/dev/stu

Reached a small milestone in my bat and ball game (BallBreaker), the fonts are implemented as bitmap fonts, meaning that everything on the rendered on the game screen is original material.

The current font system is based on tiles, so it should be easy to implement animation and cool stuff next, it definately feels like the project is about 1/2 way to releasable.

Switching to Cairo is starting to seem attractive, especially when making bitmapped versions of the fonts.

For the moment I won’t switch to Cairo as I’m very curious to see what happens to performance when pygame 1.8 comes out.

Another reason I haven’t switched yet is a bit of lazyness - the pycairo msi doesn’t install the cairo dll… and of course the learning that goes with the new API

More MSys troubles, it turns out that sh.exe stackdumps were somehow caused by my Logitech Quickcam.

To stop the segfaults, just kill the lvprcsrv.exe process and things start working again.

Found here

I was getting an error ‘Cannot create executable’ when setting up MSYS, it turns out that the solution is to add

/mingw/libexec/gcc/mingw32/3.4.5

to your /etc/profile.

Cheers to the mailing list at nabble.

I’ve just finished the initial version of the font that’ll go into my game ball breaker (”Ball Breaker Caps”)… Some of the characters need more work, but it has the retro-future look I’m going for.

This means that I can feel happy about putting in the high score table and scrolling messages and they’ll have the look I’m going for.

It seems I use more addons for firefox than I thought… to help speed up setup on other computers I’ve made a page with the current addons and greasemonkey scripts in use… The current list looks like this:

• BetterSearch
• ColourfulTabs
• Del.icio.us bookmarks
• Dragdropupload
• Fish eye tabs
• Greasemonkey [Gmail colorizer]
  
• Operator (semantic web)
• No squint
• Web Developer Toolbar
• CSS Viewer
• IE Tab
• Live HTTP Headers
• Foxytune - Controls media players including XBMC

Now if only there was a greasemonkey script or addon to install these automatically I’d be sorted

I’ve recently started learning python in earnest, to this end I’ve been writing a bat and ball game. I’m quite suprised at how much you get for your LOC in python… so far it’s about 1,000 LOC and has multiple powerups and bats, plus sound fx by ne7.

,

Graphics are made in inkscape and the GIMP - ingame screenshot after the cut.  Read the rest of this entry »

Well I gave in and installed some blogging software… mostly I’ll be posting development things I find out and need to remember, and information on ongoing projects.

I might just post the odd weird animated gif here too, in fact theres one below the cut

Read the rest of this entry »