BrenDevLog
Follow along as Brennan attempts to bootstrap a 1-man software company/indie game studio.
What is this blog about?

What I'm workin' on

wifight is a free online multi-player multi-game turn-based game service. Is that enough hyphens? It's fun. I'm basu. Say hi in the chat room!
WINDOWS/PALMOS

Debris Visual Art: A long-running art project. It generates surrealistic paintinglike displays from random imagery accumulated from the Internet. The image continually shifts, but just barely too slowly to see. Someday you'll have a dedicated LCD picture frame in your house running this. I have been working on this off and on since about 2001.
WINDOWS

bmem: A simple (very simple) HUD for your PC, showing memory/CPU/disk use. In win32 the disk cache memory and free memory are kind of the same thing but they are reported separately, which is a huge pain. So I was inspired to write bmem. I also tried to make it as tiny and efficient as possible.
WINDOWS

RSXE: This is my RSS/Atom/whatever newsreader. It's kind of approaching alpha 1.0. I use it every day and code up a feature or two when I find something I miss. The goal here is simplicity, efficiency, and speed.
WINDOWS

Hlscript: When a programmer starts a blog, he can either use a pre-existing software package, or write one himself. Guess which option I picked. Hint: this blog runs on it! The design goals here are once again simplicity and speed. And easy hackability/customization. And not requiring a SQL engine. And not requiring too recent a version of PHP. Or browser.
PHP

Listo: A PHP-based personal streaming mp3 server. I wrote this to use with my Treo 650. It has a Web page interface to queue up songs while you stream them via PocketTunes or similar. It uses LAME to transcode songs to a usable bitrate. I use 32-40kbit mono variable bit rate over GPRS/EDGE.
PHP

 




 

nov 24 2008

monday
 
wifight... on windows
wifight has been in alpha for quite some time now. In fact, total development time is now up to about 3 years as of this month! After 34 releases of the client software, I'd say it's time for beta. wifight.prc version 0.35 will be in fact a beta, not an alpha.

screenshot of wifight running on windows

Also, as mentioned in the wifight discussion forum, I started on a Windows port of the wifight client a few weeks ago. It's coming along pretty well. It might seem counter-intuitive to port mobile software such as wifight to a desktop platform, but I think it will pay off. You certainly can't beat the size of the market. Pretty much everyone these days runs Windows or can get access to Windows. Most modern OSes (Mac, Linux, etc) will even emulate Windows. And I already had to port the game renderer itself to Windows in order to run wifight in the Palm simulator. So that part was already working. The networking and file storage stuff ported over pretty well too. Hooray for jnetlib and sqlite!

Now I'm working on recreating all the UI. Basically I'm trying to set things up where I get to reuse as much of my work on the PalmOS UI as possible. Any changes to the PalmOS UI resource file should just automagically show up in the port, and I shouldn't have to manually recreate anything.

So, I started writing a program to parse Palm resource files and it went pretty well. So far it extracts all the alert resources and writes out a .h for the Windows code to include, which recreates the alert on the fly as needed.

Next up will be parsing out and recreating the form resources (i.e. game list, game screen, about box etc.) Then the menus. Not sure how I'll do those but I'll figure it out when I get there. Then I need to get all these UI components talking to the app code in a portable way. All of this is helping to smooth the way for future ports too.

And of course the next platform coming up will be: iPhone! 99% sure anyway. By popular demand.

 linkme
<<prev
next>>
 
Comments(0)

Your Name: (Leave blank for Anonymous)
ANTI SPAM: What is two plus two?
Comment:
 

RSS
for posts

RSS
for comments