program a game

scassa

It was a programming class assignment. It was super simple. As I recall, it was in assembly language.

fun

Oh, and for C++ developers… I highly recommend using the SDL libraries!

:)

From what I’ve found, it is the planning is easy. I have plans for a few games, written out systems for at least two of them, started coding on that same number. It’s all in the follow through!

... and I just haven’t got it, to date.

Focus! Focus! Focus!

If you can get a working version of your game, I think that’s a lot better than 95% of the folks with this aspiration. Sourceforge is full of dead ends. Several of those dead ends lead to me, but I hope to rectify that!

I programed a bunch of text adventgures, which I then released as shareware. God, what a blast that was. They are actually still kicking around out there, much to my surprise!

Well, it’s not so easy, I think.

First, you have to think, then you have to envision, then you have to do. So, yeah… It will take some time.

I should’ve been updating this for a while. For the last few weeks I’ve had a pleasantly productive obsession with a particular game project, and have achieved much.

What I’m working on is a reasonably realistic space simulation engine. On this I can build a number of game concepts I’ve come up with.

So far I’ve found and read most of a textbook on celestial mechanics, and based on that devised an algorithm for calculating the positions of things in Keplerian orbits at any time, without going through all the intermediate timesteps. This has fantastic implications for simming large populated star systems, in that objects in stable orbits (planets, moons, space stations, ships when they’re not actively doing anything) can be completely ignored by the physics engine if they’re not actually affecting anything that IS actively doing things.

Then, after getting that algorithm working on my new housemate’s computer before my computer arrived (though not very tested, as most tests will be easier to do on my computer), I started working on schemes for determining when objects can’t possibly affect each other (like the ‘obvious’ fact that a planet on the opposite side of the solar system isn’t going to affect you much with it’s gravitational field). This is more difficult than it sounds, as the whole point of the thing is to avoid calculating where the objects are if they have no effects, so I had to work out how to rule out the influence of an object (mainly gravity) without knowing where the object was, and do it much more efficiently than directly calculating the object’s position to boot (or it would again defeat the point of the exercise).

I have succeeded, I believe, though I’ll have to program the thing and run extensive tests to make sure that it works and check how much it actually saves me.

THEN I started trying to figure out how to integrate ‘active’ forces other than gravity, that could handle forces ranging from nearly instantaneous (like the impact of a missile) to forces that could last for several minutes (like a thruster firing) and change the mass of the thing they operate on over the duration, so the produced acceleration isn’t constant (like a thruster firing on a ship that takes fuel consumption into account). I think I have a scheme for making that work too. It’s a bit clunkier than I would have liked it to be, but that seems to be unavoidable.

And I’m getting to give internal code objects cool names like The Newtoniser and The Kepleriser. much geekiness

There’s so many of us that want to do this, we could try working on it together. Anyone up for some collaboration? Teams win. :)