12th June, 12:20 am Jun 12th

Sorry I haven't posted all weekend, but I've been working on the engine for my new game :). Since I'm at a loss for interesting links, I'll give you a brief whirlwind tour of my games building research.

To start with, I was toying with the idea of building my game as an addon for the superb dink smallwood (most info can be found on telefragged). I left this idea behind for a few reasons:

  1. The map editor wont work on win 2000 server
  2. It is quite restrictive in terms of map size

Next I truned to freely available game engines and came across the very odd morfit. What seemed at first to be great (supported every language I might want to use and had awards and such), truned out to be a bit of a scam. You had to display advertising in your game (of their chosing). To top this off, every game had to display their logo on the splash screen, display their loader app to load the world files and the graphics were crap and bitty with a pathetic frame rate (about 20fps on a PIII 700).

At this point I gave up and decided that if you need something doing, do it yourself. Knowing nothing about games programming (other than the stunningness of pants), I set out to learn. I downloaded the Microsoft DirectX SDK (which I moaned about last time) and tried to translate some code into my fave language, delphi.

Unfortunately, delphi 2 doesn't have native support for DirectX, so I needed the headers. I thought briefly about translating them myself, realised that was a silly idea, and started searching. To this end, I found the rather spiffing project jedi who are a bunch of people who translate headers for delphi. Armed with these files and having read all about the pythian project, I started coding.

Little did I know that it was actually harder than I thought to even get DirectX fired up, I searched again and came across the best site of the weekend, gamedev. Packed with resources which actually helped, I was soon on my way to creating a working demo.

Enough of games, with just enough time to moan (hehe). A few people have been visiting the site, and a few of these people have been voting in the polls, but no one has commented on the news. Is it me or something?

As for what the game is all about, you'll just have to be patient.

This was posted on Monday 12th June, 2000 at 12:20 am Pacific.

Read more posts from June 2000.

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This is the personal website of Cal Henderson, Slack co-founder & CTO.

I give occasional talks, write code and sometimes articles.

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