I'm still here, just very busy with final exams. Four of five are completed, and they are went pretty well -- it's looking to be a good term, markwise. I have one more this Saturday, and then I'm heading back home on the Monday. It'll be nice to be back after being stuck in this tiny dorm room for so long. [smile]
Stencyl
This has been the other major timesink of my recent schedule. I'm very keen to finish up the collision detection system ASAP so I can move onto my next project, so my activity elsewhere in gamedev has been virtually non-existent. Still, having the opportunity to work on software with this much gleaming potential is a rare opportunity. I wish Jon the best of luck as the project begins to fall more and more into the public eye.
Stencyl will be opening its doors (the forum doors, at least) tomorrow at 6PM EST to the public, so I encourage you to drop in and see what Stencyl is all about. Many of you probably won't have any immediate interest, since you already know how to write games [smile], but it's still worth a look-see.
Borland: Turbo Explorer Editions
These have apparently been out for nearly a year now, but it's news to me -- good news at that! Borland has been making killer IDEs for years now, although they've generally been pretty high-priced. In the spirit of the original Turbo Pascal days they've released 'Explorer Editions' of Delphi, C++ Builder, C# Builder, and Delphi for .NET. They are all (nearly) fully functioning products, and are a huge boon for quick application development or prototyping. The only downside is that you can only download one per computer. Still, for people wanting to try out Delphi or C++Builder, which has been proprietarily sealed for the last several years (to hobbyists/students), it's a great opportunity.
Take a gander: http://www.turbomirror.com
My only beef is that they did a god-awful job with the website. It looks like something from "The Internet of Ten Years Ago". [sad]
More Game Development!?
Looks like I'll be writing games "professionally" this summer.
Here's the backstory: my friend Kasra, also the president of the uni's GameDev Club, filled me in on a project that some company in Waterloo contacted him about through our club site. They're a small-ish company focusing on writing services for cellphones and PCs (chatting, lobbies, IMing, etc), but also have a slowly-growing game development 'studio' being run by one of their employees. They already have a dozen small games made in C++ using one of their aforementioned services, but it's using an obsolete service/library and they need to all be changed over to the new library. So we'd be working part-time changing them over.
So in a nutshell, our task is to convert the dozen games from using one library to another. Heh. So me and Kasra decided we'd basically write a little abstraction layer between the two libraries, and just use the old function names and give them the new libraries' functionality.
In short: super-easy. [smile] We still haven't worked out compensation details, but anything is fine. This'll be a great chance to get some 'game development' on my resume, and I get to work from home. It's adds an extra 2-3 hours or so a day to my full-time job workload, but I think it's definitely worth it. It also will likely mean an XBox 360 by the end of the term. [grin]
