Archive for July, 2007

Away for 2 weeks

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

I’m away from 28th July to 10th August in the Ukraine doing Aikido so I will be unable to offer customer support during that time period. I hope that this does not inconvenience anyone.

General Update

Saturday, July 21st, 2007

Well it’s been a little while since I’ve posted and that’s because I’ve been crazily busy. At the end of July I’m going to the Ukraine for 2 weeks for an Aikido Summer School – it promises to be an intense and interesting experience.

Meanwhile I’ve been focusing on getting my current game to an alpha state before I go. So as a result I’ve been minimising all non-coding activities which includes playing games, writing for Binary Joy and this blog, reading blogs and forums etc. It’s actually been a good feeling to totally focus on one thing – my mind feels less scattered. Of course I’ve still been trying to fit family time into all this, so I’ve been playing Paper Mario with the boys (it’s too rainy to go outdoors on bikes) and watching 24 with Helen 🙂

I’ve made some great additions to my framework recently. I added a TGameText type which can read in Unicode files so that I can localise my game into other languages easily. I’ve also made a TBitmapFont type (with the help of Tim Fisher of Indiepath), which can display Unicode characters, and then I converted lots of my existing code to use it. Finally, I compiled my AOTMG framework demo on my Macbook Pro and fixed a few bugs and released it on the Blitz Forums. It felt great to see it running smoothly on a Mac – I even ran it on my plasma TV via an HDMI cable!

Anyway, blog posts may be a bit sparse during the next month or so while I’m coding like a nutter and on holiday. Thanks for your patience.

The Adventures of Torus

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

I’ve added a new link to my blog roll: The Adventures of Torus. It’s a comic strip that I’ve been drawing for fun. It’s not supposed to look good, as I’m not an artist (currently), although I used to be pretty good at drawing when I was a teenager; it’s supposed to be funny and action-packed.

I drew the first one with my mouse and it had some cack on the roller ball (it’s not optical) which made things really hard. So for the second one I used a pen on a pad and it was better. For the third one I went back to mouse and tried a bit harder 🙂 Then for the forth one I bought a cheap graphics tablet and it yielded a pleasing result although I need tons more practice with it because it still feels pretty weird to use.

Enjoy!