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First new remake is complete ..... sort of - it's the facelift for my website! Yep, the old 90's look has gone, and a snazzy new modern look has replaced it. That should now leave me free to start getting my head back into coding in 2012

Okie dokie, I've been having a look around the place, and have decided that my first project needs to be something relatively simple to get my teeth back into coding. I also want to concentrate on what I do best - no, not breaking wind - writing self contained snippets of code that solve a problem (or do some of the donkey work out of game creation).

By first task is going to be to revisit my Bitmapped Font Library code. There are a few good reasons for tackling this project first:-

1) Many, many people seem to have found these routines useful
2) People have modified the code to add additional features, but some have managed to add a couple of minor bugs in the process (oops!)
3) Before RL happened, I had numerous features lined up to add, and numerous optimisations to make
4) It is a set of routines that will always be completely platform independent

With this in mind, may I humbly request that people do not continue to edit my original source further? This is largely because I may decide to make the final version of these routines (which the next one should be!) as "forced" donationware (ie you can have the source for a donation - how much is up to you.) Sorry if that sounds rather unlike me, as normally I am happy to share all my routines freely - but staggeringly, in the three or four years I have had a "Buy PeeJay a Beer" link on the website (in fact, I think that Paypal link is now broken since I changed email address about 2 months ago) I have had no less than TWO donations, one of which wouldn't have bought me a pint of milk, let alone a pint of Guinness! Don't get me wrong - this is not a whinge (well, not much), but with the number of people that have found my tutorials and routines useful, even invaluable, I would have expected a few beers bought for me, especially considering the time that was given up to create these things.

Whilst I am not particularly materialistic - believe me, on my salary, you learn not to be - it has made me feel rather despondent that people are making money selling apps on market place etc, but freely given donations are thin on the ground, to say the least

With that in mind, my whole philosophy and outlook has changed - possibly not for the better - but hopefully enough to help even out of the balance a little. If I am coding for me, that's one thing, but if I am coding for others (which I have done repeatedly in the past both with problem solving and code routines) then a donation for my time would be more than welcome

My very first task, though, it to completely overhaul the website - I kinda like the look of the website I have created for SADOS - www.sados.co.uk - so the new look website may well look remarkably similar

That should keep the girls happy

Sadly, the licensing restrictions mean that recording of the plays is allowed for personal learning only - broadcasting is strictly prohibited - and since I am heavily involved in the society committee, and it is a registered charity, I would not even think about doing something that could jeopardise their standing (which is incredible - SADOS is actually the oldest am dram society in the UK!)

I'm not a professional actor, no - though the only difference between amateur and professional is that professionals get paid to do it. We just do it because we love standing on a stage terrified with hundreds of eyes bearing down on us, like rabbits caught in headlights! (not really - the first time is pretty scary, but I've been doing it on and off all my adult life, so any stagefright has long since left .....)

Aha, found it in the help (for the iPhone at least) - accelerometer control by polling GEYJOYX(0), GETJOYY(0) and GETJOYZ(0). Could be interesting trying to do similar under Windoze, as I don't actually own a joystick 

Ah, maybe one day I will release the source, but to be honest, I am very tempted to use the engine again ...

As for getting back to coding, I have a rough idea for another "original" game (by "original" you can read "a mishmash of cliches thrown together under some premise of being unique - so kinda like every game you come across these days!) but it's going to be one step at a time - my first challenge being to come to terms with the screen handling and how best to do it (after all, if I have a 800x600 "game window" surrounded by a black border, whilst it will look best due to not having distortion on widescreen displays and not having doubling up of pixels on LCD/LED screens, it will just look like a postage stamp on HD systems ...... I need to give that some thought)

I wonder if someone could answer a quick query. On mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android) does GLB support input using the accelerometer? If so, is there an input system that could be employed on Windoze to emulate this for development and testing?

Also, and this is a cheeky one – I currently have to use a proxy to access the forum at work (thanks to the net nannies) and all the ones I tried are also blocked, so I made my own using Glype 1.2 which, whilst circumventing the company lockdown effectively, sadly does not allow me to post to the forum. Anyone know whether there is a trick I need to use in Glype to get round this? Or whether there is another alternative proxy script I could upload that would allow posting? Not that I would condone skiving off work to browse forums, you understand – oh no no no no no! 

I tried that, but doesn't seem to have solved the problem - error message at compile time on Manic Miner is thus:

*** Configuration: WIN32 ***
precompiling:
GPC - GLBasic Precompiler V.10.104 SN:f3546c43 - 3D, NET
Wordcount:2087 commands
compiling:
C:\DOCUME~1\PeeJay\LOCALS~1\Temp\glbasic\gpc_temp0.cpp: In function `DGInt __GLBASIC__::LoadHiScore()':
C:\DOCUME~1\PeeJay\LOCALS~1\Temp\glbasic\gpc_temp0.cpp:5595: error: invalid initialization of reference of type 'DGNat&' from expression of type 'DGInt'
C:/Program Files/GLBasic/Compiler/platform/Include/glb.h:1110: error: in passing argument 2 of `void __GLBASIC__::READWORD(DGNat, DGNat&)'
*** FATAL ERROR - Please post this output in the forum

The code is as follows:-

Code (glbasic) Select Expand

FUNCTION LoadHiScore:

IF DOESFILEEXIST("hiscore.dat")
OPENFILE(0,"hiscore.dat",TRUE)
READWORD 0,hiscore
CLOSEFILE 0
ELSE
hiscore=0
ENDIF

ENDFUNCTION

The only variable used there is hiscore, which is declared globally (but I haven't used any explicit declaration on it as an integer) - guess I'm going to do quite a bit of tweaking under the hood ..... unless anyone has any other ideas?

Ah, I'm a muppet, aren't I? (hence the avatar!) Thanks to both of you guys - that should help out enormously. Looks as though my old projects won't compile now due to changes to commands so it looks as though the first tasks are to work out what has altered, and what's totally new. I've figured out the extra paramater on the PLAYMUSIC command (a welcome addition, that one!)

Aha, thanks hugely kanonet - that's the command that will solve the problems in an instant - obviously something that has been added since I updated last (which was version 8.078!!!!)  Like I said, it's been a while ..... 

Thanks Ian, but therein lies the rub, as the bard would tell us. The big issue (no, not the rag sold by the great unwashed) is to establish what the current resolution of the monitor is before then doing any calculations, and for it to be cross platform compatible (unlike the windoze only calls from the previous thread)

Well, previously I have released my efforts on both Windoze and Linux (making that routine only half useable) but since I now have an Android phone (albeit a basic Wildfire) then that is also a good option for me (with appropriate scaling, of course). I know I could run stuff in a window and immediately solve the problem, but I have always felt that games should really run full screen so you haven't got the distractions of icons ticking away all around! Also, it would be nice to be able to have borders which fill the screen without needing the monitor to scale the image (thus making graphics look a bit tacky - I have enough problem with getting graphics to look good as it is!) 

Hi guys!

Okie dokie, I'm looking to start coding again, but before I do, I'm wondering if anyone has any advice / code snippets to help with the following (bear in mind I have been out of the scene for a couple of years, so I'm more than a little rusty!)

Running my previous games on my shiny new huge monitor looks really shit, because of the stretching to full screen on a widescreen display (native resolution on this screen is 1920x1080). I know there was some discussion on solving this issue at http://www.glbasic.com/forum/index.php?topic=5006.msg38597#msg38597 which is a nice workaround, but as I understand it, it will only work with Windoze (thus negating the idea of having one source code for all platforms)

Has anyone resolved this problem yet, or have new GLB versions got swanky new features to address this issue?

Any help / pointers would be very much appreciated

Aw, I can feel the love from here  though I wish Ian would take it easy with the S&M loving   

I'm fine folks - like Kryters said, I've been moving house, and for the past couple of years have been very busy with making a tit of myself on stage - we actually did 6 productions this year alone, and I have been involved to some degree in all of them! You can check out some of my handywork at www.sados.co.uk (yep, I got roped in to doing the society website too, as well as all the artwork for flyers, posters and programmes ..... on top of acting, singing (ish) and dancing (like I'm having a seizure) - I am seriously considering taking some time out to get back to coding, but the director of the next production, Fiddler On The Roof, already has me lined up for a part to audition for - it's relentless, I tell you - worse than knocking out 50 crap games in a month! 

Thanks all  - it's nice to know that people have found it useful in giving them a foot on the ladder. You are quite correct Stevester - it was originally a Blitz tutorial, which I then rewrote as I made the change over to GLBasic myself, so I could learn the syntax and differences as I went along.

Rumour has it that there may be another 50 crap games in the pipeline, but I wouldn't hold your breath (both for the length of time it may take, and because for crap games, I wouldn't even hold a fart in!) 

I'd love to see this command too.
In my case, I have a what you could think of as a set of selectable tiles where there are a lot more than fit on the screen at any time. The set of tiles can be scrolled left & right to find the one you want to select.
The tiles that get scrolled are created dynamically by the program, so there's no  image file I can load as animation frames.
Additionally, as the set of tiles can scroll, the first and last tiles on the screen will often be partial ones, so I can't just draw animation "frames" to the screen to get around the problem as drawanim doesn't support drawing partial frames.

Okay, I'm confused - if I understand correctly, surely you need nothing more than any other scrolling tile based map? If so, the answer is very simple indeed.

At the screen edges, you do not need to draw "partial" frames - you simply draw them outside the dimensions of the screen - ie. if you have a sprite that is 64x64 pixels, you can quite happily draw it at -32,-32 and just the bottom right will be visible on the screen. Why over complicate matters?