I’m close to a release, very close, but theres still so much to do!
I wont give a date, i’ve tried that and it doesn’t work, so i’ll adopt the famous mantra “When its done” and see you next decade!
lol, i’ll have a more interesting post when i’ve finished the bit i’m working on at the moment.
So it occurred to me that as i come closer to releasing something, I’ve not yet ventured out of the debug environment of my IDE (Visual C++ 2008, which apparently coddles your code to a great extent.) I decided to try a release compile and see if i could get it to run outside of the development environment, what fun that was!
First of all, it highlighted a bug in my code that the debug compile never did, I’d only assigned 5 surfaces for sprites, not the 9 that i was actually using, that took a few attempts to figure out!
Then i found a couple of people couldn’t run it, this confused me as I’m writing in plain C++ and SDL, and I’d included the SDL DLL.. Anyway, to cut a long story short (too late?) people who don’t have it installed, need to install the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable, its only 1.8mb and I’ve had commercial games that have forced the 2005 redistributable on me in the past, so i don’t feel so bad about that.
After all the fuss, the 3 people I’ve sent it to have all got it working 
I’m especially proud of the fact my game currently occupies 14kb as a release executable (either i write efficient code, or games are worryingly more expansive than i dare think about..)
Did i mention my laptop died a few weeks ago? Didn’t use it for programming, but it was very convenient as a media pc, the loss has been very annoying! (especially when i though my main pc had died, and i was facing the prospect of spending at least £400 to replace whatever had broken)
Ho-hum.
So shortly after my last post, i had an accident and had to format my pc. I put off setting up all the SDL dev libs and everything, then just when i was about ready to get it all sorted, i had a hardware fault (which in hind-sight, could have been what caused the crash that meant i had to re-install in the first place..)
Turns out i had a bad stick of ram, so while i wait for its replacement, i’m on a meager 1gb 
Anyway, i’m going to get it all setup again tonight and i have tomorrow off, so i hope to spend a bit of time getting back into things.
Seeing as theres no point in not showing everyone the only screenshot of Atoms i have at the moment, here it is!
I’ve gotten to the point now where i have a pretty decent class based engine that handles most of whats needed for Atoms. I should be working on the actual game now and as soon as i have anything interesting to show, i’ll put up some screenshots 
Bah, curse you Haowan! Your suggestions have caused a reboot of my codebase, but its all good, this one shouldn’t take so long.
Before i abandoned it, i’d made significant progress on the last Atoms codebase, the next one will incorperate these improvements
So i’ve started doing a little work on Atoms while in my lunchbreak at work and progress has been steady. I’ve renamed the project “Atoms 2008″ as i’d like to update it periodically, and because i’d like it to be a progression of the original, not a replacement.
Pretty soon i’m going to take some shots of it to show everyone, i’m jazzed at how its coming together now and i’m even having ideas on how to add AI to make it single player as well! (the original didn’t have single player) This is made more interesting by the fact i know nothing on the subject, but thats not stopped me before (lol?)
More soon…
So i set up my own hosting and copied wordpress onto it, i’m in the process of setting up pages for my projects as well as generally just working on them
I’ll be updating here instead of the old wordpress blog from now on, so please check back for more inane gibberish
Its been a while, i’m sorry but i’ve just not done any code at home in ages
I sat at the computer today much as i have on numerous occasions with the want to crack on with AstroLiger but the will to work on certain parts of the code lacking, so i chose to look at implementing a tilemap engine -something thats needed for this and probably any other game i’m likley to make hereafter, and i’m glad i did. A few words of wisdom from my friend Haowan (Alex of Deadrock fame) pointed me in the right direction and now i’ve (almost) got a working tilemap engine
Now i just need to hook it into the renderer, add mouse controls and make an editor, then i can put together some mock levels
Progress is slow, i’d forgotten how much i dislike webdesign nowadays, so i havent done the webpages yet, even though i’d decided thats what i was going to do this weekend.
I have been doing a little code though, not much, its been a pretty boring weekend, low motivation. I’ve been working on the game engine, i’m keeping it generic as much as possible so i can use it as a starting point for future projects, today i added framerate control, and thats all working very nicely now.
Over the next week, i need to try to get a tileset renderer up and running, so i can build levels, not that i have a game to play them in, but its what i want to do next 