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Submitted by , posted on 09 August 2002
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Image Description, by
It's been 18 months in the making, but my IOTD is finally here. Kronos
Software proudly presents Miko & Molly.
First, lets get an overview of the game. Miko & Molly is a fun, challenging,
original, and completely non-violent level-based logic-puzzle game. Miko &
Molly takes puzzle games to A Whole New Dimension by taking this classic
game style to 3D. Now you can solve puzzles in the third dimension. Can't
get around an obstacle? Try to find a way over it. You get powerups such as
boots and bridges, which you must use to make your way through worlds filled
with teleporters, ice fields, water, stone blocks, and so much more.
Miko & Molly is fun for one player but is the first of its kind to offer a
unique 2-player mode. In 2-player mode, players work together to solve
puzzles as fast as possible. Competition will only slow you down.
Cooperation is the name of the game. Miko & Molly also saves your fastest
time for each level. Replay the levels over and over, trying to find the
fastest solution. Then upload your scores to the Miko & Molly All Stars web
site. The All Stars web site records the 3 fastest times for each level.
Now for the more technical info. It was developed in Visual C++. The game
isn't the most graphically complex: Single textured, flat shaded, rather
simple tile based board. A far cry from some of my per-pixel lighting
tutorials, but the game is meant to be very hardware compatible (runs on
almost any 3D card). A lot of work went into developing a pluggable
architecture. The graphics, audio, input, and math libraries are all
replacable. The game queries each plugin at startup and selects the most
appropriate one. The plugins indicate their relative level of performance to
the application (so a DirectX8 plug would say "pick me", and the DirectX1
plugin would say "pick anyone but me"). Initially I developed DirectX 8
audio and input libraries, but because of the pluggable architecture, I was
able to swap them out with DirectX 1 compatible libraries (for old
computers) without touching a line of code in the main application. It
currently uses OpenGL for graphics, and I haven't yet developed a Direct3D
plugin (though its on my list, possibly with a software rendering plugin). I
also haven't bothered with an SSE math library yet (and probably wont, since
the computers that support SSE are already plenty fast for this graphically
simple game). In order to implement these pluggable libraries, I of course
has to write an abstract wrapper API to which every plugin interfaced.
Graphics in the game are all TGA textures and Milkshape 3D models. Music is
done with midi files, and sound effects are done with wav files. The in
house level editor was a good 6 or 8 months or so of the development time,
but is nothing terribly complex. It is a GUI interface written in Delphi
which loads a C++ DLL that handles all the editing logic, and itself uses
the graphics plugin for rendering to a TPanel. A lot of the time was
actually spent handling all of the tile picking and texturing interfaces.
Miko & Molly is available for purchase from the Kronos Software as is a free
demo. Just go to:
http://www.kronos-software.com
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