Obligatory Plug

Because John Karlgren has been totally awesome over the past year and has even been cool enough to give me the code to Action Cyborg, I'm going to plug his new game once more. Only this time, you can actually play it! All you need to do is send him an email and tell him you'd like to try out his new game. His email address is david@terrorpunksyndicate.org. Or, if you'd rather PM him on GameDev, his username is Kada2k6. He also would like to get some feedback if possible.

Finally!

Okay, finally I have a tech-demo to show everyone.

Here's the description from FileFront:

This is a tech-demo for my new scrolling engine "KevEngine 2". It's very basic at the moment, since I've only been programming it for a couple months. The map included in the program is very simple since I threw it together really quick so I could upload this ASAP.There's also a few features that I left out due to bugs.

Download it here: http://files.filefront.com/techdemo0zip/;8844157;/fileinfo.html

Sorry, People...

Not only do I have to sacrifice what is the best graphical function I've programmed in the engine (as of this writing), I'm afraid that, despite my promise, I have to push back the release of my tech-demo. A couple bugs popped up suddenly (about an hour ago) that I must fix. They absolutely can't be in this tech demo. I don't know what specific day I'll have them fixed, but I can assure you that it will be soon. I apologize to those of you that were getting ready to download the file today...

Tech-Demo Sacrifices

Because I want to keep my promise to release a tech-demo by the end of this week, I unfortunately have to sacrifice including the background rotation feature. The bug has proven to be quite a match for one programmer. I even have some work to do on the regular scrolling mode to get it ready for a tech-demo. I think I can do it fairly quickly, so I'll probably have something ready for upload tonight. If not, I'll have something ready by midnight tomorrow! I really hate to have to sacrifice the coolest feature in the engine, but a promise is a promise. Sorry, folks!

Whoops!

The background rotation function that was finished (or so I thought) needed a little tweaking.

Now, I have a bigger problem on my hands: A catastrophic (maybe an exaggeration) bug that causes it to not pivot properly.

Instead of writing a lot about it here, I'll point you to the thread that I posted on GameDev.Net: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=467333

And here's the video that I made to demonstrate what's going on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_SNtwHymnw

Daily Progress

Done:

- I finally fixed all of the annoying bugs that were in the rendering loop.
- I finished the background rotation function.

W.I.P.:

- Collision detection.
- Getting the first tech demo out the door!

This weekend is going to be somewhat of a mini-crunch mode, since I'm hoping to have a tech-demo ready by next week. So don't be surprised if the next post is a bit longer :)

For Dan

Dan Marshall, developer of Gibbage, just made a video about the effects of video games on the brain. Please do him a favor and Digg this: How to use Video Games to Improve Your Brain!

Good stuff, Dan! Keep 'em coming!

Programming Tip #1

Here's something I just had to learn the hard way: Never open more source files than necessary!

I was sitting here debugging the rendering loop in KevEngine 2 and I realized that I had too many source files open. If you close the files you're not working on, you'll notice how much easier it is to debug and find errors in your code.

Happy coding!