Controller Woes

Curse you analogue controller!

Wow, it's been a few weeks since I last posted anything here. I should remedy that.

I think I will.

Let's talk programming.

When we last talked I'd been working on a Zelda-like for Linux and I'd made a bit of progress. One of the things I was testing was the ability to use a controller.

SDL2 makes it fairly simple to hook a controller up to your computer, find it and use it and I did tests that did just that. Using the left analogue stick I made a sprite move around the screen. This worked well for both horizontal and verticle moves. But there was a problem.

New Amiga Game

I didn't get much done program wise and worked a bit on my movie I don't have much to show.

However!

There is a new Amiga game that has just come out and it's free to download. Dan Wood over at kookytech.net gives a bit of a review.

Enjoy.

Fighting The Good Fight!

Looked up "silly" on the Internet. Was not disappointed.

The struggle is real my friend! Okay, just kidding.

That aside I got a bit of work done on the game today. Unfortunately it's a bit of underlying stuff so their is really nothing to show. It looks exactly like the image I uploaded yesterday when run so have a look at that if you want to see what it looks like today. Instead I'll find something silly to upload.

Today's work was making a texture class to wrap images I load up into it. The class handles rendering and will return the width and the height of a loaded image.

Step By Step

Updated "retro style" graphics but not final at all.

Today it didn't seem like I got much done today but I actually got more than I thought I would.

Aside from the new graphic I made for the temporary title screen, I created a timer class so I could control the frame rate of the game. The game now runs as fast as it can but updates the screen ~60 times a second. I'm not sure if I will keep this as some people have displays that refresh at higher frequencies than 60 hertz. Some people are up in the 120 range and beyond.

Accelerated!

Pretty but not much to look at.

I'm not going to lie. I had a hard time getting into the project today as the thought of going over and rewriting stuff I'd done before did not appeal to me. I wasted a bunch of time doing "other stuff" until I forced myself to sit down and actually work on it. I was happy I did. Unfortunately I didn't get as far as I wanted too.

Live and learn, eh?

It's Late. So Late

Not quite state of the art graphics...yet.

So, once again I didn't get as far as I wanted to. The plan was to pull the Windows source code from BitBucket and get that working on Linux.

Well, pulling the code was the easier part. Getting it working under Linux was a lot harder. I spent more time than I should have mucking about with that. Eventually you have to decide if it's better to spend the time trying to get what you've working under the new OS or starting over from scratch.

Home Sweet Home

Gaben!

[Billings, MT] Today was a long day and a tiring day but all in all a pleasant day. I got to see some family I hadn't seen in a long time. Unfortunately it threw off my driving schedule. I don't mind because I wasn't under a huge time constraint. I simply didn't want to be driving into Billings in the dark.

Unfortunately this means I'm home, gotten some food, gotten a shower and am almost ready for bed. It's pushing 10 pm right now and I am tired.

I was hoping to get a SDL project up on my Linux box and a "hello world" program going. Doesn't look like it's going to happen right now.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 5 Catching Up

So, I took a couple days off from my Commodore 64 BASIC dungeon crawl to take breather from the project, a little breather, and to work out how I was going to handle the movement and other factors that are needed to make a dungeon crawl.

In my attempt to "save memory" I decided to use a one dimensional array to store my room data and, even worse, I stored strings instead of integers in my array. Something like:

10 DIM RM$(100)

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 4 A Brief Interlude

Welcome to video four in the series. This is getting to be an enjoyable series for me!

As I get deeper into this project I wanted to take a few moments and fix a variable that I may have problems with in the future. This project is reminding me of the many pitfalls I had on my BASIC game projects when I was in high school. The most noticable to me is the fact that I didn't plan out the projects that well. So, as a result, I'd either work my self into a corner and have to start the project over and better planned or I'd have to implement a feature poorly because I didn't think it out well enough. There were also times I'd get so fed up with a project I'd abandon it. I find that is the case here.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 3 Character Creation And Bug Hunts

Ah, the third video in a series of videos where I uses the Commodore 64 to create a simple text dungeon crawl. Of course I'm using C64 BASIC.  This video is a bit long and I think it clocks in at over 30 minutes but that was not on purpose.

When I'm doing these videos I'm programming something off the top of my head. This is not the proper way to do things as you would usually do a lot of planning. This was, however, how I used to do projects, well most projects, back when I was in high school. It was any wonder I got any of them completed.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 1 Initialize the Game

OK so I decided to start programming a Commodore 64 video game. In my last programming video I'd made a Christmas candle it was written in Commodore 64 BASIC.  I enjoyed this process very much and the urge to do another project has started to tempt me.  I had been watching various you two videos of other people's programming projects and several of them had done a simple dungeon crawl.  So I figured that should be my next project.

Bring Back the Arcades of Yore!

Where all the cool kids hung out.

I miss the video game arcades of the early 80s. More importantly I feel sorry for people who were PacMan skillz. Odds are they'd hand your ass to you with their better than uber PacMan skillz.
born too late to experience such places. Arcades were great. They were the social hang outs for us nerds and introverts. Instead of being a jocular football player we could be "cyber" athletes of a sort. Of course there were a handful of nerd girls who'd hang out at the arcades so if you weren't too shy you might be able to woo them with your awesome

Arcades were an awesome experience. They were usually under lit in order to make the games and artwork stand out. The sounds was a cacophony of beeps, bloops and the battling music of attract screens. The only modern equivalent I can give is walking in to a Las Vegas casino and listening to the siren songs of the electronic gambling machines. A lot of times there was the steady flow of Top 40 music coming from speakers embedded in the ceilings of these places. You might just make out the tunes of a favorite song above the din of the machines.