I just got an e-mail from a friend o’ mine asking why we’re using OpenGL even though our game is essentially two-dimensional. Here’s why: OpenGL is just a quick, portable way of getting pixels on the screen. It happens to have a lot of functionality for three dee stuff, but that doesn’t make it useless […]
Soft Landing now builds to a double-clickable application icon for Mac OS X! It was about 100 times easier than I expected, thanks to py2app. I’m repeatedly amazed at the things people build and give away: Python itself, SDL, pygame, PyOpenGL, and now py2app. This project has benefited from the talent and generosity of a […]
Major cleaning up is going on. Because I’m still learning all of this stuff as I go along, there is a considerable amount of ugly code and inefficient methodology hanging around in our project. For the past couple of days I’ve been doing some slash and burn on old code, replacing it with tidy and […]
Rayme of Forever Zero took a look over my shoulder while I evaluated some code today, and he gave me a helpy OpenGL tip that sped up the drawing of guys by a heck of a lot. Now we can have many, many bullettes on the screen at once, moving very smoothly. :D
A lot of stuff has gone on behind the scenes to get the level editor used to the idea of scrolling backgrounds with parallax. I’m astounded how complicated it can be just to scroll a picture past the screen repeatedly. Now, though, we have five levels of parallax scrolling past quite nicely at 60 frames […]
Been a while, yeses. I am still in existence and I still do daily think about SL. Well, recently as it turns out I’ve sort of been able to figure out some free time. Well, anyway.. much discussion and work has been done with Fet, and one of the major goals we have at the […]
We put together two different implementations of beam weapons today, and the second one worked out surprisingly well. We now have lovely lasers that fire straight across the screen instantly but terminate when they hit something.
I just played Soft Landing with a PlayStation 2 controller!! :D
The particle system is now more flexible: we can have flat polygons or texture-mapped rects. Even when texture-mapped we can tint them and have the color and opacity fade across the lifetime of the particle. I started exploring the PlayStation-to-USB adapter that Forever-Zero gave me; by this time tomorrow I should be playing Soft Landing […]
After not too much work and with the help of a couple of excellent people, Soft Landing is now finally under version control. Subversion will be taking care of every tiny little change to every obscure little file in the project. This should save a lot of time and energy for both Jules and me. […]
Recently I received a personal demo of Forever-Zero’s years-in-the-making DIY game, Gemini. These guys are good friends of mine, and their game is as much a labor of love as this one, so we often share stories of our development adventures. I had no idea how much work had gone into Gemini already; while SL […]