Day Fourteen

If you've tried to run the previous two releases, you may have been greeted with this message:

This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect...

This is due to so-called "side-by-side" issues. You can get the earlier releases running by downloading and installing the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package. I'm fixing the issue by statically linking my app, so future releases (including today's) won't require this.

So, on to today. Home from mum and dad's for tea, then some pottering around, where I

• got the project statically linking;
• disabled texture blurring for that ye olde schoole pixellated effect;
• implemented viewport panning and zooming;
• got a follow-cam working.

So download and explore. Controls are now as follows:

• a, d: move the guy
• space: jump
• q, e: rotate
• cursor keys: move viewport
• pgup, pgdn: zoom viewport
• p: toggle debug
• l: toggle camera lock
• esc: exit

And the link: DayFourteen.zip

Hmmm... don't expect this productivity burst to last forever! But, while it does, future plans are:

• Animation
• Sound FX
• Particles
• Data file format, and loading

Day Thirteen

I think I'll be working on the HelloWorld app for while yet, and I'm spending time today going through hge and b2d dox, making sure I get some broad overview of how these libs work, now that I've got something basic going. Next steps will be to divorce the physics sim from the view, allowing me to have a large world, scrolling the view around and zooming in and out. I also want to draw some debug lines so I can see where the static and dynamic physics bodies are, without having to rely on hge sprites. And I'm starting to think of what the prototype game might be...

...and later I got debug drawing in, got the guy bouncing around, and fixed a few bugs. So it's a-d to move, space to fly, q-e to rotate, o-p to set debug drawing on/off. And here's the link: DayThirteen.zip

Day Twelve

Got graphics loading fixed (loading from a packed resource file now); got Box2D ticking away, and got keyboard control in for moving the little guy about. Not bad for an hour or so of a Sat'dee evening. Zipped everything up into a release, which I'd hoped to upload here. A bit of googling around revealed a bevy of free file hosting sites, and I got me registered at one. So, here's the link: DayTwelve.zip.

Day Eleven

Nothing today. Randomly decided to see Miss Saigon, and just got home from a late supper at Billy Lee's following the show, so no time to make any headway on Project "White Box". Hehe.

Day Ten

Continued the hackery. Got a simple Engine class going, although that took longer than expected because hge's update and render callbacks need to be static. Resolved this by making Engine a singleton, but still need double-indirection for the callbacks. Then got a sprite moving around. Or, to put it bluntly, a white box. Must investigate file loading soon, so I expect the tune for the next few days will be investigating how best to do something, implementing, refactoring and so forth, until HelloWorld hits yesterday's feature list, and is structured in a sound way, providing a framework for further development. Natch.

Day Nine

Really tired tonight; it would be oh-so-easy to make some lame excuse and do nothing. Instead, I squeezed in an hour's work, from half-nine to half-ten. I got the hello world example building and linking, with everything in P4. There's no sprite bouncing around the screen with physics driving its movement, but the framework for that is in place. I expect the next step will be reading docs and hacking on the framework to get to that point. Even better, here's what I want:

• Arsepipe splash.
• Arsepipe audio.
• Sprite bouncing around, with gravity.
• Control something with keyboard and / or mouse.
  

There's not much time, but I'll make that the milestone for Sunday. So four days, which translates to four hours, probably!

Day Eight

Turns out that D. wasn't having a night out, so I had scant time to dedicate to the project. I improved my P4 configuration, got things working on the command-line from cygwin, imported Box2D and hge into the repo, got the hge tutorials building from the cygwin command line with vcbuild, and coded a HelloWorld app that doesn't, as yet, build. Task for tomorrow is getting HelloWorld to build and run, incorporating both hge and Box2D. Basically a sprint bouncing around with physics driving it.