Friday, December 30, 2005

"The New Kind" updated

I've uploaded the fixes to Elite TNK. These sort out the problem found with the star chart - a stray planet appeared at times - and also the mostly harmless save game memory bug. Other source code changes fix a few compiler warnings, but nothing else.

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Elite WIP

A couple of bugs have been spotted in the Elite code Thomas sent me. I've sorted them out now but haven't uploaded the new files. I'm still testing to see if the fixes break anything else. If anyone's desperate then let me know and I'll post them.

I've also incorporated some of TM's changes into Elite AGB. The Quick Save is especially handy. More testing here. One thing I'm going to have to add to EAGB is proper Z clipped polygons. A Mr Harris wrote me an email complaining about the docking and the fact that just before you enter the station, the whole thing disappears. He's right of course. This was OK in the wireframe Elite, since everything was see through anyway, but it is unsettling when you have solid space ships. Not an easy one to fix, but I'm on it.

Finally, my move to coding DS game seems more likely as some bright spark has figured out how to wireless multiboot DS code from Linux using ralink wireless cards. Which is just the type of card I have. All I need now is a DS.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

The Future plus Linux stuff...

The GBA now seems to be deprecated by Nintendo in favour of the DS. However due to the difficulty of getting games to run on this new handheld, I'll continue with the older model. My next project is probably going to be a port of "Linux Rogue". In fact it is an old project I semi-finished before Elite AGB. It actually plays pretty well, with a nice control scheme and cute 8x8 tile graphics. I just need to tidy up the Game Over sequence, add some saving of hi scores and stuff.

I continue messing about with Linux as well. It reminds me a lot of the olden days of the 8-bits where you could dabble with writing your own 'stuff' in BASIC - here one uses shell scripts to do computery stuff. All good fun, but a bit time wastey. Anyway, after (or during) finishing off Rogue I'm going to 'port' my remake of Castle Master to the PC. This is already underway and (hopefully) I should be able to make it generic enough to run other Freescape games. Currently I have got CM and CM2 running on the GBA version. Total Eclipse is hacked in, but as I wrote this remake in C, I have a load of ifdefs all over the place. The new version is in C++ and I plan on using inheritence and all that jazz to get round the various differences in the games. Watch this space.

Edit: Gah! Open GL is too good for a crap Freescape clone - sledgehammer, nut - and now the Ovine Boys have announced Total Eclipse.. so I give up. (Plus PC games are dull.)