Game Trailer and Steam Greenlight

Brillant Film has created a new game trailer for Diabolus Ex Machina .

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Diabolus Ex Machina is also up for voting at Steam Greenlight

A tabbed list or table for LibGdx

The TabbedList was derived from the original List widget of LibGdx.
It allows to split the list items into sub items which are positioned in individual virtual columns. Rows can be deleted and added by just modifiying the underlying data of the widget without creating or removing the widget itself or any of its child components.
Additionally, TabbedList is synchronized for a thread safe modification of the list items.

An example using the tab character as delimiter:

String[] items = {"12:00\tgame1\trunning", "13:00\tgame-2\tfinished"};
TabbedList list = new TabbedList(items, mySkin);
list.setColumnGap(20f);
list.setHeader("Time\tName\tState");

The items and the header are displayed like this:

Time  Name   State
12:00 game1  running
13:00 game-2 finished

Download at GitHub.

A virtual joystick for Android and LibGDX

Developing games for mobile platforms always involves the problem of finding a solution for the overall game control. For game programming with LibGdx, I created a virtual joystick modeled after classic hardware devices with the following features:

• the knob can either be snapped to fixed directions (typically 4 or 8) or is freely movable
• separate renderer classes ease the design of an individual visual appearance
• around the center is the unresponsive dead zone
• an adjustable tolerance allows to ignore very small knob position changes

a virtual joystick drawn with the circle renderer

An usage example:

1.The setup:

// create a joystick at point(123, 456) with a radius of 128 pixels
VirtualJoystick joystick = new VirtualJoystick(Gdx.input, 123, 456, 128);
joystick.setYUp(800) // view height=800 pixels, bottom-left is point 0,0
joystick.setPositionCount(8); // 8 snappable positions
joystick.setDeadZone(32); // inner dead zone circle with a radius of 32 pixel

// paint joystick with simple circles
ShapeRenderer shapeRenderer = new ShapeRenderer();
...
joystickRenderer = new CircleJoystickRenderer(shapeRenderer);
joystickRenderer.setDrawSnappedKnob(true);
joystickRenderer.setBoundsColor(Color.BLUE);
joystickRenderer.setKnobColor(Color.RED);
joystick.setRenderer(joystickRenderer);

1.1 Keep the direction vector as member which will updated by the joystick:

Vector2 joystickDirection = new Vector2();


2. Now polling the joystick's current direction in the game loop:

// update for touch pointer 0 and retrieve the current knob direction as unit vector
joystick.update(0);
joystick.getDirection(joystickDirection);


3. And finally rendering the joystick:

joystick.paint();

By default, created joysticks use a y-down coordinate system which requires a camera to be set up with the shape renderer, for example like this:

int viewWidth = Gdx.graphics.getWidth();
int viewHeight = Gdx.graphics.getHeight();

cam = new OrthographicCamera();
cam.setToOrtho(true, viewWidth, viewHeight);
cam.position.set(viewWidth / 2, viewHeight / 2, 0);
cam.update(true);

shapeRenderer = new ShapeRenderer();
shapeRenderer.setProjectionMatrix(cam.combined);


Currently, VirtualJoystick is digital, but a modification for analog position values is not a big deal.
The virtual joystick is published under the Apache License and hosted at GitHub.