No news so far.

Monopoly development is going well and I've continued to develop my tileeditor.
It's more work then I thought to make such an editor user-friendly.I've began to implement the eventeditor yesterday and didn't really made it user-friendly though. :-/

Visual Assist X

I've fallen in love with Visual Assist X.
End of post.

I'm addictet to refactoring

I pretty much felt in love with the refactor function of Eclipse.

I used to change classnames all by hand with "search & replace" in VS2008.
After a little bit of searching I found ReSharper Visual Assist X , an addin for VS2008 which features refactoring.

I downloaded the 30 days trial version about 5 seconds ago.
I wonder if it works as good as in Eclipse...

Java isn't that bad.

I was a bit prejudice but the conclusion after ~7 hours of intensive java programming is:java isn't that bad.

I did some programming with java before but that weren't big projects.

Maybe I'll do a little bit more java programming after I finished the engine.

Editor development paused for a few days

Hey guys,

I need to stop the development of the tileeditor for a few days.I'm currently working on a java teamproject for school.

We need to program "Monopoly".
The current plan is to do it via a java-server service +
Flash for the Gui.

My work is to do the game logic.

Of course I'll post anything about that project here.

First video of the tileeditor.

Hey guys!
I'm doing pretty good steps with the tileeditor.

Here's a video in which you can pretty good see what
the current state of the editor is:


(I recommend to watch it in fullscreen,though)

It is possible to create a new tilemap and to set a few properties (Mapsize,tilesize,name and the tileset) for it.

The next step would be to implement the possibly to draw tiles on the map.
You'll hear from me again if that's done.

Oh and by the way:

Qt is goddamn good library!
I absolutely recommend it for Gui programming!

First pictures of the testing.

Hey folks!

Here is a first picture of a program I created with QT.
The goal for this program was to fill a window with randomly colored little tiles.

The result looks like this:



That was just to see how tiles could be created with QT.

If someone cares...I decided to take 'QPixelmap' for the tiles.

PS: After I woke up this morning my neck and back starts to hurt...The whole day I was crawling and moaning around...First signs of getting old :( ;)

Switching to Visual Studio 2008

I decided to replace Visual Studio 2010 with Visual Studio 2008.
The reason is that the support for QT (the GUI library I'm using for the tileeditor) is way better in Visual Studio 2008 than in 2010.

But I'm a little bit scared that Visual Studio 2008 doesn't support the new c++0x features :-/.

REALLY starting to work on the tileeditor

I finally finished my economy test.
I couldn't really start to work on the tileeditor because I had to learn for the test.

Economy isn't really my favorite subject.

Starting to work on the tileeditor

The book I ordered about the GUI library QT finally arrived. I read a few pages and realized that QT is way way waaaayyyyy bigger/enormous than I thought.

The book is ~800 pages big so I think it will take a while before I can show you some results (although I don't want to know everything about QT ;) )

You will hear from me again if I have something ready that's worth showing.

Video of the tilegenerator

As promised before here's the tilegenerator in action:


The plan for the upcoming days is adding multiple layer.

Skipping Particleengine

I decided to skip the particleengine for now.
I will continue the work on the tilesystem.

The reason for skipping the particleengine is that I finally want to have something
playable.

The good thing on the tilesystem is that I can adept the most of it from an old schoolproject I was working on about 3 months ago.If everything works fine I can upload a video of the tilegenerator within the next hour.

Problem solved once again....Somehow

I figured out the error really quick.
The problem was that when the last object got erased from the list via

i = Timers.erase(i);

the iterator pointed to the space equals to Timers.end().
The for loop then incremented the iterator and voila you get an pointer to undefined memory.

I don't know why the for loop didn't jumped out at this point even though
the stop condition for the loop is

i != Timers.end()


After I added the following line at the end of the for loop, the error disappeared.

if(i == Timers.end())
break;


New problems to solve...

Today I tried to program some "CreateNew" functions for my classes/structs.
The idea behind that was that I wanted to add newly created objects to an array so they get processed automaticly.

The code looks like this (in this case the timer class):

Timer *CreateNewTimer() {
Timer *pRet = new Timer();
pRet->EraseMe = false;
//Some more initializes
AllTimers.push_front(pRet);
return pRet;
}


In the main function there's a function "CheckAllTimers" which looks like this:

for(auto i = AllTimers.begin();i != AllTimers.end();i++) {
if(!(*i)->EraseMe)
UpdateTimer((*i));
else {
delete (*i);
i = AllTimers.erase(i);
}
}


But somehow I get an error when the timer gets erased from the array (in this case a list)...I tried to fix it for 2 hours...(I used to use vectors and hoped that the error disappears if I switch to lists...But that didn't do it.). I'm pretty damn sure that it has something to do with

i = AllTimers.erase(i);

and I'm also pretty damn sure that something like

if(i != AllTimers.end())

will fix the error but I'm too tired right now to invest more time on trying to fix this error.

Started working on the particle engine

I started working on the particle engine for my 2D engine about 3-4 hours ago.
I'm making pretty good steps although it's way more complicated than I thought.

Here's a little video of me testing the particle engine.



The next step would be to implement something like physics and spreading.
(Which is the hardest part though)

Not to see the wood for the trees

I *finally* fixed an error I was trying to fix for like 4-5 days.
The *error* was sooooooooooooooo stupid that
I don't understand how I couldn't have seen that.

I tried to implement my timer module (a simple countdowntimer) in the scripting language Lua.

To test if the implementation works correct,I wrote a little testapplication in Lua which just creates a new image and draws it on the screen for a specific amount of time.My problem was although the timer had stopped the image was still visible...I tried nearly everything to make it work but I failed over and over again.

Yesterday I realized that I forgot to draw a background in the testapplication.
The test-image (a tiny little ship by the way) was still visible because there was nothing that drew over it. Sooooo stupid -.-

If someone cares, here's the script:

function Start()
testsurface = Surface.New("Ship.bmp")
testtimer = Timer.New(3000) --3000 is the time
--in milliseconds the timer's running
end

function Update()
if Timer.IsRunning(testtimer) == true then
Graphics.Render(testsurface)
end
end


Problem solved

I solved the linker problem from yesterday (last post) with a strange workaround.

The following 3 lines were the key to success:


#ifdef main
#undef main
#endif


I will stay with this for a while, but if I have some free time I will try to fix it.
I'm not a big friend of such workarounds...There must be a way to run this main-stuff properly.

Switched to MS Visual Studio 2010

Today I realized that I can download 'Visual Studio 2010 Professional' for free with my msdnaa account.I read that many dev studios are working with VS, so I thought that it wouldn't be a bad idea to install it and get used to it.I worked with 'Code::Blocks' (using MinGW compiler) so far and really felt in love with it so I was a little suspicious and scared when I started the installation.

After the (way too long,but not too boring (thanks to my PSP ;) )) installation I imported some *.h and *.cpp files from my CodeBlocks project (a 2D-Engine) to the new VS2010 project.

After I set up the lib-/ and include dir I started to build the project...

I expected the project to build properly (as it did in codeblocks using minGW) but after a few seconds some (and by 'some' I mean infinite) linker error appeared. I now spent like 1-2 hours to finaly got rid of them.

After I (finaly) build the *.dll and *.lib from my engine with VS2010 I started to program a little test application to test some functions from the 2D-Engine.

The engine is using SDL for eventhandling and graphics-stuff.The thing about SDL is,that it declares its 'own' WinMain() function.There's no need to call a WinMain,if you're using SDL...You just need to call main(int args,char args[]) (or something like that).That's easy to use and should normaly work but now I get another linker error caused by the main() function. I'm now sitting here for like 2-3 hours in total just fixing some linker errors and starting to slap my own face for switching to VS2010...I hope I get used to it soon.

Oh and btw: welcome to my new blog ;)