D Bits

So I've finally gotten started on some game code. In order to see if Dolce is actually useful or a waste of time, I decided to start by porting the A5teroids demo that ships with the Allegro 5 package. Here's what I've learned so far.

First, the whole idea of Dolce as a framework on top of Allegro to allow an absolute minimum amount of startup...

Once the semester ended, I took a week to do nothing but play Dark Age of Camelot and get some much needed guitar practice in. Then I dove back in to the gym for some long overdue exercise. I also managed to pick up a few more private classes to fill some of the gaps in my schedule. Once I let off all that steam, I fired up...

Dolce is still very much alive, just getting little attention while I wrap up the second semester at the university. For anyone interested, I'm teaching in a special program where a local university here in Seoul is partnered with a university in America. The students do two semesters here in Korea before moving off to the States for three years. We...

In my last post, I showed the minimal amount of code needed to get something up and running with Dolce. And while it's a really small amount of code, something kept bugging me about the implementation. It just wasn't "D" enough.

Over...

I'm making very slow progress on Dolce, but progress nonetheless. I managed to grab a couple of hours today to refactor event handling and to simplify the framework interface.

In my initial implementation, it was necessary when making a game with Dolce to make all of the initialization and termination calls yourself. All of these calls are found in the...

D shares a lot of similarities with C++ and Java, but a lot of the sameness is just a bit different. One of the first places new users see this is in the handling of structs and classes.

D's classes have more in common with those of Java than C++. For starters, they're reference types. Whenever you need an instance of a class, you new it and it is...

I've made a bit of progress on Dolce, but I realized something while I was doing it. My purpose for starting the project was to work on a game idea I've had for a long, long time. I knew from the get go that graphics were going to be a problem The problem is the open-endedness and complexity of the game experience. To pull it off, I either need very...

I've been away from Dolce for a couple of weeks now. Just came back to it last night and realized I don't like it. I've horribly over engineered some of the modules. So from last night I started stripping stuff out and refactoring. In the process, I realized a silly mistake in my resource management code. I'm throwing it out and rewriting it...

My time has been limited lately, but the core of Dolce continues to evolve. I think it's converging into something fairly decent. I'm still not completely happy with it, but I believe I'm most of the way there. As usual, I'm getting wild ideas for new projects. Like a renewed interest in building a 2D library from scratch in D. Or a more...

I didn't add much of anything new to Dolce in the past week. The time I had to work on it was mostly spent refactoring. I'm patching this thing together haphazardly as I go along. I have a good idea of what I want it to do, but how to organize it all wasn't clear from the beginning. Package hierarchy, structs vs classes, module content, and so...