Dev-Scene.com

This is a new site just opened, and it looks pretty neat. The goal is to be an all-in-one DS homebrew website, and it already includes over 100 homebrew DS games, with screenshots, descriptions, and download links. They are also working on being a resource for homebrew developers, with tutorials and guides. There’s a Welcome Message for new users, a news site (which I believe will become the successor to drunkencoders.com, with many of those posters moving to dev-scene), as well as a RSS aggregator for 18 DS-related blogs.

PS: They got ‘dugg’ and amassed nearly 700 ‘diggs’ as of last count. So it seems to be a hit so far.

Screenshots from Nintendo’s Big Brain Academy for DS:

haXe is a new powerful programming language that can generate Javascript code and also compiles to Flash SWF (including latest Flash Player 9). It handles all the browsers differences and has crossplatform APIs such as Xml, Http, Date…

The sweet thing about it, is instead of using 3 languages to write webapps, now you only need one. Instead of Actionscript+Javascript+PHP, you can use haXe+haXe+haXe.

As a replacement for ActionScript: contains several powerful language features, including ‘type inference’, and can compile the same code to flash 6,7,8 or 9. No need to switch syntax when going between versions.

As a replacement for JavaScript: Provides a typed language, to help you make fewer errors, versus javascript’s complete dynamic typing.

As a replacement for PHP(Perl/Python/Ruby/etc): Use the same language on the client and the server. Libraries for file/database/image/etc manipulation. Compiled to bytecode, thus can run much faster than the interpreted languages (some benchmarks show it 20 times faster than PHP).

haXe website | digg story

I know you’ve all been waiting for this, it’s not completely functional yet, but here’s a preview:

(gfx shamelessly stolen from )

If you can’t wait, and need to get some drawings done ASAP, you can download a previous version.

UPDATE: It also seems I’ve defeated the long-standing issue of the ‘jumping lines’ once and for all!!! I need to do some more testing to confirm it, but it looks good so far!!

A quick update to the mandelbrot explorer, this improves speed when you are not zoomed in very far. When you are zoomed below 175x, I will use 32 bit (1.17.14) fixed point numbers, which greatly improves speed. However, if you zoom beyond that, then it switches back to 64 bit (1.35.28), which provides greater precision. I’ve measured, and you can zoom to approx 200,000x before you start getting pixelated due to lack of precision, at which point I switch to floating point (which slows it down a bit), but you can zoom a bit farther then.

Next, I will start looking into optimizations of the algorithm itself. Two things I have heard of, but not really researched, are ‘boundary tracing’ and ‘periodicity checking’

R05 Download: .nds and .ds.gba
Changes since R04: Minor optimizations and quality improvements.

Here’s some more PNGs saved out from my app: