Voyaging Mind

I have had a presence on the internet for a very long time, having built static sites, run sites on various content management systems as well having written a lot of text in various blogging sites. One thing I have never really is done is getting to grips with server side programming. Sure I wrote a couple of app-engine apps  but I am not sure I understood the concepts. I however had an idea for a site I am thinking of creating that would require a reasonable amount of server side coding. So I decided to learn a bit more about the topic. I signed up the the Web Development course at udacity, the free one as I don't need a certificate at the end. So far it has been pretty interesting. While I sort of recall some bit from previous adventures, taking it from the ground up has been pretty interesting and I am certainly learning a fair bit. I have also brought a book on node js and express. While I am only slowly progressing with this it is touching on similar topics the udacity

Well I would not say I have been productive over the past few days. I have been busy but in a distracted sort of way. No simple game has hooked me yet. I like the idea of producing some simple, small games but my drawing abilities let me down and I get disappointed. I am learning towards creating games that are a little bit more off the beaten path so my, lack of, drawing skills are not compared with full time artists. My art skill at art varies a great deal over a period of a year. It is all down to practice and knowing the tools. It would be fair to say I am at a low point at the moment and the only way out of this is to do more art.  The tool I am most familiar with is Inkscape and to be honest it is not ideal for the creation of art I would like in my games, that means I have to leave my comfort zone and learn some more tools. Usually at this point I would head towards something like gimp but this time I am taking a look around as all I really need in a sprite editor. It would be n

I call it v0.01 and it is ready to ship. I am of course talking about my little play around game engine I am creating. It is really just about 900 lines of code to wrap SDL a little bit. Not exactly breathe taking in terms of quality. Heck I have not bothered to put it in its own name space. Nor does it really have a name, well it does it compiles to a static library called gamelib. I just call it v0001 for short. The point is not to create a great library more to have fun while experimenting with C++ 11, along side SDL and cross compiling to HTML5 and android. Mmmm when has cross compiling been fun? Still I am sure it will be this time. So I made a small list as I said I would and set about completing the list. Now as promised I will create a simple game. Yay! Although I am still not entirely decided on what it will be. I may just go for the obvious clone and remake space invaders. It is simple to make so I can play with C++ 11 and will force me to draw a bit (a good thing). Dra

I have to admit I am quite enjoying SDL at the moment. About 10 years ago I used it a little bit and found it to be a bit low level for what I was looking for. Sure it was very cross platform but I was looking for something slightly higher level to knock out a few prototypes. I think I ended up using python and pygame (which uses SDL internally). Fast forward to now and with increased experience in C++ plus SDL having improved somewhat as well I still find it low level but am finding it fairly easy to wrap it into a slightly higher level api to use. It means so far this year I have been writing a game engine, I actually want to be writing a game rather than an engine. Game engines can and will steal your time in part because they are so interesting to create and in part because there is always something else to add. Thankfully I have avoided abstracting away SDL. The code I write is tightly coupled to SDL but then SDL is on every possible platform I can reasonably target making this is

I have spent the past couple of days knocking together the start of a small 2D gaming library in C++. Pretty much wrapping parts of SDL to make them more C++ like. I have to admit it has been great fun. It has been a while since I said that about C++ I have probably said it many times but C++11 has been a huge change and the alterations C++14 makes look like they will make things even easier. Sure there are still things needed such as a module systems but the feel of it is a lot more modern. If you have not spent time with C++ in the past couple of years then you will probably be presently surprised with the changes. Thanks to clang we have competition in how fast things compile and that is benefiting us all plus the relentless drive in performance increases of hardware, yes I am singling you out SSDs, is slowly making programming in C++ a little less of a chore. Sure I doubt it will ever feel as fast as Java but it is getting better. Finally I have been trying out Clion a new ID

Is there a better way to see in the new year than a really heavy cold that has you floored. Perhaps there is but the heavy cold options was the one dealt to me. Christmas resulted in a number of Hudl 2 tablets entering the house. They are pretty nice tablets that may be unique to the UK as they are produced by Tesco (a large supermarket chain in the UK). One fun thing about them was on the play store the game Terraria did not support these tablets. My children quite like this game. Looking on the Amazon store not only do I find it is happy to install it on the tablets but was for a limited period free. Kind of a win for amazon and a loss for google play as we now have the amazon app store installed and am now only one step from buying from them. Christmas also brought in the first chromebook into our house. It is an ARM based one and is really nice to use. I have not put it to any heavy duty tasks but it handles all the light browser based tasks like blogging, emails and facebook