Well, its been a long time. Blitz is gone, nice idea - shame about the language. My current idea is to rewrite the egine one more time but in c#, using the csgl libraries. If so, I plan on releasing the code as well, so this will be more of a tutorial-style thing.

posted by at 8:54 AM (Link)

 I discovered Blitz3D the other day - I had heard of it in the past through the Llamasoft forums and thought it might be a bit of a lame game creator tookit type thing, but in reality it feels more like coding on the old BBC Micro. I think I might try and get the high level portions of my engine ported to it and then prototype the actual game in it - I can go back to the C++ version and finish that version at a later date when I have the time but given my current constraints a higher level development system might make it easier to get all of the things that I want to do done.

C# wise, I have been working on a web service at work - the coding is now complete and I just have to add data to the .config file as new features are required. I am working on a design for my other project.

Listening to: Primus - Tales from the Punchbowl
Playing: IL2 - Forgotten Battles


posted by at 9:33 AM (Link)

 Well in case you haven't noticed it, The game engine and Paradroid are on hold for the moment but I do plan to move back to the code at some stage and continue development in what I hope to be a series of more tutorial-oriented articles. In doing so, the 2d game engine will eventually become open source.


posted by at 5:03 PM (Link)

 A number of things have been going on in the past few weeks:

1. Started studying for the Java Certified Programmers exam.
2. Bought Freelancer.
3. Work.

These have been leaving little time left to dedicate to Paradroid.

posted by at 11:32 AM (Link)

 Another month flies by... and I _still_ haven't found the time to return to the game code. I fired the code up in Visual C++ yesterday and thought "I wish I had commented that bit" - oh well, tracking through and commenting it will let me remember where I was up to last time :)

Got through the Freelancer demo that was released recently over the weekend - a fantastic game well worth the money.

Listening to: Underworld - 100 Days Off

posted by at 1:54 PM (Link)

 Back to some C++ coding today - not on the game unfortunately, this application is for a barcode scanner and it is coded in a strange hybrid C/C++ dialect by someone obviously unfamiliar with C++.

Still playing CFS 3, although it is a bit of a drain on the system resources. I had to set a 1 gig swapfile to prevent warnings from popping up while playing the game - and I made the mistake of installing the latest detonator drivers which seemed to be a bit of a backwards step performance-wise. Found the same problems in the campaign mode as most reviewers did, ie the effects of wins or losses appear to have no resulting effect on the front line. I will persevere at it though as it is entertaining and engrossing.

Paradroid-wise, I need to write my own input classes as the library I am using (basically a wrapper over DirectInput) is copyrighted by Games Institute and so I cannot release any source code or use my engine in competitions which require the submission of source code. That might be my next step to try to ease back into game coding, as DirectInput is a relatively simple API compared to other DirectX APIs.

posted by at 12:11 PM (Link)

 Fired up Paradroid again last night and ran it for a while. I am going to have to find some time to get back to the code again soon, even if it is just to document it properly. The trouble is that work is sucking up huge amounts of my time at the moment and after spending a whole day writing SQL code I do not feel like even looking at the game code of a night.

I obtained a sidewinder joystick recently and lately I have been playing Flight Sim 2002 and Combat Flight Sim 3 - I really like the feel of the latter game.

posted by at 9:26 AM (Link)

 Wow, two months have gone by since the last entry. I would love to say that progress has been made on the game but I have been taking a temporary hiatus from non-stop coding. I do plan to resume development at some stage in the near future but I need to feel suitably inspired to do so, and at the moment I am not.

posted by at 9:12 AM (Link)

 I ran the game constantly for over 5 hours last night with no noticeable problems - I also fixed the display of the y-coordinate on the map. The latest pre-alpha test demo version is available for download here - It is totally unsupported though.

Any feedback would be appreciated.


posted by at 8:22 AM (Link)

 The problem may be solved - it appears that either heat or something dubious with my Windows 2000 installation may have been the problem after all. After trying to isolate the problem, removing routines and implementing a memory manager to record allocations and deallocations I can safely say that my game engine is not leaking memory or doing anything dubious. By cleaning the dust out of my PC and installing Windows XP the problem appears to have disappeared - I will leave the game running for a few more hours to see how it goes. I was using an old version of the Nvidia Detonators (31.40 I think - Freedom Force is unfortunately incompatible with newer sets but I just won't bother with that until they fix it), so it may have been something there.

It did seem strange that the simple things that I am doing in the game could cause Windows 2000 to lock up tight. Time will tell.

posted by at 5:46 PM (Link)