Look at these reviews of AiRace: Speed

• "Download it today, because you will not be disappointed." - NintendoFuse 10/10
• "AiRace Speed is one of the most solid Nintendo 3DS titles to hit the eShop. And, for $4.99, it’s a steal." - GAMINGtruth 9,5/10
• "I found myself coming back to the game multiple times, even after finishing every level." -Nintendo Enthusiast 9/10
• "If you like some fast, flying action, there is no better place to look than AiRace Speed." -Nintendo World Report 8/10
• "Challenging, fast and exciting, AiRace Speed is as fun as it is fast." - God is a Geek 8/10
• "With its impressive visuals, old school challenge, and strong replay value, AiRace Speed is a winner!" - Pure Nintendo 8/10
• "It drops you and your vehicle into an obstacle course and demands that you fly increasingly fast to get out alive." - Nintendo Life 7/10
• "As an eShop title costing a mere $4.99, AiRace Speed by QubicGames impresses in numerous ways." - My Nintendo News 7/10

AiRace Speed Reviews

Finally, AiRace Speed is on the market. This is what press says:

3DS View:

"This game is quite a step up from the original tunnel racer created by QubicGames on the DSi. You get sexy graphics, great music and a slick framerate to boot. Online leaderboards means you’ll get plenty of replay value while going for the best scores. If speeding down tunnels at ridiculous speeds in full 3D sounds like your kinda thing, then you simply can’t go wrong with this title, especially at the modest asking price. Highly recommended."

BeefJack: "Recommended."

3DS Pedia:

"All in all AiRace Speed is one of the best racing game I’ve played on the 3DS and even one of the best jet racing game I’ve played on any console. The gameplay is a bit similar to Zaxxon Escape (Android) but AiRace Speed offers much more features than it. It’s a great game and well worth its $4.99 price tag."

http://purenintendo.com/2013/09/21/pn-review-airace-speed/

Failed to load platform plugin "windows", QT 5

When deploying the QT 5 application, after adding all (as far as I thought) required DLLs, you might get an error like this:

Failed to load platform plugin "windows". Available platforms are: minimal, offscreen, windows

In documentation (https://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtdoc/deployment-windows.html) it stands that one should put platforms/qwindows.dll in the app directory, but it didn't work in my case. Actually, I've found out something weird, that it's enough to add the libEGL.dll in the app directory, and that works. I'm not a QT developer I must be honest, so I don't know why it helped, maybe it's ok. But nothing like this was said in the documentation, so I decided to write it here, maybe someone will be looking for the same problem and now google can help him (it didn't help in my case ;)).

AiRace Speed @ Nintendo 3DS eShop

Finally, we've made it! AiRace Speed, continuation for successful DSi AiRace series is comming to the market on the 19th of september. I've worked mainly as a Producer / Project Manager on this title, but I was also doing some programming job there.

Cinematic Trailer

Gameplay Cinematic Trailer

ゲキヤバランナー

Our game, 2 Fast 4 Gnomz just went onto the Japanese market, now it's called ゲキヤバランナー, that means Gekiyaba Runner, or "crazy runner" in other words. Our publisher is Flyhigh Works.

http://flyhighworks.heteml.jp/games/gekiyaba/

2F4G @ Nintendo 3DS

The next game that I've been working on in QubicGames was released in the U.S. and in Europe. It's actually a port of 2 Fast 4 Gnomz from WiiWare to 3DS, but as a matter of fact the game was made from scratch. The new version is greatly improved. My role was project management and programming (both engine - new QubicGames engine for 3DS platform, with stereoscopy, and gameplay). The game got really good reviews - usually between 7/10 and 9/10 - including:

• Nintendo Fuse (7/10)
• Nintendo World Report (7/10)
• Nintendo Station (9/10)
• Nintendo Life (7/10)

Some screenshots here (click):

And the trailer:

Fake Snowflake Shadow

Some time ago I was walking at night in a dense snow fall. I won't talk about my mood, but I was walking alone, nobody was around and I had some time to think, or rather to observe what was happening around. I was really excited about the shadows that where casted by snowflakes. They were dancing everywhere around, like small spiders running through the snow. Something beautiful, honestly. Of course, I mean shadows that are casted by something like street lamp. Now the problem is - how to simulate them? Of course we can cast each shadow accurately. But there are some obvious problems, and when I say problem I mean performance. I think I don't have to explain what problems are connected to shadowing complex particle system with multiple lights (just imagine the deferred shading with all those particles outside buffers, problems with transparency, or FR with multiple pass particle drawing, crazy). And also, there is some possibility, that you render your flakes (or even more possibly - rain) as post process. Sure! It is possible to do it in a straight way, but we wouldn't be game developers if we wouldn't look for some fakes ;) So how can we add some fancy shadows on the snow, that will look like drunk spiders? As you can expect, I'm not going to talk about any physically accurate solution. Look at the image first.

The upper part of the image is a 2D ortho projection of the world, the Source is our street lamp, green line is the ground. The lower part is meant to be the top-down view. As you can see, when the snowflake is close to the lamp (high), it's shadow is casted far from the center of the lamp cone, and it's movement dx1 is quite big. Then, when the snowflake falls and is close to the ground, it's movement dx2 decreases and position get's closer to the center. The situation shown here is utopia, because the flake falls straight down, with const speed. But, what it shows is that the shadow will be tending towards cone center with decreasing speed. This is a very important observation. Now, let's look at the right side. The snow is falling by some trajectory and in successive time periods it is located in P0, P1, P2 and P3 positions. The rule is quite the same, its shadow in time (T0-T3) tends towards cone center with decreasing speed, but we have to remember that this speed will not decrease monotonically, but will be varying. There even may be a situation, when T(n) is farther from cone center than T(n-1). When we look from top at the problem, we also have to add some variation in the other axis (due to air drag, the flake doesn't move straight), we can assume that shadow moves over some simple spline, directed towards S' (cone center) and with variably decreasing speed. The Lambda area is some small area around S', where shadows tend to dissapear (i think that making them bigger and more transparent would look good). You have to include this Lambda area if you don't want your shadows to dissapear suddenly. That's what I've observed in nature - flakes don't go towards strict cone center, but towards some area, because the light bulb isn't a point, but a volume.

Ok, I think that the idea is simple and obvious, so now - how can we simulate this? There are many possibilities, like:

• Particle system used only for shadows
• Post process stage shadowing
• Animated textures (even on low-end hardware, but I won't call any exact names ;P) with texture projection
• etc.

What you can take from this note is the general behaviour of snowflakes. Their movement is partly predictable (or at least its schema), and by reproducing it you can achieve some eye-candy scene.