Hello Everyone,

I feel it is time for some updates on my game as I really did not say much about it. So I would like to introduce you to the concept of a game I have been wanting to make for years. The game is called Orbis. The general idea behind the game is Asteroids with a twist.
So ultimately I will be making a Asteroids clone with a few twists to spice up an old game I use to love to play at the Arcades or even on the Atari!!!!
I am not sure if I am ready to really detail out all the features quite yet as I am not sure exactly what will make it into the game just yet. So we will leave it at Asteroids with a twist for now till I flesh out more of the concepts.

I also decided to make some tool changes for the game. I decided I would stay with C++ even though after my first foray back into C++ I wanted to scream back to C. Ultimately I ditched QTCreator and MinGW. For some reason I was having issues with MinGW on Windows 8 so I decided to install Visual Studio 2013 Express Windows Desktop edition. I must say I am really impressed. I also decided to stick with SFML. To use SFML with VS2013 I needed to rebuild the library and building SFML 2.1 did not work out to well so I ended up going with the Git repo and building from there. So far so good. So here is what my new environment looks like.

• Visual Studio 2013 Express Windows Desktop
  
• CMake 2.8.12.1
  
• SFML (master)
  
• Git Version Control (on BitBucket)
  

I am still using CMake because if I do decide to build the game on Linux for testing on my laptop CMake will save my life. So right now I use CMake to generate the Visual Studio projects and work from there. Not pretty but saves tons of headaches. Visual Studio leaves me out of my comfort zone as I am not a huge IDE fan period but we will see where this setup takes me.

Now a bit on the progress. Not much honestly. Much of my time is taken up by school and on top of it I am trying to get back into the groove of C++ after spending a few years in the world of C. So bear with me we will get there.

The first task I really wanted to get done was make sure SFML actually worked and it did. From there I felt the most important thing I should get out of the way is Resource Management because this is something I really can't have a game without. Sadly this was probably not the best place to start when I am trying to get my C++ groove back but none the less I think I was successful. My goal here was to put together a cache for my resources. This will be the core of ensuring all resources are properly freed up when no longer needed and will also be the core of my TextureAtlas system which is what I will be building next. I really needed this to be generic because SFML has many types of resources. So this resource cache is built to handle sf::Image, sf::Texture, sf::Font, and sf::Shader. There may be a few things but this is what I can think of off the top of my head. It will not handle music because sf::Music handles everything very differently so I will need to take a different approach for music.

I also wanted to ensure that the memory of the cache was handled automatically. Since I am not in the world of C and the fun void* generic programming world I figured I might as well try to use some C++11.

So my first foray into C++ after years and years of not touching it includes Templates, and some C++11. In other words AHHHH MY EYES!!!!
Sorry for no comments but here is the code I came up with using unique_ptr for the resource which gets stored in a map. The actual key to the map will be implemented as a enum elsewhere so I can index into the cache to get what is needed. There are 4 methods. 2 load_resource methods and 2 get_resource methods there is no way to remove a resource at this point as I am not sure I need it yet for this game at least.
One load_resource takes care of the basic loadFromFile. sf::Shader as a extra param and so can sf::Texture so the overloaded load_resource takes care of that. get_resource just returns the resource and there is a overloaded version to be called in case the cache is a const.

Again sorry for no comments I feel the code is simple enough to not need any.#ifndef RESOURCECACHE_H#define RESOURCECAHCE_H#include #include #include #include template class ResourceCache{public: void load_resource(ResourceID id, const std::string& file); template void load_resource(ResourceID id, const std::string& file, const Parmeter& parameter); Resource& get_resource(ResourceID); const Resource& get_resource(ResourceID) const;private: std::map> resources;};template void ResourceCache::load_resource(ResourceID id, const std::string& file){ std::unique_ptr resource(new Resource()); if (!resource->loadFromFile(file)) throw std::runtime_error("ResourceCache::load_resource: Failed to load (" + file + ")"); resources.insert(std::make_pair(id, std::move(resource)));}template template void ResourceCache::load_resource(ResourceID id, const std::string& file, const Parameter& parameter){ std::unique_ptr resource(new Resource()); if (!resource->loadFromFile(file, parameter)) throw std::runtime_error("ResourceCache::load_resource: Failed to load (" + file + ")"); resources.insert(std::make_pair(id, std::move(resource)));}template Resource& ResourceCache::get_resource(ResourceID id){ auto resource = resources.find(id); return *resource->second;}template const Resource& ResourceCache::get_resource(ResourceID id) const{ auto resource = resources.find(id); return *resource->second;}#endif
Here is the main.cpp file which I used for my functional test as well so you can see it in use.#include #include "ResourceCache.h"enum TextureID{ Background};int main(){ sf::RenderWindow window(sf::VideoMode(250, 187), "SFML Works!"); ResourceCache TextureCache; TextureCache.load_resource(TextureID::Background, "./Debug/background.png"); sf::Texture bkg = TextureCache.get_resource(TextureID::Background); sf::Sprite bkg_sprite(bkg); while (window.isOpen()) { sf::Event event; while (window.pollEvent(event)) { if (event.type == sf::Event::Closed) window.close(); } window.clear(); window.draw(bkg_sprite); window.display(); } return 0;}
Like stated this is my first foray back into C++ so feel free to let me know if you see anything obviously wrong with the ResourceCache class. Much appreciated in advance.

Until Next Time.