Junk Bytes

As described in a previous post about TAGjam16, JunkBytes.com has hosted November's TAGjam. I participated with a simple game as a non-compo entry.

The game is called "They Are Coming For Us". The game puts you in a zombie apocalypse, and you have to repair a boat and escape with the help of a few companions. You can play the game here.

Still working on that aircraft game I posted about a while ago.

Yesterday I modelled a fighter jet that I want to include in the game. I recorded the modelling process, initially for personal use (to help me remember certain methods I use). Then I thought I could post it here too, as a dev update for the game.

Final Result:

Creative process (texturing only):

These days i was playing around with conky and python. So i created a module in python for file monitoring which i embedded in conky. You can find the source code and the installation instructions in the github link.

The list_of_files text file contains the absolute path of the files you want to monitor.

You should set as you wish the HOURS variable in scripts/hash_calc.py. This is the time interval (number of hours) after the last change that the module will notify you about the change in the file.

In order to monitor the specified files you should have read privileges. Also, take care of update_interval because frequent md5sum calculation may increase the load of your system.

It looks like this:

-Anastasios

In my last post I mentioned that JunkBytes.com participated in TAGjam 15, The Arbitrary Gamejam (TAG) of October, and won with the game Flashy Dansy.

As per TAG's rules, the winner of one month's jam becomes responsible ("tagged") to host next month's gamejam. This means that JunkBytes will be hosting and managing TAGjam16, the November gamejam.

The gamejam page on GameJolt is now open and contains more information about the jam. The jam will run from November 7 to November 10, 2014.

The game jam is based on three random-generated themes plus one host-chosen theme. These themes will be announced 24 hours before the jam starts.

We encourage you to participate, alone or with a team, using any game engine you like. If you are interested, we can send you a reminder email along with the jam themes when the theme-announcement day has come. To do so, send us a message here and write TAGJAM16 in the "Your Message" field.

UPDATE 11 Nov: TagJam16 is over. The winne…

Kostas here, during the past weekend I took part in a rapid-gamedev competition, #tagjam15.

This compo is a monthly 48-hour or 72-hour game-development jam which I came across by luck. I thought it was a good chance to force myself to make, complete and publish a game in a competition context, so I went for it.

The resulting game is Flashy Dansy, a Flashdance-parody where you dance to the song "What A Feeling" in the middle of a bridge road.

Hello! Sorry for being inactive so much time but summer lasted a little bit longer than usual..!

Regarding my digging in digital forensics, i decided to create a series of posts beginning with imaging. So today i will show you the three most prevalent formats of "post-mortem" imaging and how to obtain them (on a *nix system) from a test disk.

The discussed formats are the following:
(1) Raw Format
(2) Expert Witness Compression Format (or ewf)
(3) Advanced Forensic Format (or aff)

For the past month I took a break from Game Maker and have been testing out Unity. In the process I am making a mobile-targeted aircraft game, where the user will compete against flying challenges such as aerobatics, aerial battles and search-and-rescue.


The game has progressed rapidly during the past weeks, and currently boasts:
Simplified and intuitive controls, fitting for mobile screensNavigation instrumentsInfinite procedural terrain with treesLanding strips with ILS-like guidanceConsistent and beautiful graphics style

Kostas here, after completing Omelette I decided to go for a bigger game project. This will be a retro-styled dungeon RPG with story elements from Final Fantasy games and combat elements from Hammerfight.


More on the game story will be announced later on. The gameplay is largely physics-centered, powered by ExtremePhysics.

Features designed so far:

Animated charactersPhysics-based combatRagdoll-animation character deathsSlow-motion and blur effects (shown on character death)Breakable crates with gold and itemsInventory systemLighting system

I'm back again with an article discussing optimal network sensor placement. It is a simple case study i made after i've finished my thesis (APT detection through machine learning and network behavior analysis) regarding the network sensor placement in order to achieve maximum network visibility with minimal possible redundancy. These days i read "Network Security Through Data Analysis, Michael Collins, 2014" which triggered this case study.

The experimental network is a prototype enterprise network depicted in the following image.

(I didn't take it from "The Practice of Network Security Monitoring, Richard Bejtlich, 2013" even if it is almost the same with one of Richard Bejtlich's images. It is created using Dia)
The above network is a reasonable abstraction of an enterprise one. So in the following picture i try to place the candidate sensor positions (From A to F) and replace DMZ with a Debian machine (running an FTP, HTTP and SSH server) and In…

Update 16 Sep 2016: The project mentioned in this post has its own page on Gamejolt and Itch.io now: Visit "Stick Veterans" on Gamejolt or Itch.io for more info.
Some of you may have played the classic games Stick Soldiers 1 and 2 by WhiteSpaceUnlimited. Stick Soldiers belongs to the list of small, humble games that manage to captivate our interest and have made many of us spend a lot of our free time and have a lot of fun. (you can download them here: SS1, SS2)

Stick Soldiers has remained discontinued for the past years after the hiatus of the development team and the cancellation of the long-awaited sequel Stick Soldiers 3 by Andrew Russell Studios.

For a long time, I have aspired to revive the Stick Soldiers series by making a fan sequel to the game. Since school's start, I spent about a whole year working on a Game Maker / Ultimate3D project, aiming to evolve it to a complete and worthy sequel, which I called "Stick Soldiers: Encore". Second year of school …

Better late than never, the "omelette" mini-game I announced in my previous post is finally complete.

While humble and simple, the game turned out nice and I am very satisfied about it. I might work on it more in the future, but I consider it complete and playable as it already is.

Controls are pretty simple, move with arrow keys and shoot by clicking. The enemies come one after another and get progressively harder to beat. My friends and I have enjoyed playing this game and I hope you will enjoy it too.


Downloads:


Download & play, for Windows
ZIP file - download, extract and run omelette.exe
3 MB




Download source file
ZIP file - Game Maker 8.0 file, and required files
2 MB

Kostas here, in the past three days I postponed working on the "dragboxes" project to work on a new idea I had, for which I am actually excited.

This will be a simple mini-game where you are an egg and fight against enemy eggs using guns. I am going for the fun factor in this game: using interesting weapons, and having a good-looking mechanism for the egg-breaking.

The first phase of the project is ready and demonstrates the breaking of the eggs.

Downloads:

EXE: omelette_d1.zipon Dropbox (Extract first) (Windows only, 1.45 MB)
Source: omelette_d1_gmk.zipon Dropbox (Game Maker 8.0 file, 0.13 MB)

Screenshots:

In my first post I described a small Game Maker project I am working on. Today I implemented a few additions to the project.

Changes:

Implemented a very basic scripting module, to allow dynamic behaviourCreated switch blocks that execute a script when they are placed properly on switch platesCreated banning areas, which prevent player boxes (heart boxes) from passing though but let other blocks throughMade the motion of the boxes smoother, to allow finer player control

Eventually, after some brainstorming conversations with Kostas we decided to create this blog in order to post our work.

As you may guess my name is Anastasios. My interests are comprised of computer security, linux, operating systems and many more low level programming concepts :P.

Finally and before my first post, I would like to thank Kostas for taking care of junkbytes.com because i wasn't involved in the creation process. May the source be with you Kostas :) .

So regarding my first post, last days i encountered a very interesting way to execute ptrace. What is ptrace system call ?

ptrace is a system call found in several Unix and Unix-like operating systems. By using ptrace (the name is an abbreviation of "process trace") one process can control another, enabling the controller to inspect and manipulate the internal state of its target. ptrace is used by debuggers and other code-analysis tools, mostly as aids to software development. (wikipedia.org)

As you can see i…

School is finally ending, so that's one thing less on our minds.

Anastasios and I have been tinkering with code and software for quite some time. Our specific interests in programming are very different, but we enjoy sharing interests and cooperating in small projects. Anastasios recently suggested that we make a small blog to post our concepts and experiments, and I liked that idea.

This is Junkbytes.com, the blog we started, and aims to slowly grow with posts about everything we may be working on, mostly programming-related.