Voyaging Mind

It would be fair to say I have not been productive during this year. I have done a great deal of learning rather than actually getting on with the project I had in mind for much of this year. We are now gradually heading towards to the end of the third month and all I have is a few abortive attempts at starting something. Yes I have learned a great deal about servers and some about more modern ways of doing client side web apps. I do like that style of creating apps perhaps because servers are still a bit of an unknown to me at least in real use so pushing as much to the client is my safe place. But so far the results are telling, I have produced nothing of note. So I decided to kill it. If a project is not gaining some development momentum after two and a half months then it is probably a good idea to move on. Perhaps I will return to it at a later date but for now it is dead.  It is funny how the decision to kill it came about, I was having a frustrating time trying to figure somethi...

It is fair to say I have written this entry about 4 times and that is kind of funny as it is just one of those what I had for dinner entries. As my previous posts indicate I am taking a bit of a dive into server side web development as it is area I know little about. The Udacity web course taught me a fair bit and made me think seriously about using the google app engine. Something just didn't feel right about it. The lack of control part where it seems very hard to get you data out if you decide to migrate away has just about scared me off. I however liked python and took a look at using Flask. It seem pretty nice but again I didn't really progress with it. Last night I realised that I don't yet know enough about server side webdev to get going on the project I want to create and decided to attack the Node JS book I have again. This keeps in with my only use Javascript of C++ for projects this year, plus it is self contained and should give me the knowledge I need to a...

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...