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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

I Moved A Square

When I look back on trying to code games as a "bedroom programmer" as I think the term has been coined (which is fine since it makes it sound sooo much sexier than it actually is) ... I really see it as a series of restarts. Even when I was modding I had to rewrite the wheel repeatedly - either because the Unreal codebase had changed on me or I hated what I had already done.

Over the weekend, I got iTunes to draw a square in it's visualizer. That was a bit of a feat. Last night I got keys to make a square go left or right - very shakily at first and a little more smoothly now. Mind you, when I was in the Make Something Unreal Contest, I was coding multiplayer class-based campaign modes.

It's like Bill Hicks used to say: "Funny things change. Today - water. Last week? Heroin."



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2 comments:

Thomas said...

I hear that. I wrote so many "display a pixel" routines when I was doing PocketPC work.

Josh said...

And it only got weirder tonight.

I'm using Quartz, which I'm worried won't be performance friendly. So I'm poking around to see if I can convert the wrapper code I've found to OGL. Then I decide to test out the vanilla Apple visualizer ... only to find that it's getting 10-30fps in general.

So now I probably need to find a way to design around basic performance constraints no matter what I'm doing.