Sound had a bunch of bugs, music would not play correctly.. loading errors..

Music now plays, pauses/unpauses, and stops. No loading issues (was actually reporting an error even though there was no issue).

Next up will probably ogg integration and sprite handling.

In the mean time, I’ve starting delving into SDL. Currently going through some tutorials and to get the gist of it. I’ve been doing the SDL Tutorials in tandem with learning programming on Ubuntu Linux, involving using gcc/g++, Make, and other various goodies. Essentially, I take a tutorial on SDL, change it up a bit, maybe making it into a more modular class format, etc. and write a Makefile and compile.

Hopefully in the next month I’ll have a small SDL program that conglamorates much of what I learned. I hope to make a release both on Ubuntu and Windows.

So far, I’ve created a vertical slice video of the game. Note, this video is simulated game play of the board game, it may or may not look like the computer version.

Made on Ubuntu with all open source tools, Blender, GIMP, etc.

Verticle slice of gameplay

Tutorial video

What I really wanted though was the next two books I’ve recently checked out, one “Interactive Computer Graphics A Top-Down Approach With OpenGL” is actually a well put together (so far) advanced book on computer graphics. Prior to reading it (and because it was raining so I didn’t want to ride my bike home and I can only check out 5 books at a time right now), I read an oooold book that was right next to it on the shelf–”Computer Graphics Definitions” from 1984. The interesting thing about this book, is it had a mix of TV and movie technology as well as upcoming 3D computer graphics technology that was mostly theory then. Or that most of the 3D computer technology comes from a lot of old theory. I finally learned what those Bezier Curves comes from.
The final book I’ve got, “The Essential Blender” , goes pretty well with the other book I got. I picked this up due to my lack of internet access for a week and the not-so-great quality of a lot of the blender tutorials out there. I like how the book is written and I’m moving quite along with it.

Anyhow, after these I want to find a book or something on cross-platform development and networking (multiplayer game) programming.

example: these are equivalent

const ARRAY_LEN;
my_array[ARRAY_LEN];

unsigned int i;
for(i=0; i < ARRAY_LEN; i++)
{
my_array[i] = '';
}

and

memset(&my_array, '', sizeof(my_array));


And it gets better..

The table below compares two different methods for initializing an array of characters: a for-loop versus memset(). As the size of the data being initialized increases, memset() clearly gets the job done much more quickly:

sources: http://www.cppreference.com/wiki/c/string/memset

Went backpacking with family in the Three Sisters Wilderness for a week (and summiting south sister), and then up the Oregon coast for some fun in the sun at the beach (as well as backpacking a night in a very wet cloud in the coastal range..).

View from South Sister

Actually this experience resulted in some interesting game ideas I had for some adventure/travel/gathering/picture game.

Inspiration!

Well, I re-relocated back to Seattle after a couple months living in Portland, this should help with finding a job in this area–not so fun to travel 8 hrs for an interview…

At the library I stumbled across a rather fun programming book–Beginning Linux Programming by Neil Matthew and Richard Stones. I’ve been pretty excited going through it especially as it’s a project based book. The project in the book makes a CD catalog management program. This is all fine and dandy for the book but I have no use to record all my cds into a program. So I’ve been doing the cd program educationally, and then heavily modifying it to make my own program, MyGroom, a dog grooming salon management program. Basically the program will allow you to:

Add customer into a database, as well as their pets, with all the necessary info a dog groomer would want to know.

Search for customers, and book a pet.

Edit/remove entries and more.

This will be done with Bash, C, and MySQl among other things.

I think once I get through this book and get the program pretty well done, I’d like to do some web development for it, a business web page along customers to book their own dog and such using LAMP and web technologies. But, I haven’t gotten there yet.

Mission play currently features three worlds with a total of 16 challenging levels.

Each level features a start and finish point, obstacles, level objectives, bonus objectives,  and collectable items.

See the website for Serial Connector here.

Next up is to finish the  map editor.

• Use random generator to generate 3 pieces into the GUI piece bank.
• Select a piece using the mouse or ’1′ ’2′ ’3′
• Upon selecting piece attach piece to mouse
• Piece follows mouse, snapping to the grid
• Display an overlay for playable grid spaces
• Piece can only be placed on playable spaces and only in certain orientations. I.E. the piece must properly connect to another piece.
• Add placed track to graph
• Allow to place at start and finish points

To Do List:

• GUI (pending artwork)
• Random Domino-Track Generator (console version completed)
• Graph to add dominoes to (rough console version completed, lacks required features)
• Create rest of track pieces–update track attributes and methods
• Domino Collision
• Object/World organization and loading

We’ve almost reached week 4, meaning getting down to under 3 months to have her done. Expecting some rapid development happening.