Working on the new project

Hello, I haven’t posted for quite some time now so I think it’s time that I update the situation.

First let’s go through what I have been working on for the past 2 weeks. Well one of the bigger changes is that I started learning playing the guitar. Yeah, I got myself a guitar and now I spend at least an hour a day practicing. When I started last week I was practicing even more so I didn’t put much time into other things. But now I just settled on a “fixed” schedule so I can work on other things. I hope I’ll stick with it because I really want to learn it.

I also finished my school project “School Jumper”. I released it for my school class for testing and already made a new version fixing some bugs. I also found a mistake that I was doing from the day I started with OpenGL. I thought that using images for textures with a resolution different than the power of 2 was totally OK. But as testing showed it was not. Some graphics cards did not support those texture resolution and the result was that the users only saw white squares. This is a problem that appeared already in Squared Shooter and every other game that came after it. Back then I thought that it was a driver problem but now I know that it isn’t. So from now on I’ll only stick to the default (16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, …) resolutions.

“School Jumper” isn’t really interesting. I was getting bored with it early but it had to be done. But it’s a small little time waster. I’ll wait some time before I release it here because some changes might happen but it probably won’t take long. I’ll also make a Linux port when I will find the time. I will release the source code after my project it graded so it will be free to use. Expect the source code around end of May or something like that.

The main focus currently is on the “documentation” of the game/project. I have to write it and post it till April 14th and I still have a lot to do. It’s a pain to write it but it has to be done.

The other big thing currently is working on the new project. I’m learning Box2D for it and I’m writing myself a really small framework for easy creation and handling of complex shapes and things like that. I still have to look up some things but Box2D is really an awesome framework. But it also changes the way you handle moving, collision and rendering so it takes some time to getting used to it. I also switched from orthographic OpenGL to normal OpenGL so everything is a little different now and takes time to properly understand it.

And that is all for now. I also haven’t made any new videos so I will try to make an interesting test with Box2D and make a video with it so that you can see what it looks like. Maybe even today, but who knows.