tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18939438912150334762011-11-27T15:35:52.651-08:00--- "Yet Another Rogue"Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.comBlogger601100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-68278536782943073302010-11-02T15:50:00.000-07:002010-11-02T15:50:31.158-07:00

Seems like I have found my groove right now.  I kind of suspected that there would have been the mad rush at the beginning of the project to work on it and it would peter out a bit over time.  At least now I am getting a better sense of how long this will take.  At first I was stary-eyed and had great plans and thinking "how hard could this be."  Though I knew it was not a simple undertaking, but

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-66872323504756075202010-10-22T13:49:00.000-07:002010-10-22T13:49:31.187-07:00

This week is Fallout New Vegas.  Way back when, I watched the closing credits of Fallout 2 after a very fun romp though the NorCal wasteland.  I did my typical "Talkie/Sniper" build which is how I usually play any CRPG.  At least for the first run though.  Then a name popped up on the screen.  It was a name of Warhammer GM in High School.  And I went, is that him. A few months later we met up

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-74040462151457435682010-10-19T09:51:00.000-07:002010-10-19T09:51:41.230-07:00

So I have finished what would be the foundation part of the RTS programing book.  That is mostly on textures and skinning and the heavy lifting of DirectX.  Now it is time to put all the pieces together.  First though, I need to take a step back.  The code in the book is fairly simple.  In that there isn't any real resource management, and much of the initialization information is hard coded in.

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-90242264127763295982010-10-04T10:27:00.000-07:002010-10-04T10:27:45.156-07:00

So I have finished all of Chapter 4 and I am on the final exercise of Chapter 5 of the RTS programming book.  Right now I am have an issue with the vertex shaders and the terrain.  Once again, this will require going though the example code and taking a look at mine to see what little step I have forgotten. So far it is just a fancy terrain map with some functions for later use.  Most of the

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-56274150316736189732010-09-20T11:15:00.000-07:002010-09-20T11:15:54.219-07:00

After beating my head against the wall, I called in a friend to help look at and debug the code.  If I were in a collaborative environment to begin with, I would have asked for another set of eyes sooner.  But after lunch at a nearby sub shop, I had him poke at my code. Although the exact error was not found at that time, he did show me some more tricks working with Visual Studio and at least

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-48179022674538296662010-09-10T13:49:00.000-07:002010-09-10T13:49:07.151-07:00

I am slowing working my way though Programming an RTS Game using Direct 3D.  Only on Chapter 4 but I am taking my time to go over the code in the book and the full code on the CD to understand what I am doing.  Not to mention going back to some DirectX resources to see why I am doing what I am doing. However, I have hit my first real stumper.  Some how I am getting corrupt memory in my

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-85522131462589759282010-09-03T13:45:00.000-07:002010-09-03T13:45:29.912-07:00

If you went to Engineering school in the 80's you most likely had to take a programing in FORTRAN class.  As I started in 1989, I too took FORTRAN.  Two years later, entering freshmen learned C instead of FORTRAN.  Granted I also took the C programing class as an elective, but FORTRAN was the required language.  Also I think my year was one of the last years to have a mechanical drawing class

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-20504592445804391492010-08-12T13:38:00.000-07:002010-08-12T13:38:16.499-07:00

There is English and there is English.  I am from the US and have what is as close to what is the "Neutral US Accent."  This is the accent of the majority of news casters and for the most part the non-metropolitan east coast accent.  Being a geek I grew up with Monty Python and other British TV as well as spent some time in Australia.  And for the most part I never had an issue understanding most

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-11468722340603882312010-08-10T14:25:00.000-07:002010-08-10T14:25:42.239-07:00

It has been a few days playing with DirectX and the tutorials from MSDN.  As tutorials go, the MSDN collection is fairly weak.  Lots of steps missing that you need to go research or already know.  Very little in the way of explanation.  On the upside it was nice to know that I could fill in the holes myself, and that I have learned quite a bit so far. Like the Win32 API, DirectX (at least

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-83345528030849835692010-08-05T09:29:00.000-07:002010-08-05T09:29:34.277-07:00

The past few days have been adventures in to the Win32 API.  After all the elegance of playing with the STL and creating classes, I have gone back to fairly basic C style coding.  Not only that, C-style coding with Microsoft style tags and means.  I can see the various Visual Basic influences as well as some other old school language methods.  Now to be fair, this API has been around for over 15

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-78626808509574736912010-08-03T08:52:00.000-07:002010-08-03T08:52:02.050-07:00

After putting a stop on Maze Mover, I have decided to take a few steps back and learn some basic Windows Programming.  Well at least the Win32 API.  Mostly this is because I am going to work with DirectX so I should get familiar with the Windows based calls.  The SDL API did some interesting changes on top of the standard Win32 API while using Visual C++.  Then again SDL is meant to be more

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-9985867209377431022010-07-29T10:24:00.000-07:002010-07-29T10:24:25.086-07:00

At this point, I have touched on most of the key traits I wanted to cover with Maze Mover. It isn't the complete Pac-Man game, but it has the elements I wanted to include and at this point I have gone as far as I would like with the current design. So here is a bit of a sum up of what I wanted to do and was able. Separate the graphics/game library from the programming.  I did create a whole

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-69664123150533356512010-07-28T08:23:00.000-07:002010-07-28T08:23:25.901-07:00

The hectic month that July seems to be is finally over. With work sending me off to different locations and Comic-Con, it kind of disrupts focus. Granted, I should have still worked though it, but a few other games got my attention. While at Comic-Con, I did get to run to one of my game designer friends, so that too has help rekindle my fire. Okay, now back to the project. Maze Mover is at a

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-30364097005036340322010-07-13T09:15:00.000-07:002010-07-13T09:15:09.645-07:00

Well after a week of testing and rebuilding libraries, I have come to the conclusion that python and SDL have issues. For now I will forego using Python with Maze Mover and now just focus on getting some simple path finding and AI functions hard coded into the game. I was going to move off of SDL eventually, but it may be time to do so after I get enough of this game working as a test project

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-41291890800830488792010-07-08T09:10:00.000-07:002010-07-08T09:10:01.927-07:00

Not programing objects, but really annoying obstacles. I have hit a bit of a major road block with the current Maze Mover project. Something between Visual C++, Boost, and Python isn't working with the project. It seems there are two problems, both of which need to be solved in the long run. First is the boost-python libraries do not "out of the box" work with the python debug libraries.

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-10559979457393598092010-07-02T10:09:00.000-07:002010-07-02T10:09:59.299-07:00

Aside from being on travel this week for work, I had the unfortunate event of my laptop's hard drive dieing on me. The annoyance about losing "data" was minimal. I have multiple copies of all my critical data in various locations. All of the "YAR-Project" work is up on the Sourceforge Subversion server so nothing was lost there. A few documents that were in flux were lost, but I have hard

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-1987773546384891002010-06-27T14:14:00.000-07:002010-06-27T14:14:47.918-07:00

As you may have noticed, not much on the "new" programing this week. That is because I had the joy of flying around to perform IT related upgrades. Although there is a lot of time wasted while traveling, not much of if is directly conducive to getting any quality programing. I do have time to read more so I have started Effective C++. In short this will be a book that I will read again in the

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-56612259864533130562010-06-21T22:25:00.000-07:002010-06-21T22:25:18.402-07:00

Over the years I have classified many arguments on the web as Coal Miner Debates. Unfortunately my reference hasn't caught on yet. In the circle I surf, one of the most common topic of debate is "Is $GAME and Role-Playing Game?" There have been many variations on the theme depending on the boards in question. The most common variant I find myself in is "Is $GAME is MMORPG?" Keeping this

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-79237398621118307272010-06-18T17:56:00.000-07:002010-06-18T17:56:29.853-07:00

The last few days have been full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.   Okay, not that bad, but I was hoping that I would have something more tangible to show.  The last few days have been going though various amounts of documentation and web searches to understand the how and wherefore of embedded Python in C++.  I expected it to be a bit easier then it turned out to be.  Mostly because it

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-33200797452310605922010-06-17T16:55:00.000-07:002010-06-17T16:55:01.135-07:00

I have always been a fan of seeing the development of ideas though common media over time. One of my favorite examples it Issac Asimov's Foundation Series. The first set of books were done in the late 1940's and then more books are added in the 1980's. What I found interesting is that both books represent more about the culture at that time then the future. How women are treated in the

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-73507761234179983582010-06-16T17:03:00.000-07:002010-06-16T17:03:10.521-07:00

So here it is...Sort of.  The beginning of my Pac-Man like game.  Still needs quite a bit, but this is fairly significant.  First off, I was able to use the tile board from before, but I the player token (Pac himself) is larger than the single tile size.  So I had to do some adjustments to the collision detection for the board. Also there was some rework to get all the Resources and Entities to

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-45568839200532055602010-06-15T16:00:00.000-07:002010-06-15T16:00:02.877-07:00

This weekend I finished my first play though of Alpha Protocol. Suffice to say it was a short story. However, it is not really a short game. One of the big things touted about this game was that it is all about choice, and their are no bad decisions. Most RPGs that have any moral choices tend to favor "Good" over "Evil" choices. The Knights of the Old Republic series had a really big

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-82001822560913834282010-06-14T07:50:00.000-07:002010-06-14T07:50:57.219-07:00

The past few days have been fun whit C++ streams and dealing with file I/O. Way back when, I remember dealing with char arrays and char pointers to handle text information. But most of what I recall was writing my own tools to crudely manipulate strings to at least do some basic tasks. In my first career related job, I was introduced to the world of Perl. And lo did string manipulation just

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-72809170476363766222010-06-08T05:40:00.000-07:002010-06-08T09:43:44.076-07:00

...is just a Rectangular Bear after coordinate transformation. The nice thing about traveling cross country is having lots of time to read. My current text is: Game Engine Architecture. 6+ hours flight time each way means quite a bit read even with the occasional cap nap to digest the information. By the time I got back to San Diego, I had finished just over half of the text. One thing that

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-48088689584152499832010-06-05T07:04:00.000-07:002010-06-05T07:05:22.440-07:00

My first real job as a Systems Administrator was at Salomon Brothers at 7 World Trade Center. A short walk north from the office is Warren Street, home of two of my usual haunts. First was The Raccoon Lodge. To call it dive would be a complement. But for us back office grunts of Wall Street, it was our little watering hole to forget about the days events. The interesting thing about the

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-41667626584588904192010-06-03T12:08:00.000-07:002010-06-03T12:08:04.435-07:00

(Okay, so I actually did some work on the project since Alpha Protocol arrived, but it arrived early) I am starting in the next major component of the project. One that is fundamental to all games (and even most software projects) and that is data file reading and writing. Not just simple file I/O, but how to save and reload the various state information regarding the game itself. I have

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-64887220612295976322010-06-02T14:07:00.000-07:002010-06-02T14:07:00.701-07:00

Alpha Protocol has finally arrived on my doorstep. So for the next week or so I will be entrenched in all the wonder that is the modern spy. This means not too much will be done programing over the next week or so as I get though my first burn of the game. Having been around a while, I know how I play games. Which is good because I can easily plan my life around releases of games that I

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-37104068290044340072010-06-01T19:20:00.000-07:002010-06-01T19:20:00.860-07:00

It has been fairly productive over here at the project. With the Holiday free to program, and a fairly quiet day today, a good deal was accomplished. Monday started with a good deal of rework on the Entity classes as well as adding a hash_map to keep track of the various resources that will get loaded. Most of that was done to put off the inevitable dread of dealing with Collision Detection

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-43081554559183439042010-05-31T09:08:00.000-07:002010-05-31T09:08:37.340-07:00

So it is a day off from work and having no real Memorial Day plans, I am looking forward to many hours of uninterrupted programing. I just finished my breakfast and morning reading of C++ for Game Programmers and about to dive in to the code. Lots of ideas to implement today. So we will see what I get done. First I need to finish collision detections between the game board and pieces on the

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-10917648540502074552010-05-28T19:59:00.000-07:002010-05-28T19:59:05.922-07:00

The nice thing about holiday weekends is that you can get so much done. Fortunately this gave me more time to program. Today was an exercise in possibly getting too clever. Yesterday I stumbled on to making my own operators for custom data types and I may have gone a wee bit overboard. My little old position structure is now a full class with addition, scalar multiplication, equality

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-13850012729011653382010-05-27T17:15:00.000-07:002010-05-27T17:15:00.374-07:00

Today I did a small detour in to the Microsoft Windows API. Just did the old faithful Hello World, and a simple screen form. I have never been a fan of the whole "Design the interface then do the code" style that most form builders use. And Visual Studio is no different. Though part of the problem in the past is that I was trying to learn the language as well as the Form Design. The design

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-21357796836900843812010-05-26T18:57:00.000-07:002010-05-26T18:57:58.728-07:00

Coding wise, nothing too new to report. I finished off the lower level SDL interface objects and created the skeleton for the main gaming loop. Although I made a remark about Game Dev's "One Line Main" program, I am starting to see its usefulness in limiting scope and reducing the need for some type of global variables. At least now I can provide a context for most of active game data so that

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-66389854456103003212010-05-25T18:33:00.000-07:002010-05-25T18:33:45.880-07:00

I never ever implied that what I am doing is unique in any way. Just found these today: Rogue Basin: The wiki on all things RogueLike. It even has How to Write Your Own Rogue in 15 Steps. Seems like I am already on Step 4. Looking at that outline made me feel good since it is fairly close to what I had working on in my head as a development guideline. Anyway, back to the code.

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-47411401401275202532010-05-25T17:55:00.000-07:002010-05-25T17:55:03.944-07:00

Today, I am almost back to where I started. Functionally speaking. I have been redesigning the under lying class structures. Aside from using "better coding practices" like const declarations and explicitly using more references to limit the amount of actual data movement, I also changed a fundamental logical method. Originally, I had the source graphic object take care of applying itself to

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-549112241425534792010-05-24T08:22:00.000-07:002010-05-24T08:22:37.064-07:00

Last week finished up a few things. First Connect Four was put to rest and I finished the book Code Complete. So this weekend was a bit of a interim break. But now it is Monday and time to get started. First off, I have started C++ For Game Programmers. It is what the title says it is. I am only a few chapters in, but so far so good. Very meaty and it will take a while to digest. Also

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-68462773906309349472010-05-23T08:00:00.000-07:002010-05-23T08:00:02.678-07:00

So I finished Code Complete and I did enjoy it. I started writing this on Friday (it is now Sunday morning for those that do not want to do date math from the archives) and I did something I like to do often but in the end turned out to be a bad idea. I have a slightly masochistic habit of reading the low rating reviews of products that I liked. Although I enjoy doing this, it made the first

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-11421221072603305302010-05-21T10:38:00.000-07:002010-05-21T10:38:00.607-07:00

The Rev 2 Connect Four is up and out the door. Once again you can get it from SourceForge again. Today's joy in building the install package was more fighting with Visual Studio again an nothing code related. It seems that when you set your mode to "Release" in Visual Studio it decides to just bypass assert() functions completely. So parts of the code that actually started the whole game were

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-19996399244825614402010-05-20T19:38:00.000-07:002010-05-21T16:19:10.453-07:00

I am the type of person who likes to read different sources on the same topic just so I can see the topic from different angles. At times I will even even jump to similar topics just to gain a better understanding in general. For example, I read up on Java and play with it for a while to get a better idea of Object Programing. To that end, I still like to look at other SDL Tutorials even

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-47850800025948875632010-05-20T16:50:00.000-07:002010-05-21T10:34:50.745-07:00

Today was a non-code day. After pretty much getting the final task done for the next rev of Connect Four, I thought I would let it rest. Also I avoided looking at any other parts of my own code. That isn't to say I did not think about various design aspects. I found another SDL tutorial site (which I will go in to detail later when I finish it) and I have been reading up various articles from

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-4617565662827618252010-05-19T17:31:00.000-07:002010-05-19T17:31:00.134-07:00

So here I am once more. All goals for Rev 2 of Connect Four have been met. Now it is time to let the code sit for a bit and go over again to see if there are any other defects or issues that need to be addressed. There are still some style issues that are inconsistent as well as I feel the main class C4Board is just doing to many different things. But at this point it isn't really worth a

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-11642533866035958632010-05-19T15:45:00.000-07:002010-05-19T15:45:00.985-07:00

Today I read an article on Game Tutorials & How We Learn. There is a bit of confusion between kinetic and kinesthetic but for the most part it does bring in to light some thoughts when considering the audience of your game.One path I have been exploring with my lovely woman, is the idea of developing software for use in education. She herself is currently a teacher of kindergarten a pre-K but

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-25956752206364547982010-05-18T17:52:00.000-07:002010-05-18T18:30:28.282-07:00

Yet another reason why I like programing. At the end of the day there is some form of tangible progress. Some days it isn't easily quantifiable, like yesterday's refactoring, but today saw two notable features added to the Connect Four. First was adding the "Dropping chip" animation. The animation was fairly simple. Depending on how many ticks since the last screen refresh, move the chip

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-56686129266981058182010-05-17T16:40:00.000-07:002010-05-17T19:28:34.060-07:00

In reading Code Complete, one of the more interesting statistics was that the average amount of new code generated by one programmer was about 50 lines a day. Now, "lines of code" isn't a very good metric since it does not take in to the consideration of the density of each line of code. That is how much really is done. However it can give you a ball park idea on how complex the program is.

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-20974298007527001992010-05-16T12:04:00.000-07:002010-05-17T12:23:04.153-07:00

This morning's breakfast was strawberry waffles. What does this have to do with game development? Well not that much but it was yet another aha moment for my journey. My lovely woman was craving pancakes this morning and since we were out of mix, we went to the local IHOP. She did comment that since I started this project, I have found new passion again. And I got to thinking how I could

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-3766590303900291032010-05-14T13:00:00.000-07:002010-05-14T13:05:45.423-07:00

And now I am a Game Publisher. I have uploaded the Connect Four game over at SourceForge. I did change the name to Four Across just to not deal with any copyright issues with Hasbro. Sure there are some internal references to Connect Four (tm) in the code, but for now, I not overly worried about any legal action. Most of the early part of the day was spent learning the Visual Studio release

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-38704717235894932412010-05-13T13:34:00.000-07:002010-05-13T14:19:45.317-07:00

As of this point, I am now a Game Programmer. Connect Four is complete and it does everything that the basic game does. It allows players to take turns and figures out who wins and ends the game. Sure the indication of "End of Game" is the background going from white to blue, and you no longer see a potential chip, but there is a change in how the game behaves. I will be a Game Publisher later

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-29572099450900296902010-05-12T16:55:00.000-07:002010-05-12T17:45:35.468-07:00

The Connect Four game is moving along nicely. I will hit my goal of having a complete game by Friday. Though it may not be up on Sourceforge as a Release Download till the weekend. For now it will just be a .zip file of the executable, .dll's, image files. But I need to test it one of my non-development systems to make sure it works.There two things left that need to be done. First, I need to

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-36348519608476334722010-05-11T16:31:00.000-07:002010-05-11T17:15:25.134-07:00

One aspect I love about programming, as well as systems administration, is the "Ah Ha!" moment of getting past some really challenging problem. It is that moment of clarity that everything else falls into place and the rest of the solution just falls in to place. Now a days these moments are getting rarer and rarer in my primary career. It has to do with the fact that, as an industry, IT just

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-60531499415178617452010-05-11T12:05:00.000-07:002010-05-11T14:01:25.898-07:00

I make no pretense to be any form of a graphic artist. Hence the simplistic look of my games. This is also why I have never gotten in to the Mod Community of games. I can structure story and dialog paths, as well as crunch numbers for encounters, but I must rely on stock images. I can get by drawing maps with pre-gen tiles, but I would not create new tiles.When it comes to image manipulation

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-91593497467711064792010-05-10T17:10:00.000-07:002010-05-11T16:26:35.679-07:00

So it was a fairly productive day. The Connect Four Project as officially started and at this point I can create a the board of yellow plastic. As from before I have the image files for the checkers and for now that is all I will do for graphics. For this week my goal is just to get the basic game play for two human players taking turns and able to recognize when the game is won, or board full

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-51243208467653257732010-05-10T09:00:00.000-07:002010-05-10T09:05:38.723-07:00

So now that I have finished with the tutorials, time to give a bit of a sum up of my experiences at Lazy Foo' Productions. I found the site though various iterations of google searches. Between "Game Design Tutorials" and "Game Graphic Programing" it seemed to pop up a few times. So with a few clicks and away I went.My first hurdle was getting used to working with Visual Studio 2010. It just

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-53734789450286057172010-05-09T13:44:00.000-07:002010-05-09T14:44:09.086-07:00

So it is the weekend, but there was still work on the project. This time, its was creating following three images for the Connect Four game:Board TileRed ChipBlack ChipAll told, it took an hour and a half to do these simple drawings. I started off opening paint and every time I tried to draw a circle it ended up slightly flattened, and I could not just modify the circle properties itself by

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-53392000300377412162010-05-07T14:14:00.000-07:002010-05-07T15:08:54.991-07:00

So today was a productive even if very little coding was done. I did a few tweaks to the ImageSheet and finished the Tile Class. I created the base of my Mob Class (for Mobile) which is based of the various Dot, Square, and Sprite classes from Lazy Foo'. For now I am done with his tutorials. I have some ideas for other exercise projects, like a simple maze game, which will deal with MOB-TILE

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-16011326619295185832010-05-06T17:35:00.000-07:002010-05-10T18:27:33.405-07:00

I finished a pass though the old classic The C Programing Language by Kernighan and Ritchie. It is a fairly small text coming in under 300 pages with index, prefaces and other such things. Even C for Dummies comes in over 400 pages and doubtfully has the same meaty-ness that is in good old K&R.The second edition came out in 1988, and there has never been an update. My particular copy was

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-87665178394167673382010-05-06T17:30:00.000-07:002010-05-06T17:34:39.568-07:00

So instead of doing lesson 29 on top of what I have already done, I decided to clean up what I have already done to make things more uniform. My realization is that sprite sheets, animation sheets, and tile sheets (not to mention font sheets) all share a lot of similar properties. You take an image file and show only a section of it depending on external factors. So it is time to combine as

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-26532067689909306142010-05-05T17:00:00.000-07:002010-05-05T17:00:05.764-07:00

Today I got up to lesson 27. Though I sort of did skip lessons 24 (Game Saves) and 25 (Joystick Controls).Lesson 24 was basically simple file I/O. I am very familiar with the concept but I have not done it in C++. However I will come back around and look at the fstream class later. Actually, I sort of need to do a nice tour of the C++ standard classes anyway. Vector was used in one of the

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-1088893784495572102010-05-05T08:05:00.000-07:002010-05-05T16:26:42.789-07:00

One of my math professors in college once was asked "What is a mathematician?" He then wrote the following on the board:Then he said, "A mathematician is someone who knows that the answer to this equation is square-root of pi." This is the Gaussian Integral and is fundamental to most of probability. The trick to solving this is to making it look more complicated to make it easier. In the end,

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-55918229466274046012010-05-04T15:02:00.000-07:002010-05-04T15:43:02.137-07:00

Today was lessons 20 to 22 at Lazy Foo'. Animations and scrolling backgrounds. Most of my time was spent breaking out the Animation lesson and creating my own robust Sprite Object. Also I cleaned up some of the SDL wrapper functions and put them in their own header/code section. Today's limitation was trying to create arrays of undetermined sizes of things. My pointer-fu is still weak. Right

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-51793272884963984752010-05-03T17:52:00.000-07:002010-05-03T18:27:38.232-07:00

To become a game programmer, one must first learn to program. I am not sure exactly when I started programing. My first projects were typing pre-written basic programs from this yellow book of "Computer Games in BASIC." I was fairly young at that time and I could understand the structure and read the code, but I was not really developing it. My first formal programing education was learning

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1893943891215033476.post-12155171678436651472010-05-03T17:20:00.000-07:002010-05-03T17:51:42.620-07:00

So here I am, starting a new project and seeing how I will change my life this time. Who I am is fairly simple, just another geek with a goal to make a living being a game designer. I have been playing games of some sort all my life. I had one of the first "Supper Pong" game systems (Four Games in ONE!) and my family got one of the very first Apple II's out of someone's garage, long before "

Andrew E Harastyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17001186769929793122noreply@blogger.com0