our company logo over the last few weeks and there were a lot of factors that went into choosing the final design. We took our time, because the company logo is one of the most important early decisions we had to make. The logo will be included in corporate marketing materials, stationary, business cards — and of course in our games — so it is important that everyone who sees it will know what we are doing and remember it. To achieve this my mission was clear: ‘Keep it Simple, Stupid!‘ … and voilà!… here it is…
the final logo for Rough Sea Games:

By clicking the image you can see a bigger version.

Chris

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Today I have some great news.

In December 2008 our team was able to sign a very promising deal with Gameforge and founded Rough Sea Games GmbH! The details are published in an official press release, which you can read here.

I want to thank the whole team for the great work they did in the last year. It is absolutely awesome to be a part of such a great bunch of people.

Sure, most of the work still has to be done, but from our point of view, we are expecting a very bright future. We were able to defy the psychology of the economic crisis, which gives us additional confidence and self-assurance.

So, watch out for more news on our upcoming games.

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Our blog started a few month ago and the feedback is already very good. I want to thank all our guest bloggers, readers and friends for their great support. I hope you had a good start into 2009. We had a very good time in the last year and there is much more good stuff to come.

We will continue and intense our blogging activities in the month ahead. So stay tuned for more helpful browser game articles and news about our upcoming game.

All the best from the Rough Sea Games Team
Chris, Joerg, Manuel, Matthias, Rafael and Ole

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Hello folks,

I am sure you know that communication is one key for successful development or project work. Companies usually have a conference room, or you meet somebody in the hall or in the elevator that you need to talk to. But nowadays people work from home in different cities, countries or even continents. Therefore you need a virtual place to meet.

That’s why I am going to write a little about Murmur / Mumble for those who haven’t heard about it. Mumble is a voice over IP service, like Battlecom, Teamspeak or Ventrillo.  The advantages of Mumble are an excellent quality of speech,  database support, server & client support for all major operating systems, text chat, and encrypted traffic — all for free!

First of all, we should differentiate between the server (Murmur) and the client (Mumble). Murmur defines and handles all Mumble requests: a typical client / server system.
But enough of this chitchat. We have to set up a Murmur!

Installation of Murmur:

Therefore we should start with installing Murmur. Installing Murmur on Windows shouldn’t be a problem, but what about Linux? All common distributions offer a binary packet of Murmur that you can install via your package management tool like yast, yum install “packetname” , apt-get install “packetname”, etc.

I am going to describe another way and will use the
“Static Linux Server stable packet” which you can download here.

Download murmur-static_x86-X.XX.tar.bz2.

Now untar the compressed file.

tar xfvz murmur-static_x86-X.XX.tar.bz2

Go to the directory which has been untared or move it for example to /home/murmur. Of course you can also run Murmur in the current directory.

Now it is time to decide whether to use SQLite or a “real” database like MySQL. SQlite has the advantage of running with Murmur right out of the box. The disadvantage is command-line-based user management, like adding new users or administrators. With MySQL you could use phpMyadmin (if installed) to do the management, so future administrators wouldn’t need shell access to add new users.

So if you want to use SQLite, ignore the MySQL part of the murmur.ini

Create a database or use an existing database of MySQL!

Edit the murmur.ini with MySQL support:

database=putyourdatabasenameinhere

dbDriver=QMYSQL
dbUsername=database username
dbPassword=Ilove-securePasswords
dbHost=localhost #localhost or the ip of the remote database
dbPort=3306 #usually the default port of mysql is 3306
dbPrefix=murmur_ #prefix name of your tables within the database

### SQlite and MySQL has to edit the lines below ###

host= the ip or domain # if you want to bind the murmur server to a default address

port=64738 #port you use for your murmur server

serverpassword=NicePassword # password for non-registered users. Keep it empty for no password login

Save the murmur.ini and exit it.

Now set up a superuser with the following command:

./murmur.x86 -ini murmur.ini -supw

Under Windows, of course, use cmd and type murmur.exe instead of murmur.x86

Now the superuser is saved in the database.

That’s it!

Murmur is running. Now you can login as “superuser” with your Mumble client and configure the rooms with a helpful GUI. Click on “channel” and then “add”. Now you can add a channel/room. This shouldn’t be a problem.

Enjoy your virtual conference room!

Documentation is available at mumble.sourceforge.net

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Hi, let me introduce myself with my first blog post . My name is Ole and my job could be briefly described as a server administrator – and yes, I feel like a Swiss army knife. Oh, please do not misunderstand me. This feeling isn`t frustrating or negative. I like my job. You need a wide range of knowledge to do this job, as admins work with systems and not only with few applications or “just” software.

My job is to deal with the hardware, software, server services, system security and especially user`s wishes.
(Hey, just in a professional way, of course !) Anyway, sometimes I experienced that administrators ignore users and their needs. Although their job is to serve the users,  but I guess, this topic would be worth of another blog post.

So perhaps you are wondering: “Why does he like to be the swiss army knife of Rough Sea Games and work with game developers ? ” Short answer: “I LIKE GAMES  and I LIKE COMPUTER SYSTEMS .”  A perfect fusion of my personal interests. This is great !

Anyway, my time is running short, so I promise to keep in touch with you and write new posts about my work. In the upcoming posts I will write down some interesting hints about server administration and maybe help other Swiss army knifes to keep their systems alive with those blog posts. Feel free to post some comments.

PS: WE ROCK THE BOAT!

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