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You know how there's that awesome feeling?
Sep. 3rd, 2005 01:12 amThat feeling you get when you fix a bug and the entire program/library/etc comes together after multiple frustrating hours? I just got that. Magic: The Gathering now has unlimited smooth scrolling across the table, and you can drag cards wherever you want (did I mention it was smooth, too?) I haven't mentioned anything about this project before, I started it in Fiji after taking a look through my two Magic decks and thinking about how to represent them in code. After two weeks of work, averaging around 4-8 hours per day on the game, I have something to show for it. The program itself only contains minimal rules about running the game and giving priority to the appropriate player. Each card is a DLL (for now) which contains a bunch of exported functions, and the game loads every DLL it finds and fills up a structure that contains millions of function pointers. Now, the obvious security hole in this setup is that a card (Soulnova, for instance) could delete every file on your hard drive (although personally I think it would be amusing for Soulnova to grab a single random file and delete it). If this project goes anywhere then I'll switch to a scripting language like Lua, which has many obvious advantages over DLLs. Until then, the security hole stays.
Anyways, I have some basic turn logic in place (no combat yet, extremely basic card playing (the stack doesn't exist yet)) and I have written some nice video routines that make my life easier. I give you a delicious taste of what is yet to come:
( Screenshot )
So, in conclusion this new project is quite challenging and a lot of fun to work on. On the topic of solving bugs, I finally found the source of problems I've been having for the better part of a year. Turns out that I was drawing my lines for one element one pixel past the boundary, ergo overrunning the space given to the SDL pixel array. All it took was a -1, and every bizarre problem in SDL-GUI disappeared. Poof. On the bright side, that means I can keep adding in more GUI element types whenever I feel like it now, I used to be holding off until I discovered why it kept crashing :)
Man, code is \m/ I also highly recommend the new IDE Code::Blocks, it's like Dev-C++ but... better. I feel like a traitor now, but one of the Dev-C++ dev team is working on this new one with some other folks, and the result is a well-designed, wxwidgets-based, extensible IDE for C/C++. It's a 1.0 release candidate that's available, and while the class browser and code completion are still a bit wonky (surprisingly more wonky than the Dev-C++ ones), it's a wonderful program to work in. It lets me have workspaces and build targets, first of all. That means with my Magic: The Gathering project, I have the 'Release', 'Debug' and 'Cards' targets. Release has some compiler optimization settings ticked, Debug puts in all debug info and Cards runs a makefile I created that compiles every .cpp file in the /cards directory into a DLL. Did I mention that Code::Blocks integrates with 5 different compiler sets right out of the box? It's hot stuff.
Enough geekiness for one night. We'll see what happens tomorrow.
Anyways, I have some basic turn logic in place (no combat yet, extremely basic card playing (the stack doesn't exist yet)) and I have written some nice video routines that make my life easier. I give you a delicious taste of what is yet to come:
( Screenshot )
So, in conclusion this new project is quite challenging and a lot of fun to work on. On the topic of solving bugs, I finally found the source of problems I've been having for the better part of a year. Turns out that I was drawing my lines for one element one pixel past the boundary, ergo overrunning the space given to the SDL pixel array. All it took was a -1, and every bizarre problem in SDL-GUI disappeared. Poof. On the bright side, that means I can keep adding in more GUI element types whenever I feel like it now, I used to be holding off until I discovered why it kept crashing :)
Man, code is \m/ I also highly recommend the new IDE Code::Blocks, it's like Dev-C++ but... better. I feel like a traitor now, but one of the Dev-C++ dev team is working on this new one with some other folks, and the result is a well-designed, wxwidgets-based, extensible IDE for C/C++. It's a 1.0 release candidate that's available, and while the class browser and code completion are still a bit wonky (surprisingly more wonky than the Dev-C++ ones), it's a wonderful program to work in. It lets me have workspaces and build targets, first of all. That means with my Magic: The Gathering project, I have the 'Release', 'Debug' and 'Cards' targets. Release has some compiler optimization settings ticked, Debug puts in all debug info and Cards runs a makefile I created that compiles every .cpp file in the /cards directory into a DLL. Did I mention that Code::Blocks integrates with 5 different compiler sets right out of the box? It's hot stuff.
Enough geekiness for one night. We'll see what happens tomorrow.
