BackFire Studios

so yesterday, around this time, i saw an interesting daemon running. Interresting, because it was some java stuff. Now if you know me, even a little bit, then you know how i avoid java apps like the plague, so it seemed really weird that something was using java without me knowing it.

And so i set out to investigate the matter. It wasn’t long before i remembered having an install of the excellent Openfire on my machine. Openfire is a free xmpp, otherwise known as “jabber” server, and i was messing around with it for a little while, and the removed it. Or so i thought. See there wasn’t really an uninstaller as far as i could tell, so i did what normally works; remove the prefpane and assume it’s gone. It always worked that way, so why not now?
Just goes to show that even people with a fair amount of tech knowledge can screw up. Apparently the server was still there, and it was most likely even running like that for a good 6 months or so. I did notice that my computer was using more cpu power than before, but it wasn’t anything that didnt make sense. It was an install that had been on for over a year, i like to try software, so things stack up, and sometimes things stay behind. Next to that, my hard drive was also filling up quite nicely, so i didn’t really thing anything of it.

Anyways, having found the cause, i then had to obviously fix the issue. Soon i found which files were located where, and i removed them all, including the startup item. That last bit wasn’t really a smart move. even though i have no clue how to unregister startup items. So yeah i deleted it and did a reboot, only to find that.. it didnt actually boot anymore. CRAAAAAP!

So i grabbed my install dvd, copied some essential files to en external drive using the terminal, and relied on my time machine backup to contain most of my data.

All went well, and i am typing this from the freshly installed iMac, but there was one little issue.. the PSP SDK was gone. So i tried to re-install it, but it started to cry and refused to compile. Oh maaannn, just my luck.

Right now i am installing it on my macbook, and that does seem to work as far as i can tell, but the iMac still refuses to compile the thing. So if it does compile, then i’ll be copy-pasting the whole thing to the iMac and see what happens. I simply NEED to have the SDK.

In unrelated news, i had to give S a little motivation boost to get him to figure out what his priorities are. He has been working on various things, then abandoning them, and things were getting nowhere. So i decided to play hard and try t get him to stop the crap and focus on things that matter, which seemed to work.

Ok, im off again to look for a fix, keep your fingers crossed for me!

Since i have loads of free time for a short while now, i decided i can learn the PSP Homebrew SDK, and so, i am going to port BalloonSailor to the Sony PSP. No clue if i’ll finish it, or if it’ll be anything like the original, since i am using C, so without the OOP-ness of C++, and i will not be using SDL, since the stupid thing wont compile and i cant seem to find decent information on how to get it set up. Cant wait to see what happens with this little side-project!

Today i decided to do another blog post. It’s been a while since the last one, and im here to tell you exactly why! First off, i have been busy doing my final assessment, which is my exam for my current game design education. On top of that, once that was done, i moved on to work on the assignment that was part of the application process at NHTV, a higher education, which, if i get it, will allow me to continue working on/with games, as i’ve been doing for the past 4 years, and have been doing with great joy. NHTV is the most kickass school i’ve visited, and getting in would be so incredibly awesome. Finally a school that just makes everything seem ‘right’, unlike, for example HKU, which didn’t seem to care about practical knowledge, or a nice working environment.
But let me just stop my propaganda right here, since i doubt anyone really cares anyway.

The products of this application process will be online here later on. I need to change a few things, minor issues, and put the ‘old’, higher quality graphics back back in. The good part about this game is that, as far as i am aware, there are no bugs, only some visual drawing order things that look a little silly at times.

So what do i have to do next? Usually there’s something next for me to do.
Well yes, i have to do a minor thing or two to do for the presentation for my exam, but other than that, i have nothing to do. God that i so nice for a change.
I took this opportunity to upgrade wordpress to the latest version, and post this

And now i have some free time so i think.. i’ll sit back, play some Burnout Paradise

Ok, let’s test some of the new features first..

01-locoroco-title-theme

hmm not too bad

and boom, rt 0.3 is no more! What?! Yes i really did stop developing realtime 0.3. I was trying to add conceptual features from realtime 0.4 (which will possibly be renamed 1.0) to version 0.3, and when limitations in SDL would not let me write a proper windowmanager like I wanted, feature-wise, and I decided to use a faster, less bug-prone way to manage userinput, I knew It was time to just get busy with the real thing.

I’ve now been working on it for just over 2 weeks and I am now already starting to get to a point where I can add things like physics, and things like that. So in general this version is even nicer, both to code, and to use. Which makes me a happy code monkey ; )
partially because some libraries that I wanted to use before but were broken are now fixed, and because I can really notice just how much I’ve improved my programming skills.

why hello there, I thought you wouldn’t come back for news here after my lack of posts, but there you are!
Lets kick this thing off with the fact that I finished the battlecruiser game a while back. I then moved on to do my Procu (no clue how to explain what it is, sorry!), and am now working on my final assessment! OH I SO wish I had the time to work on realtime, it has so much nice stuff coming up (when i find the time to implement them, that is).

I was a little ill on friday, but made up on saturday when I went to catcore in Huizen with my new-ish (but amazing) friend Lisa, had a great time, and today I figured i should update my blog since I have been saying that to myself for a little while now.

So whats RT’s status?
well things are looking like this: I am currently in the process of writing up a user interface extension, since all games at least have some sort of menu, so having prefab code to work with would save lots of time in the future. After that’s done I’ll be able to make some progress on the windowmanager, which will be taking over duties from the inputmanager who has started to show a number of flaws. Since window and input management go hand in hand, I decided to fuse the two into one. Once that is done, I’ll be fixing up a series of minor things, start changing the API (again) for the version number bump, and see if I can optimise the entity management code that’s currently present but not used in RT 0.3.9.
Then I’ll be evaluating how well the audio code that I wrote up for 0.3.9 works, and write another one with the same class but using sdl_sound. loading files directly from disk will be a secondary way of loading files, and physicsFS will take over most of that, allowing developers to add archived resources to the mix.

So quite some work to be done still.

On the teaching side, I’ve been helping out S as usual. He is making good progress, one little step at a time