June 2008

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