Darn good SDL Tutorials!

You know the feeling of being dizzy and nautious and you just had, say, a fever? You walk around your little appartment with a smelly sweater which is too cozy to change.
But suddenly! Someone noisy and energetic rings your doorbell and burst into your death hole and drags you to the bathroom and fearcely dips your head into a fresh mint and citrus smelling bucket of water. Of course it's ice cold. What do you do???

I craved for more of that near-love experience!!! x'''D At least mentally, because that's how Mr. Tim Jones's tutorials felt like when I began with them! I was so anxious about failing to understand and program in C++ and not to mention SDL. Oh I can say that I had to retake a course because I couldn't manage to write a 2D game in SDL :(

A week ago I sat down, furious at myself and everything around me (my desk, my cup of coffee, my baby sister in one corner of the room...everything) and I googled on C++ SDL tutorials games. I started clicking and felt how releaf started to fill my body as I read some tutorials. I decided to start with Dev Hub's SDL tutorials as they felt more noob-friendly and the site was user friendly. I checked both SDL and basic C++ tutorials, and decided to go with SDL directly because they were very similar to my lecturer's examples.

Yes, some parts were exactly like my lecturer's examples during the lectures, but oh my God how easy it was to follow and actually understand what Tim was saying!! *____* During this week I've learnt so much so much so much I could cry out of joy!

So I highly recommend all beginners in C++/SDL to start with Tim's tutorials!! Read them, follow them and make a Donation to Mr. Tim for his hard work and generosity!! (ò_ó)/) You won't get served with silver plates like this often!

Even a retarded person like me understood them, and I made a nice Tic Tac Toe! ;D Of course I'll continue with the tutorials myself but after doing 4 of them I felt the urge to blog about it :P Oh and I will also try out other programming sites and make a list of those I find the best/most suitable. This will help both you and me to get ready, set and go with our projects! ^_____^ (hihihi anyone checked out the contest at NeoGaf?)

Now it doesn't seem impossible for me to make a 2D game for an assignment with a deadline in 15th of January. I'll do the other tutorials on animation, maps and collision (YAY!) and by the end of this week I should be ready to start with my assignment.

If you happen to know how to create applications/exe-files out from VC++ projects, please tell me/link, so that I can make my "games" into applications and let people try them out! :)

Saving Private Lego?

And lastly we put words on an idea that our teacher suggested to our thesis!

Shortly put, it's about two Mindstorm Lego Robots that co-op to get an object (or more) out of a labyrinth. The first goes in and puts lego pieces as a trace mark.
When finding the goal, it sends signals to the other robot to come, the other robot follows the trace of lego pieces, gets there and brings the first robot back. Since Robot #1 is carrying the object, Robot #2 will have to carry the lego pieces on their way back to the start point, and put them in some sort of holder.
It all sounds like Saving Private Ryan. I like it.

The programming language we're planning to use is LeJOS. There are other alternatives, like RobotC, pbLua and BrickOS, but we felt going safe and use LeJOS - it's based on Java, which is the language we're most familiar with.
RobotC gets a lot of credz, but it's C-based and that scares me off. I started with C++ directly. Oh, good, because BrichOS uses that. Well... I'm not THAT good in C++, even though I want it to be my major programming language in the future.
And pbLua is based - as most of you have guessed - on Lua! Nope, we haven't studied that script language.

Besides, Java IS fun and according to Wiki and some other sites, LeJOS have a plug-in for Eclipse and guess what: we have worked in Eclipse before! *banzai*

There are more information on these and other programming langauges on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms_NXT#Programming
This fellow had the same problem and chose LeJOS as well, but it's interesting to read the comments: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/664615/lego-mindstorms-programming-which-language-ide-do-you-use-recommend
And this one has a table on the languages' attributes: http://www.teamhassenplug.org/NXT/NXTSoftware.html

Hopefully I made the right choise here. If you know of other helpful sites, especially on LeJOS and programming languages that uses C++ (like BrickOS), please feel free to drop a comment about that.

And now the real work begins. I think I'll get a hell of a new year, planning both thesis and a game project, making games in both Java and C++. I don't know if I'll manage, but I'm so glad that all of it sounds exciting, or I'd be dead by now.

/Kweiko

Director-problems solved, thesis-problem next!

Jahoo!
I know you won't believe this but we actually got a [pass] on our Director-assignment! Well, I don't believe this! We didn't even fullfill all the criterias! And there were only three of them!

Well, we did a lot of cool stuff that never worked anyway, but he (the tutor) saw how much we tried to get things done. I guess the result is not all that matters. The way to get there was a pain in the *piip*!


Mondai ga aru! I have a problem!
I and my friend will soon start with our thesis for the Bachelor's Degree. "ooh" you say? Well, we don't know what to write about!
The thing is, we have a pair of the latest Mindstorm robots that we thought would be fun to work with. But every single idea has been rejected because it seems too difficult/wide. We need something narrow, yet fun, yet "important", you know, something that could be more motivated than merely "because we liked the idea!".
And now we're still thinking. The funny thing is that we're both game development students but we're thinking robotics here.
I confess. It was my idea. I've always liked robots.
So yeah. We're stuck with robots and no plan. T_T

I am seriously thinking of forgetting about the robots and just go for a plain game or something. But I really like the idea of programming a robot X(
Hëlp hëlp!

Director is NOT fun!

And so a new year has started. My last year before getting a bachelor's degree in Computer System Science with specialization in Computer Game Development!! (\(^___^)/)

We started off with having a programming course, where we'd build a project team and make a game demo, which I and my friends really looked forward to. We teamed up with three more and became seven members, four programmers and three graphic artists. I (one of the programmers) was elected to be the project leader and we started with the design of the game, schedule, deadlines, rules and guidlines.

When we started to program in Adobe Director, using the script language Lingo, we all got reminded of how to get pissed off properly - nothing worked fine and we all felt like helpless beginners, totally lost! It was even worse than when we began to learn C++ by handling a game engine!!
Fortunately we got a lot of help from the tutor, but it took a long time to understand how Director works, with scripts instead of classes, and score and cast and everything... Four weeks have past and we've become happily wiser, but we've all agreed never to work on Director unless we really had no other choice.

In the seminar last Friday someone recommended Unity3D, another environment that's best suited for game programmers. Maybe I'll test it someday, if I don't get a phobia for everything that remind me of Director, that is.

For now, we still have two weeks left to work on our game demo, so we'll have to bear with it. X( But, [almost] everyone in the group are hard workers, we'll manage well! ;)