A little test application showing some features of the engine
I’ve been writing a cross-platform game engine in C++ recently. The ultimate aim is to create a game engine, so it’s easy to create games without having to worry about coding any image, text, music, event handling or window creation support. I’m using the SDL library, which makes writing this really easy. Right now, the engine supports sprites, images, music, text and keyboard and mouse control. I am still working on adding collision detection and image rotation, and then I will able to start making the actual game.
The game I intend to make, called “Eclipse” will be a remake of an asteroids game I made for a school IPT project, which we were forced to write in Visual Basic (ugh..). (more…)
A version of WINE (0.9.46), a free implementation of the Windows API for other operating systems released quite recently featured support for all versions of Photoshop up to CS2 to “just work”, so I decided to give it a spin. I’ve been using Wine mainly for games for a while now, and have found the support for DirectX very good. Still, I was very impressed with how well Photoshop ran – all the filters and operations I tried worked flawlessly.
Of course, there still are a few issues (like not being able to type into the serial number box in the installer, and a small issue with window focus), but for the most part, it was very impressive. The Wine developers have done an amazingly well, and I wish them luck with future versions.
You can see my testing report here. My screenshot is there too – with a slight spelling mistake…
I’ve been using 7.10 since the fifth alpha release, and it’s really great – a big improvement over Feisty in some areas. The new display manager is alright, but I hope that it is greatly improved for the next release – it’s a little sparse on options at the moment. The new version of Gnome is great too – some nice improvements there (like being able to drag from File Roller to Nautilus).
Here’s the announcement:
“The Ubuntu team is proud to announce version 7.10 of the Ubuntu family of
distributions.
Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, and
servers, with a fast and easy install and regular releases. A
tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and
an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.”
I came across a cool blog featuring mockups of ideas for the user interface redesign of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Some of the best in my opinion are the imitations of Macromedia/Adobe Flash’s interface, and the design similar to blender. Another interesting one featured a full-screen view of the image with transparent palettes. Here are two examples:
Whichever design they choose, it will definitely be a big improvement over the current interface.
Here’s a review of the new Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 that will be included in many major upcoming Linux releases. The Screenshots look fantastic, and the configuration tool looks greatly improved.
I just upgraded my computer from openSUSE 10.1 to Ubuntu 7.04. I chose to go to Ubuntu instead of upgrading SuSE because I have grown to hate YaST (It’s incredibly slow on this computer), and Ubuntu’s configuration tools are so much better. I’d never been able to get SuSE to update any of my packages, or even to play mp3s. In Ubuntu, this did not take very long to setup at all.
Now that I can play music on my computer, I am streaming my iTunes library downstairs to my computer. I had to buy some new speakers, because my current ones weren’t great. I got some really good Logitech speakers for $40 (down from $70) which sound great.
The only problem that I have now is my wireless card. Ubuntu comes with a driver for my chipset, but it is limited to WEP encryption. So instead of this, I am trying to use NDISwrapper instead (it was working great in SuSE). I just can’t work out how to change it’s driver from rt2500 to nidiswrapper…
I saw this on Digg – it’s the first of an interesting series about Linux gaming. Includes a brief history of gaming on the Linux platform, and some of the best Linux games available (both commercial and open source). Look in the comments too – a lot of other interesting games have also been suggested.
You get to use it, instead of it using you. A Linux system immediately snaps to attention and does your bidding, with no hassle at all. Even when you tell it to do something impossible, it tries to make you happy and only reports back to you upon failure. If you’re tired of the computer popping up an “Are you sure?” dialog box in your face, you’ll love Linux. Stop and think about it: when the computer makes you tell it everything three and four times before you’ve convinced it that what you’re trying to do is a good idea, isn’t the computer really just arguing with you???
It trusts you. Never enter a serial number or an authentication code again! Because the software’s free in the first place, it isn’t full of booby traps to keep anybody from stealing it. Tired of feeling like a cop is watching you over your shoulder with every mouse click? A Linux system takes it for gospel that it is your computer to do whatever you please, and leaves the police work to the police.
You can have any kind of desktop you want! Go for a familiar interface with KDE, Gnome, and Xfce. Or get Enlightenment and gaze in awe at just how cool it looks. Or go for a performance desktop with a minimalist Blackbox or IceWM. Rid yourself of mouse-dependency with RatPoison, or be ‘leet with the Spartan TWM. Get a flexible desktop designed to emulate almost anything with FVWM or go for the cutting edge of graphics capabilities with XGL. With over 50 window managers and desktop environments to choose from, there’s a Linux experience that’s just right for you.
If you liked tabbed browsing in Firefox, you’ll love virtual desktops. Have you ever gotten tired of maximizing one window, doing something, minimizing it, and hunting for the button on the taskbar to bring the next window up? In Linux, you open a program on desktop one, maximize it, and hit a key to go to desktop two and keep another program maximized there, and so on – as many desktops as you want. Never settle for anything less than full screen. And as if that weren’t enough, you can also hit another key combo to bring up the console – your desktops are still there, undisturbed – while you can flick back and forth between multiple consoles as well.
Access is finally shipping its next-generation Linux-based operating system and development kit for mobile devices. The company is showing off version 1.0 of Access Linux Platform (ALP). According to Access co-founder and CTO Tomihisa Kamada, �The ACCESS Linux Platform software has been designed from day one specifically for mobile phones and converged devices. We believe this approach has enabled us to deliver an integrated, commercial-grade Linux-based platform that is optimized to provide true flexibility, openness, and customizability.
I think this looks pretty cool, and I can’t wait for some phones to enter the market running this!
Here’s a video of it in action:
I’m really getting sick of those default Windows Movie Maker titles though…
One of the most addictive Linux games, Frozen Bubble, just got updated to version 2.0.0. The new version brings you a new single player game mode (multi player training), network (LAN, Internet) game mode (up to 5 players), fully revamped graphics, full joystick support, recording and playback of all games with non-predefined levels and more.
This was one of the first games I played on Linux (On a Knoppix live CD), and I still love it!
