Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
The game engine has been coming along quite well recently. I’ve been doing a lot of work on it, as it’s school holidays.
I moved all the image code over to OpenGL, which was surprisingly easy. All I had to do was change a bit of initialisation code, and then rewrite the code that draws bitmaps. Instead of blitting them onto the screen, now images are rendered as textures. This gives me some very big advantages. Firstly, I have to call one command to rotate an image – something I was having a lot of trouble doing before. Also, I should be able to make it more resolution independent, and allow the user to play the game fullscreen.
I was having some trouble initially with OpenGL – I was just getting a black screen. Eventually I found that I was clearing the screen after drawing everything… At least then I could get white (or coloured) rectangles to render, but I was still having problems mapping the texture to them. After a long, frustrating debug session, I found that I had just accidentally put two arguments around the wrong way on a function call… Suddenly everything worked perfectly!
(more…)
Posted in Linux, News | 1 Comment »
Posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007
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…)
Posted in Linux, News, Technology | 1 Comment »
Posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007
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.”
For more information, see the release announcement,the Ubuntu 7.10 Press Release and the GNOME 2.20 Release Notes.
Posted in Linux, News | No Comments »
Posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
Well, I fixed the wireless issue that I was having. The solution was to add the rt2500 module (which doesn’t support WPA) to the blacklist (/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist). After I did that and restarted, the ndiswrapper module took control of the card, and I was able to connect to my wireless access point.
Posted in News | No Comments »
Posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007
BBspot reports:
Microsoft’s innovative strategy to counter this reluctance to upgrade will be to release a bug-ridden, security hole-filled Service Pack 3 for XP. “Most people are happy with Windows XP and have no reason to upgrade, but SP3 will fix all that,” said Microsoft’s VP of Service Packs George Francione. “The bugs and security holes can’t be reversed, so there’s no going back. The only viable solution will be to upgrade to Vista.”
Full Article
-Stephen
Posted in News | No Comments »
Posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006
I was bored today, and I decided to give my site and blog a new look. I made it a lot lighter, and added a stock photo up the top. I think that it looks a lot cleaner and more modern. If you liked the old version better, you can still see it by using the style chooser up in the top right corner of the page.
-Stephen
Posted in News | 1 Comment »
Posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006
We had a lot of downtime yesterday and this morning when we couldn’t connect to the internet. I also put a lot of photos in my photo gallery so you should take a look at them.
-Stephen
Posted in News | 2 Comments »
Posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
This is a really funny: Some people copied and pasted a whole website, and they left in the original content (just commented out) and the Google tracking code. Hoave a look in the source of the copy; it’s pretty funny.
“If you are ever so lazy as to steal the CSS and HTML from another site for use in yours, please remember: try NOT to take also the javascript code that tracks the site stats, unless you want to be caught red-handed.”
If the “Read More” link does not work, try the Duggmirror cache. It doesn’t look any good, or have the whole article, but you can get the idea.
read more | digg story
Posted in News | No Comments »
Posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006
I just configured my wireless LAN card today with NDISwrapper. This means that I no longer have to run a cable up the stairs to my computer! I have not been able to get this card to work with the Beta Linux drivers, so I have instead had to use a windows driver and NDISwrapper instead. This is working perfectly, and I am using it right now to make this post.
Now I just have to get Samba working so I can print to our downstairs printer…
-Stephen
Posted in News | 3 Comments »
Posted on Sunday, September 3rd, 2006
We went to Riverfire last night, and it was pretty awesome. There were about half an hour of fireworks, and the two F-111s flew over us while doing a dump and burn twice! The sound of them flying overhead was incredible… It was deafening, and we could feel the heat from the burning fuel. They were flying very low, and had to be only 30 to 80 meters above us… The fireworks were cool too, and I got a couple of good photos; I’ll put them in the photo gallery later.
-Stephen
Posted in News | No Comments »
