Voxel Turf

I first heard about Voxel Turf several years ago when the developer first started making people aware of the game. It's basically a combination of GTA and Minecraft and it was recently released. The game is written in C++ and uses Lua for scripting, a quick search on YouTube and you'll find a lot of people are playing and making videos about the game.

I've been keeping an eye on the game for a while now and I made a post about it on the Basic4GL Forum back in 2015 as the developer had written quite a few interesting things in Basic4GL in the past.

Sadly I still haven't been able to play it yet as my laptop isn't anywhere near powerful enough to run it.

Disabling a Laptop Keyboard

Ever run into that problem with a laptop keyboard where a key gets stuck down and just keeps repeating itself ad-infinitum? I have and it's extremely annoying plus the sound the computer makes while trying to deal with the constant keypresses is even worse. In the past I'd just bring up the Windows Device Manager and uninstall the keyboard drivers and continue using my USB keyboard, however after restarting my computer the Drivers would be reinstalled and the problem would start again.

There's an excellent article on TechTambayan which shows you how to deal with the problem, just by changing the installed Drivers for ones which are incompatible for your keyboard then disabling them.

As you can see in the above image, I've installed the Drivers for a Japanese keyboard and then I've disabled them.

Links to GameDev Resources

I've recently started developing a simple RPG game in Basic4GL, so I thought I'd provide some links to useful resources that can speed up development time. Mappy is a Tilemap editor, so are tIDE, Tiled and Pyxel Edit. (I should just add that if you want the newest version of Pyxel Edit you'll need to pay for it, however they do have an older unsupported version available to download for free.)

There is now a version of Basic4GL that you can use to create Mobile and Web Apps (called unsurprisingly Basic4GL Mobile) which I paid for a few months ago which should make mobile development a little easier.

Creating your own Tilemaps can be a little tedious if you aren't artistically inclined and prefer programming, so it's good to know that a lot of free ones can be downloaded from OpenGameArt.

Free Music resources can be found at Incompetech, and a range of high quality textures, sound-effects and music can be found at the site of Eric Matyas.