News

Mono 2.0 is out
Posted on 06-Oct-2008 by Stifu
Mono 2.0 is now available.

Mono is a .NET framework, but unlike the one of Microsoft, it is open source and cross platform. This means it lets you run some .NET applications on Linux and Mac (as long as the app doesn't have major Windows dependencies, and doesn't rely on features that Mono doesn't support).
Epic Edit being developed using the .NET framework, I'll make sure it works on Linux (I probably won't be able to test on Mac, but it should be okay).

*Update (09-Oct-2008) : I got to test Epic Edit on openSUSE, and it works, but there are several problems.
For example: the first item in the track list on the left isn't visible, scrollbar arrows are greyed out and can't be used, zooming doesn't work, you can scroll out of the track limits, and the editor ends up crashing... I'll report these bugs to the Mono team, if they aren't already known*

Epic Edit - coming soon (enough)
Posted on 27-Sep-2008 by Stifu
A quick news to let you know I'm still working on Epic Edit.
This is what the editor currently looks like:

Epic Edit

At the moment, it's possible to edit, import and export tracks (as individual files), but not to recompress them into the ROM yet.
I hope to release the first version by the end of the year.

Firefox 3.0
Posted on 16-Jun-2008 by Stifu
I know it's been a while since the last news, so I thought I'd use the release of Firefox 3 as a pretext to drop a little post. I shouldn't have to introduce Firefox, but if a few of you have been living in a cave for the last few years, Firefox is an open-source web browser, and an alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
So yes, as write this, Firefox 3 will be released tomorrow.

When it's time, get it at: http://www.getfirefox.com/

I've been using the development version as my default browser for over a year, and can't go back to Firefox 2.

Anyway, the first release of Epic Edit (Super Mario Kart editor) is drawing near... A lot of progress has been done, it displays tracks and all that, but can't edit or recompress them yet. We're done with the most boring part, at least. More details later!

Site index removed
Posted on 09-Feb-2008 by Stifu
This isn't really important, but I just removed the index page of the site, where you could click on a flag to choose your language. Now, the site automatically redirects you to the news, and selects the appropriate language depending on the one of your browser (fr side if your browser is in French, otherwise English).
That makes it so one less click is needed to get to the site news. Anyway, the index was rather bad looking, and with no real interest.

That aside, in spite of my lack of free time, I slowly progress on all of my projects, and hope to be able to publish a beta version of Epic Edit (Super Mario Kart track editor) a few months from now.

Internet Explorer 8
Posted on 20-Dec-2007 by Stifu
A quick followup to the previous news: it's just been announced Internet Explorer 8 will pass the Acid2 test. Basically, the Acid2 is a test page that only renders correctly if your browser is standards-compliant enough.
This may not mean much for regular users, but it does for web developers. For example, that means my recently improved page titles (see previous news) will work in IE8.

Here's hoping people will be quick enough to move away from IE6 and 7 (although 7 is clearly better than 6)...

Internet Explorer...
Posted on 09-Dec-2007 by Stifu
So far, I cleaned up and optimized the site code as much as possible, but at the same time making sure to stay fully compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and 7... But no more.
For those who aren't aware, although Internet Explorer is the default browser that comes with Windows, it is all around far behind other browsers. I won't get into technical details, but bothering to make pages compatible with this outdated browser is the biggest problem of many webmasters.

From now on, I won't try to pollute my HTML code to stay 100% compatible with IE. I'll still make sure that the site will still work with it, although not as nicely.
As a first example, the blue bar behind the title of each page is now gone with IE. This let me simplify the code of my titles a lot. The next changes will be in the same vein...

For those who use Internet Explorer without knowing other browsers are available, don't hesitate to try them to make up your mind about them. Among them: Firefox, Opera and Safari. Once you get used to one of them, you won't want to go back to IE...

For the record, at the moment, nearly 45% of the site visitors use Firefox, while 55% are on IE. These are encouraging figures, considering Internet Explorer made up for around 90% not long ago...
*Update (07-Jan-2008): Opera users weren't included in my stats due to a little problem, this is now fixed*
*Update (07-Jun-2008): unfortunately, my site statistics are no longer open to the public, because of Free who forced me to get rid of them...*

Epic Racers, player selection screen (2/2)
Posted on 11-Nov-2007 by Stifu
As planned, here is the follow-up to the previous news.
First, we'd like to announce the arrival of a new member in the Epic Racers staff. It is smkdan, who is an experienced ROM hacker (unlike me or Impala, who only know the basics). He also knows ASM, which will let us do some quite cool things we always wanted to do.
In short, having smkdan on our side will not only make Epic Racers much better, but also speed up its development.

In the previous news, you could see what we managed to do with the character selection screen, one year from now.
Now, see the kind of things we can do thanks to smkdan:

Screenshot:
Epic Racers, new player selection screen

Video:


If you're wondering how close Epic Racers is to completion, well, far enough until we're done with the new track editor...

Epic Racers, player selection screen (1/2)
Posted on 12-Sep-2007 by Stifu
It's now been 4 years that Impala and myself started Epic Racers (then called Epic Battle). Like every year, we have a few things to show you to keep you waiting.

Here's the new player selection screen of the game:

Screenshot:
Epic Racers, player selection screen

Video:


It's been remade one year ago. However, that version won't make it in the final version of the game, as a much improved version is in the works. We'll show it to you once it's ready (before the end of the year).

More info in the next news!

Bsnes v0.22
Posted on 04-Aug-2007 by Stifu
This is the first time I mention bsnes in the news, but those who follow emulation news already know about it. It's the most accurate SNES emulator (no game-specific hacks), but that comes at the cost of speed (minimum processor requirement: 2GHz).
Byuu released bsnes v0.22 today. The reason I post a news about that, apart from the fact it's an excellent emulator, is that with this release, there is finally no more known game bugs... and Byuu would love people to prove that wrong and report new bugs.

The bsnes homepage

Site update
Posted on 22-Jul-2007 by Stifu
This is the yearly site revamping...
Among the improvements:

  • The menu button corresponding to the section you're in now stays lit on
  • A tab system has been implemented in most of the site sections, making the look and browsing of the site more simple and homogeneous (and no more need to go back to the previous page to go to another page of the same section, the links being on all pages now, rather than just on the section index)
  • You now have the possibility to unfix the site layout via the "Layout Fix" button located above the menu (if you can't see it, you're using Internet Explorer 6 or worse...). That is to say that if you disable the "fix" and scroll through a page, the site layout will no longer stay on screen
  • The content of a few pages has been updated (notably the SSF intro page, with a description of the game which is now over 2 lines long)
  • Nobody cares, but the PHP code has been cleaned up/improved some more :)

Voilà, voilà... All of that is cool, but now what my site really needs is more content...

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