SirMike's Techblog

How to spend a good evening

SirMike — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:25:27 +0000

Would you like to spend a good evening?
7 easy steps You need about 3 hours to collect “ingredients” … and some money

Tetris - first playable demo

SirMike — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 19:58:40 +0000

First playable demo of my Tetris is ready for testing.

Download Wndows version.
Download Linux version.

If you cannot run the game on Windows, you probably do not have MS Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable package installed, you can download it here

Enjoy!

Writing tetris - part 5

SirMike — Mon, 19 May 2008 00:59:57 +0000

A game without sounds and some dynamic action is bad… So I had to do it
This is just a small presentation without all features included but looks quite nice.

How do you like it?

Writing tetris - part 4

SirMike — Mon, 19 May 2008 00:51:16 +0000

Every 3D game has cool graphics effects. It would be nice to have one when “collecting a line”. Let’s create some particles…

Oh fuck… it looks like somebody slaught a pig
After several minutes of tuning it looks much better…

Hmmm… I’m proud of myself

Writing tetris - part 3

SirMike — Mon, 19 May 2008 00:44:56 +0000

Most of a game mechanics are ready. It’s time for tuning visual part.
The playfield has been added and blocks have better texture now.
It is looking better and better

Writing tetris - part 2

SirMike — Sun, 18 May 2008 00:36:41 +0000

Every game goes better during development…
So does mine

Notice, that a game can display MP3 tag which is currently playing - simple feature but looks nice.

Writing tetris - part 1

SirMike — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:33:49 +0000

Some time ago, I started writing simple casual game - tetris Idea of a game is nearly the same age as me, but I decided to create a 3D variation of it.
At the begining every game look like a crap, so does mine.

Disaster

My workshop and some technical info:

Operating system - Linux, it also smoothly works on Windows
Programming language: C++
Libraries used: OpenGL, nVidia Cg, boost, SDL, GLee, FreeType, FmodEx, id3lib
IDE: Eclipse CDT and Vim
Other tools: Blender, GIMP

More pseudo-registers

SirMike — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:27:37 +0000

There is another pseudo-register useful when working with C# language:

$exception

It contains last exception that is thrown by an application.
Suppose that we have code like this:

C#:

try
{
// something
}
catch
{
// do something else
}

with $exception pseudo-register you can easily examine it:

Pseudo-registers in VS debugger

SirMike — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:08:14 +0000

I found a very interesting feature of Visual Studio's debugger. It's been there for a long time but many developers do not know (including me) that pseudo-registers can be helpful.
There are more registers but I will mention just two of them.

@ERR

Well, it returns the same as GetLastError(), It optionally can return formatted string - just write it like @err,hr
I think I don't need to add more, screens below are self-explanatory

$user

Provides many informations about a user executing current process

Happy debugging.

Did you know - C#

SirMike — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:16:14 +0000

Did you know where the C# name come from? I didn't
According to wikipedia: "The name "C sharp" was inspired from musical notation where a sharp indicates that the written note should be made a half-step higher in pitch".

Stupid