[SmileyMan]

It needs is a separate config GUI written using a proper set of widgets, but considering I've yet to actually start the freakin game and this was purely an exercise in showing how "easy"*** it is, I think that's a task best left for another day.

I think a seperate config GUI is a better way to go anyway.  I know lots of people think that everything should be contained within the game, but from an accessibility point of view, if you use an OS-compliant configuration applet, then you're leveraging all the accessibility stuff that the player's computer is already set up to use.

It's not being "lazy", because you still have to support everything in the game itself.  Of course, having both would be best of all.  On the same note, of leveraging the OS, try having your config being able to save OS shortcuts, so multiple users of different abilities can use the same installation with ease.

PS - loving your dilemma with using business-style OO to do games.  I have the same problem, which is why I never finish anything.  One of my bugbears is just how badly designed most games libraries are; the utter horror of OGRE or CrystalSpace should carry a health warning.  But your cat's advice is sound.

[Tam Toucan]

Day 40
Spent 4 hours (2 days) bug hunting. Found it hiding in some 5 year old code. Some of the first I'd written. Not some of the first code I'd written, that was Spectrum BASIC program which eventually had to be abandoned before even being run because I got lost in the mobius strip of goto loops. No, this was just some of the first code from when I started programming at home again.

Five years sitting quietly waiting to steal 4 hours of my life. Patient little bugger. Wonder how many of his friends are still around? Sometimes I marvel that any of this stuff actually works. I did Computer Science at Uni, but programming isn't a science it's an art, and I'm glad it is*.

If a game can be art what of the code below it? What of the craftsmanship that went into creating it? You could call the pyramids "A pile of blocks", just as you could say Forty Niner on the ZX81 "Looks a bit shit"....but you have no soul if you do.

But all art requires it's drudge work. The boring non-creative part. The menus, the titles, the whipping 2000 slaves in the blazing sun. Yet even within that drudgery there is art. A finely crafted loop. A elegantly reused function. Hidden away, unseen and unappreciated except by the coder. Of course without ugly there can be no beauty, and I certainly have my share of ugly. My mutant templated TwoWayMapping class. My inbred, should-have-been-killed-at-birth EventBus that has oozed it's way into every part of my code.

Where was I going with this post? Did I miss the sign for Albuquerque? My writing often goes the way of my programming and I find myself lost in some strange place with only an overloaded ternary operator for company. So where has my programming taken me to these past few days?

- I battled the parameters of glOrtho and won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory since I don't really understand them.
- I sacrificed some of my will to life in exchange for menu options which are saved/loaded.
- I hunted down and slaughtered an innocuous iterator corruption, but there is little joy in fixing your own stupidity.

Who says programming isn't exciting?
 

* Except when I'm sitting in a fly-by-wire Airbus.

[deps]

Your writing reminds me of Why the Lucky Stiff.
And the videos are great!

Good luck with it!

[Tam Toucan]

Day 43
Drew a box. Woo-HOO!

Day 44
Drew another box. This one scales!

Day 45
Drew a stretched box on it's side. I think I shall call it a Diamond. Yes, that's a good name.

Day 46
Drew a row of little boxes. Some of them were red.

Day 47
Drew a box with lots of sides. Wikipedia calls this a circle.

Day 48
Ever get it that a common word suddenly doesn't look right? Drew...Drew...Drew? Nope word's lost all meaning.

Day 50
Rod Serling stands in the corner, top lip nailed to his front teeth. "This is story of a man. A man like any other except for one curious quirk. An anomaly. A defect in the wiring of his brain that makes him think he is writing a game, but he has nothing more than some menu options, a poorly drawn bus and a delusional tendency to talk in third person..."

Day 53
This week was Grind Week. Did you buy a flag? I bought lots.

You know sometimes a change ripples through a load of code and you'd almost be quicker training a monkey except you'd have to clean up after it, plus there's the cost of bananas to consider...Actually, 3 hours was grinding, 3 hours was fixing a big hack so I could regenerate the config files for the various input control schemes and the final 17 hours* was annoyance fixing.

"Annoyances" because their nothing major, but sometimes when I've been staring at something for so long that's all I can see. For example, OneSwitch input; hold key => SELECT, press+release => NEXT menu item. But if the SELECT chooses a menu page with a new InputController** then when you release the key it moves the next menu item on new page. Annoying, but nothing to lose sleep over.....

But I do.

It's not like anyone but me is going to care. In fact the first things people would say on seeing the menus are
Why don't you...
- draw the current item in a different color?
- give an indication of dwell time?
- show which list item is currently selected?
all good valid points, but if I think about them a small black cloud forms above my head and it begins to rain inside my soul***

Indeed I may have created the most inaccessible "accessible" input system ever. Instead of one reasonably polished, usable scheme, I have 6 fairly crap ones. But in the words of Dr Frank'n'Furter..."I didn't make him for you!". Got to draw a line in the sand somewhere I guess.

Well, on with the grind. Those 4 game control systems won't write themselves....how much are bananas these days?


* It certainly felt like that...

** e.g. A TextPage has a different controller since the hold key => SELECT+REPEAT so it will repeated press the scroll menu option (still with me?)

*** I'm using pathos here. Hoping it it will help when the "Donate Now" button appears.

[danjo]

welcome to earth tam. enjoy your stay.

[Tam Toucan]

Day 54
Did I say four game input control systems? Of course I meant SIX!

Day 55
Six! Six! You mock me with six. I want EIGHT!

Day 56
Eight! Are mad? If it's not double figures before the sun has set I shall feed you to the chipmunks!

Day 57
Twelve you say? TWELVE!....Yeah ok.

Day 58
Sound - Day 1.

Day 59
Sound - Day 2. I'll get you OpenAL and your little dog to....

Day 60
You hear that? You hear that? I love that sound. It sounds like victory!

Yes I now have sound and even though it's just a test of me going "Brrrrm", to me it's the dawn chorus heralding a new day. A brighter day on a more beautiful world. A world without input systems where a man is free to code game logic. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never tweak the menus again*

So what shall I do this is new freedom? What monolith of beauty shall I erect that millions shall come to worship? Well let's face it folks this never was going to be anything more than "Look Ma I gone and writ me a game!". Plus the end of October is less than 20 Tam coding days away**, and I don't have any kind of object system***, and I think I've caught bird-swine flu from that flying pig...

But this is about having fun (me not you), so I put such things to one side, take my vorpal sword in hand and continue on my Quest.


* We all know that's not true
** That's about 40 of your Earth hours
*** I have cunning plan for that....Write a game with no objects

[Tam Toucan]

Day 63
Played "Pin the tail on the chipmunk".


Day 65
Life, they say, is a journey. Some people take the "Go that way, fast. If something gets in you way, turn" approach. Me, I'm from the "Hmmm, which way now?" school. Thing is I've never had much vision. Combine that with pondering which way next and you get a kind of Langton's Ant. Sure you can look at each step and say why it was taken, but look at the journey and you think "WTF?".

Now I'm happy with this approach, "Know Thyself" my cat reminds me, but it does lead to some "interesting" places. I now have 4 different start up programs, 6 menu control schemes, 11+ game control schemes, but no redefinable keys (unless you find and edit the appropriate config file). Is that where I wanted to end up? No, but it's been fun getting there.

The search for a game continues. Since this is nothing more that my first attempt to put all the bits together I'm not too worried about what actually comes out at the end. Case in point; one of my original "design" points was I wanted a non-one-key game that could played with one-key. So the bus has accelerate/decelerate rather than just (say) jump. Game wise however, with what I've currently got, I'd be better throwing away most of the control stuff and making a one-key game (not actually much of change).

But I'm not going to.

Why? Well I'm more interested in the reaction to the mess, than trying to make it less of a mess. See what I mean?


Day 66
You can't teach an old chipmunk new tricks so I moved to the trunk version of the physics library (I need the new features). The old workforce objects to this and corrupts my SVN repository. With the promise of final salary pensions and all the nuts they can eat and everything's back.

Still have to clean the mess the little buggers made of the bathroom though.

Day 68
Boing Boing Boing. That's what the bus suspension used to do and it was long painful process getting there. Days of randomly changing things until it "felt right".

Boing Boing. BeeeeoOOOOING! That's what can now happen with the new library. Well, makes things more interesting.

Day 70
Are sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin....

After a drunken party watching Summer Holiday and Back To Future
continuously Dr Tam Toucan L.S.D. (Life Sciences Diploma) is struck
with a gestalt moment and combines the power of time travel with
the classic British look of the double decker bus.

Unfortunately Dr Toucan does not possess a PCV license so YOU! have
been chosen to pilot the vehicle on it's first mission...

         Retrieve the Golden Acorn of the Ancients

Sinbad tried and failed, Hercules had triskaidekaphobia, Jason would
have, but the Argo in for a service, so now YOU! must do what lesser
heroes could not.

But beware! The Gods are aware of your Quest and have released
Spermophilus the Chipmunk to thwart you...

[Lobo]

"You return home alive but without your nuts"

The Cloud~

[Tam Toucan]

Day 71 to Day 79
Question: How many chipmunks can dance on the roof of a bus?

Day 80
Answer: None.

Sometimes. I hate coding.

Day 81 to Day 85
Never work with children or animals or passenger carrying vehicles larger than 7.5 tonnes. Words to live by and ones I shall be following now that it's finally over.

Having long given up hope of finding a game in this mess, a 16 hour crunch over a few days and I've at least managed to get all the parts of a game. So you can win, lose and sort of play it. I am however quite pleased with how easy and how much fun it was putting those bits together. There's something really satisfying about just being able to scribble a vaguely phallic cloud and then see it appear in the game (without even needing to recompile!)

Anyway, thanks for everyone's support. I know there's not much to comment on since it's just a silly little broken game, but I'm interested in whatever thoughts you have about future stuff e.g. I know I need to fix the outline edge drawing, using GL_LINES with a fixed line width is just rubbish. The whole 11 different input schemes was an interesting experiment. I know it didn't work in a lot of ways (no editor. no dwell time indication. no redefine keys!), but comments welcome. Also, any system problems (performance, crashes etc) I'd like to hear about since they'll obviously appear anything else I do.

There will be an update at some point for stuff that I'll need in my next project (auto-pause for the oneswitch), but I'm done with buses and chipmunks for a long time!

Oh, for those that missed the other post. Get it here

[Lobo]

No performance issues but a few things here. Menu arrows are sorta confusing stuff, I kept clicking on wrong 'buttons' all the time. Maybe if they were encompassing the option/choices on top and bottom instead of literally being inside the actual choices? Ugh, sounds complicated!
Just make them below and above the choices was the idea

As for visuals, mspaint style is kinda meh, can't compare with the old, beautiful black screen and outlines in green (or red).

[Tam Toucan]

Yeah the arrows are a bit shit. I'd meant to go back and tidy them up, but....

For the GFX you can edit the DDBJ.cfg file and delete the second line "GFX_STYLE == SOLID". That will use VECTOR, but they are see through and so I didn't put in the backgrounds (other than the sun). Or I actually have this color scheme. Just untar it to the DDBJ directory. It just swaps the solid and edge colors so the bus is black with a red edge etc.

Oh, it screws up the Chipmunk view though because it doesn't adjust the Z coords, just the colors so you can't see the ground in the little "map"

[caffeinekid]

It's those little quirks that keep a guy interested.