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Thousander Club Update: November 3rd

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 126.5 (current year) = 535.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 63 (current year) = 773 / 1000

It’s been over a month since my last Thousander Club update. Yeesh. I’m still in crunch at the day job, although it is winding down quite a bit. I keep expecting it to be over, but there is always one more issue found that I need to fix.

In the past week I’ve worked quite a bit on trying to cross-compile a single .cpp file for both GNU/Linux and Windows. And I’ve succeeded! It seems easy once you know what you’re doing, but if you don’t, good luck finding decent documentation on the topic. I keep finding information on building your own cross-compiler, even though most distros seem to have them available. I rarely find information on what you need to build an SDL app for Windows on your GNU/Linux system. The best documentation on the topic is currently at http://icculus.org/~dolson/sdl/, but even then I found most of the useful information is in the scripts rather than the documentation about the scripts.

As for testing it in Wine, I keep encountering problems, partly to do with the fact that I’m using an older version of Ubuntu and Wine. Wine still has some really weird issues. For example, there is a bug in Wine that prevents cout/cerr from being called more than once. WTF? This issue and the inability of the older version of Wine to work with SDL_mixer make it very hard to test my Win32 version of the app while I develop it.

And cross-compiling has its own issues. I found out that arguments to main() aren’t optional when cross-compiling with SDL. Otherwise, you get an undefined reference to SDL_main, which is a non-useful error message that is luckily easy to search for online.

Otherwise, I’ve been a little more productive in the past week. I also intend to learn to use mxmlc and other freely available Flash development tools. So far, ActionScript seems confusing. For instance, when you use the EMBED tag, you are telling it what resource to use. Let’s say you want to load an image called example.jpg. You would EMBED example.jpg, then create an Image object…but you never explicitly tell the Image object to use example.jpg. It just does. Weird.

For this coming week, I’m going to try to stay away from Flash/Flex, and try to get Walls closer to release. With what I’ve learned in my experiments with cross-compiling this past week, I think I should be able to release both GNU/Linux and Win32 binaries very soon. I’ll be writing up my own cross-compile documentation soon.

[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]

One reply on “Thousander Club Update: November 3rd”

I just tried WINE for mac (also known as Darwine). I couldn’t even run the apps that were bundled with it such as Notepad.exe. That’s a bad sign. I think boot camp is a better option for now.

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