Development Blog

Hello! Finally got around to updating the website layout with a more modern look. Site currently doesn’t work in IE7, but honestly hardly anyone if anyone who would even visit this site uses IE7 soo whatever! I haven’t tested it in Firefox yet tho. But anyway, updated the sites look and feel, and probably will be updating the look of the menu’s sometime during this week too.

Also just a small update where other things are. Currently have a good design I am working on for my 2D engine. Also deciding to take a better approach to the development of it. Basically I am going to make small goals, and build the engine up by accomplishing these small tasks. Currently I have been working on memory management of the engine. My goals with this work is to decrease the amount of allocations (more…)

So I haven’t updated the site since late April. A lot of things have happened.

I first took a small break from development to try to improve my health, and to continue looking for work. I ended up doing some minor development during this time anyway, and ended up finally being hired by a company. During all this time I have been meaning to make updates as I have been doing a bunch of design work/research on my multi-platform game, which has evolved a lot since I last talked about it or made an update about it. One thing I haven’t gotten to is updating the look of the website, which right now still doesn’t look great which I will hopefully get to when I get time.

Now as I mentioned above the design for my multi-platform game has somewhat evolved, and I am currently trying to figure out the scope in all of this.  (more…)

Update:

Website is updated .. yay!! As you can see it is basically the same visual theme as before except with a drop-down menu to navigate the site. This way it is much faster than previously to view content, as well as update it for me as I do not have to deal with this annoying category system I used before. Not all the pages are done, the stub page for the “Projects” page still needs to have content filled in as well as the “About” page. I also want to add an archive link to all the blog posts. But so far this update is going to make editing the site a million times easier… so yay!

Old:

Hello! Just a quick update. Finally getting around to updating the website. I need to go from WordPress 2.9 to 3.3.2 incrementally so it might go down and up randomly.

While I still do not have a new theme really, I do have an update I will be doing to modernize the site(and it’s code), overall making it much easier to navigate and find information, as well as efficiency improvements. (more…)

Just a small update. I managed to implement the Undo-Redo, and photoshop history feature pretty easily into the Map Editor, only took a couple hours. I also have down what I am going to do about the selection stuff from an algorithm point of view, I am just not sure how I should integrate this into the effectively GUI at the moment. And in other news I got bored and started looking into multi-platform coding.

The other thing I have been doing a lot of reading about is the android-NDK and writing multi-platform code, which is what I want to do for the Coins game. So far everything is good on this part. The only thing I am worried about is on Android the OpenGL surface view creates it’s own thread for drawing, and in this case I am going to have to do some trickery to get around this as I want constant speed/updates across all platforms. But for now I have been just setting up a Windows build. After I get some of the architecture done I am going to test it out on Android. I also tried out a test Linux build, however to my (more…)

While thinking about how to go about creating the game I mentioned previously I looked through the Map Editor’s code, and overall design. After doing so I feel like I can do A LOT better to make the application more flexible for adding new features, as well as easier to use to edit maps.

One of the features I want to add to the editor was undo commands. And with doing so I think I am going to redesign parts of the interface, as well as a lot of the underlying code. Right now a lot of the code is pretty brute forced and not engineered the best. So I am deciding to use a command pattern to keep a history of edits done to the map, which will also allow undo-redo.

Another feature I am going to add is a cut and paste tool. While editing if for instance I decide I need to resize the map, or move certain sections of the map around it becomes extremely tedious as I have to delete all the tiles, and then re-tile everything. Instead with cut/copy/paste implemented I will be able to select area’s of the map (more…)