Archive for December, 2007

I’m a drunken fool…

Cris threw me a surprise birthday bash last night which was a first for me, from my fuzzy memory I think I have to say a few sorrys to Rae and loren, and probably Daz.

On the up side I think everyone agreed to test out Bert when I’m done even Daz and I didn’t think he was much of a PC gamer I think Webber has a 360 so he’ll be useful when I get round to that side of it. pyro sounded amazed when i told him that I was also redoing the map Editor.

On the subject of XNA I spent most of last week trying to install the new XNA 2.0 and kept getting an error saying something like “XNA needs the original source please redownload” after downloading three time I ended up looking through the known issues to find that this error really means “Uninstall Windows LIVE for games thingamy bob” thanks micro$oft.

2007
12/24
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Dave
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Toys, Toys, Toys…

I’ve been getting in the festive spirit and bought myself a few things for my computerJ, well you didn’t think I was going to spend money on someone else?!?

I had a small windfall recently due to a tax rebate so after I had given crispy a load of cash I spent the remaining pennies on some stuff for me thanks to play.com I now have a new Keyboard & mouse and a spanking new Xbox360 controller (for windoze) that I’ve been after for ages now I finally got one that didn’t cost £35 I like the fact that Micro$oft have started selling these to PC owners for less than they were selling them to Xbox360 ownersJ.

Any who, I see now that the Space game template has keyboard support in it, I only fond out because I was showing crispy that my controller did work. I saw that it was a two player game I poked at a few buttons and hay presto it worked but there isn’t any indication on the screens to let you know that you can press a key sort of thing.

In Bert news, I got colour bleed on the tiles when they are drawn so I don’t think I’ll be using the tiled sprite example for the render engine, if I still get this problem when I write my own render engine I’ll probably look at spacing out the tiles and see if that works.

I’ve also started reading John David Funges “AI for Games and Animation, A cognitive Modeling Approach” but I’m having a little trouble with the Maths in it, Maths has never been my strong suit. Yes I’m aware of the irony, but I wanted to read it for more a grounding in AI techniques than a how to, which is good because that’s what the book is intended to be.

2007
12/12
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Dave
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Game Development
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Humble pie

I got a post back from Paul Re:The subtle art of code conversion.

Neil optimised that for me. Sequencing the C code like that causes the resultant assembler code to make much better use of the registers (back then, on 486 processors, the 1st 4 registers were MUCH faster than the others – the sprite functions were 486 optimised). I wrote something along the lines of your code originally and it turned out to use more registers and thus slow down the function call. It’s a bit beyond my knowledge level, but Neil assured me it would work and it did cut down map loading times a lot. I can’t remember why the bytes had to be swapped but I think it was a DOS thing.

So By way of an appolagee, Paul I’m sorry for calling you a git.

NEIL YOUR A GIT!
4 Hours I spent trying to work out why I was getting numbers that were too big.

2007
12/04
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Dave
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