DrPetter always aroused curiosity with his games and inventions. Last Saturday he has released version 1.0 of Sculptris, a 3D sculpting and painting software, the result of six months of solitary work. It’s free to download, well optimized and lightweight. The official site has a very active forum already featuring several works published.

The big deal of Sculptris is its dynamic mesh tesselation that will provide additional detail where necessary. As well as ZBrush, Sculptris brings intuitive and productive methods of working. Even without detailed knowledge in modeling, in minutes you can be already addicted playing with it. However, Sculptris is not intended as a software to compete with ZBrush or similar. Even with some bugs in this version and rudimentary tools, in skilled hands it becomes a professional weapon.

The first deliverable of Vale’s Simulator is just out.

Vale Simulator – Season 1
Available now!

DVDs with images printed with Lightscribe technology.

If you need to work with dates on iPhoneOS, chances are you will need to use NSDate. Furthermore, if you need to work with timeframes, and also do some calculations for time differences, you should also know NSCalendar.

If you already saw the code below, you are right. Cashtown begins in 1958, that’s our creation time for the game. So day 1 in the game is Jan 1st, 1958. To set up this date, you should use a NSDateComponents, that only stores this value, look at line 33. It doesn’t mean anything, as a NSDateComponents must rely on some kind of calendar.

You can choose weird and crazy calendars, but for us, the Gregorian is good enough. As this function gives the default calendar to iPhoneOS, we are just getting the current calendar on line 31.

On line 38 we set mCreationDate (which is a NSDate) to the Component date, using a calendar. No problems, BUT there is a caveat here. You need to retain this value! First I thought that as this calendar comes from a NSCalendar class method (line 31) I would not need to retain. If you didn’t insert the retain keyword, you will find that mCreationDate is gone

Also, don’t forget to dealloc it on destruction, like we do on line 46.

@interface Sample : NSObject
{
	NSDate* mCreationDate;
	int mCreationDay;
	int mCreationMonth;
	int mCreationYear;
}

@property (retain) NSDate* mCreationDate;
@property (assign) int mCreationDay;
@property (assign) int mCreationMonth;
@property (assign) int mCreationYear;

@implementation Sample

@synthesize mCreationDate;
@synthesize mCreationDay;
@synthesize mCreationMonth;
@synthesize mCreationYear;

-(id)init
{
	[super init];

    if (self != nil)
	{
		mCreationDay = 1;
		mCreationMonth = 1;
		mCreationYear = 1958;

		NSCalendar *currentCalendar = [NSCalendar currentCalendar];

		NSDateComponents *components = [[NSDateComponents alloc] init];
		[components setDay:mCreationDay];
		[components setMonth:mCreationMonth];
		[components setYear:mCreationYear];

		mCreationDate = [[currentCalendar dateFromComponents:components] retain];

		[components release];
	}

	return self;
}

- (void) dealloc
{
	[mCreationDate release];
	[super dealloc];
}

There are lots of new games coming to XBLIG (acronym for Xbox Live Indie Games, former Xbox Live Community Games). Gamasutra selected 10 titles to have a look and download the trial, among hundreds of new titles.

It seems people (developers are actually people!) are getting their hands dirty with XNA, so we see increased activity on this Live channel. With that, it gets much harder to find a specific game, or keep track of new releases. Websites like XNPlay are working to make this task easier for everyone, as most indie games don’t get a fair amount of media coverages from major reviews websites.

Let’s support these brave developers and give a try (and buy) on those cool games!

See also

• Aurore ·· The wisdom of a symbolic essence
• Cashtown ·· Accelerometer in the iPhone Simulator
• Cashtown ·· All the colors and art of a time
• Blog ·· New controller for XBLA/XBLIG lovers is coming
• Train simulator for Vale ·· Phase one deliverable
• Our business ·· Indie
• How we work ·· Our games are exclusive
• How we work ·· Our projects do work
• How we work ·· Platforms
• Blog ·· Playdom acquires Merscom