Big Jump Before the Wall

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 tutorials and it seems it will solve my "list of stuff of unknown length" dilemma of yesterday.

Lesson 25 is more event handling. But for the most part the only difference is they are "joystick" events instead of "keyboard" events. The handling is pretty much the same:

if (event.type == EVENT_DEFINE) { do suff; }

For the most part you end up with a fairly extensive elseif structure. To fully build an event handler will require spending time with the SDL_Event structure and all its sub structures.

At this point I think I will take a look at Lesson 29 (Tiling) then start work on my Connect Four program. The Particle Engine lesson is on the list, but I will spend some time making it into a independent object class. Bit Map Fonts (30) and Pixel Manipulation (31) seem to have some more useful information, but I am not that sophisticated graphic elements yet. I should go find a nice 2D computer graphics/animation source. Frame independent movement is simple, move object/animation inversely proportional to the time between the last frame.

The last sections are on multithreading. Programing threads is an advance topic on its own. Independent of gaming. This, too, will require more dedicated study independent of game design. Let me get a few single threaded games under my belt first before I worry about this topic.