Dynamite: Day 1
10:30am – I have achieved the classic black screen. This is a good start. I’m using this opportunity to take all the various cross-platform code I’ve written and clean it up a touch and put it in files that are totally separate from my game code. So, thus far, I’ve got my “initialize a black screen” code in a separate file. As well as my event handling. So far just desktop support, iOS will come later.
I’m also using a Makefile with automatic dependency generation this time around. I got a snippet from Mike Kasprzak to do this about a year ago, and it seems to work pretty well. Clutters up all my folders with .o and .o.d files, but I can cope with that. (His version did something smarter like sticking all those files in a separate folder, but I broke it.) I only use this Makefile for my linux development, which is where I’ll be doing all my dev.
10:45am – Slight distraction, Unity 3 has been released, though there is still an extra day to buy it on the pre-order price. I must admit, coding this whole game myself does sound a bit like work, and using Unity might be a ton easier. I’m downloading it so I can give it a quick eval to see how much has changed since Unity 2.x.
11:15am – I now have textures loading and being displayed on the screen.
11:30am – Unity 3 download complete, checking it out.
12:00pm – Got intimidated by how fancy it all seems. I’m just looking to make something pretty simple here.
12:30pm – Working on setting up the basic state engine. Trying to do something that won’t require the use of reference counting.
Upgrading the game to isometric was pretty straightforward. I just had to render the sides to all the boxes and do some gluPerspective / gluLookAt stuff to get the game view happening.
2:00pm – Got a basic 3D isometric view displaying.
Now with soldiers! And box picking! And scrolling!
Spent some time later on fiddling to get the perspective just right, still need to work on that s’more.
-Phil