Posts Tagged ‘Linux’

Move Window

Posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008

I recently bought a new graphics card for my computer. It’s a Nvidia GeForce 9600GT with 512 MB of memory. Here’s what it looks like:

Graphics Card

Now, seeing that this card was pretty recent, it wasn’t supported by the graphics driver that shipped with Ubuntu 8.04. Now, I did try to update the driver manually using the driver from the Nvidia website, and it’s times like those when you really appreciate the drivers in the repositories. To put it one way, it didn’t really work. Whereas I had a kind-of-working desktop beforehand, now I was working in a resolution of 800×600, which didn’t look great on my 22 inch screen. So, I did what it seems I always end up doing – upgrading to an untested, unstable early alpha of Ubuntu!

Now, I have to say that it was actually pretty smooth. The update worked first time, and then I was able to just grab the driver for my card from Synaptic. Sure, a whole host of programs crash from time to time, but compared to my other experiences, I had a pretty stable system.
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Kernel Based modesetting in Linux

Posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008

This is an interesting new feature coming soon to X.org and the Linux kernel – it’s basically moving a video card’s mode setting code (which makes the card change resolutions and so on) out of the user-mode video driver, and into the kernel. It probably doesn’t sound exciting, but it will lead to a much nicer user experience. For example, it helps to make the boot process more flicker free, and will make suspend and hibernation much more reliable.

It also makes switching from X to a virtual terminal much, much faster. There are some videos in the article demonstrating it, but since this is not planned for release until the end of the year, it is still fairly buggy and unreliable.

Read the article at Phoronix.com…

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Eclipse… In 3D?

Posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

I’ve been working on Eclipse a lot lately. I’ve changed the build system, and also vastly improved the menu system. So, I was thinking that since I’m spending so much time and effort making the game, I might as well make as cool as I can. So, I thought that instead of just making it 2D, I could do a top down 3D view instead. I’m already using OpenGL, so it shouldn’t take that much work to change the current code to 3D. It would make it easier to use particle effects too, so I could have cool looking explosions, and a better looking flame from the ship’s engine.

First, I would have to see if there are any file formats for storing 3D models that would be easy enough to implement. Then, I’d probably set the projection mode to a perspective view (instead of the orthographic view I use now), and get the coordinate system set up the same way as it is now. Then, all I’d have to do is to make a 3D version of the sprite class, and I could program it the same way I am now.

I have to try that out before I start writing game code. It’s a good thing that I have started storing the code in a GIT repository, because I can just roll back the changes if anything goes wrong. I’ve also ported Eclipse to the Autotools build system, and added internationalisation support. I don’t have any completed translations yet, but anyway…

What ever I decide, one thing that definitely needs to be done is resolution independence. Then I’ll need to make two new widgets. A spin-button kind of thing (or drop-down box) to select the resolution, and a checkbox to select full screen mode.

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