Monday, October 30, 2006

Programming Languages

Well, yesterday I was happy to see that I was the number 1 most active user on Developer Fusion... Not that that's an achievement! Apart from that, my newest project is a programming language (interpreted, as I couldn't be bothered writing a compiler). It's really simple, and has the same sort of functionality as, say, BASIC... But it's a programming language, and I made it, so that's all that matters.

I've also written an email sending system on my server that connects to small via libgmailer and allows me to send emails without much effort! I also finally got around to making my forms look good with good old CSS so I now have good looking forms (using a bit of a hack... Using a DIV in the background with the input box on top).

Finally, I am continuing to work on my Winsock class - next thing to add to it: server-side stuff! I can't believe I forgot all that! Once that's done, I'm going to write a web server and hope for the best.

Bye for now, not forever...

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Microsoft makes it intentionally vague...

I've finally given up on looking and now I'm writing a class for sockets - so far it works for connecting to my home web server so hopefully I've done someting right.

Yesterday I learnt how to use Amazon Web Services so now I'll be able to extend some of my websites to include searches for Amazon stuff (I'm already using it with ISBN numbers on a website!)

I'll keep you all filled in on the happenings of my programming and may even get around to posting some code, if you're all lucky!

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Hey, we all make mistakes

Ok, ok... I have been greatly mistaken. It was almost going to happen, wasn't it. I actually searched the DirectX SDK directory and, lo and behold, found a help file with everything I need to know to make anything in Direct3D.

Moral of the story? Read the manual.

In other news, I'm writing a discussion board system that runs completely off XML files. When its done I'll put the link into one of these posts. In fact, I think I might write a simple website just to hold the projects I'm working on so that anyone can download them.

Farewell for now.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

DirectTutorial - Game Programming with Direct3D 9

DirectTutorial - Game Programming with Direct3D 9

My mistake, there is actually a tutorial on the net, this will easily be converted to Direct3D 8 with a bit of editing... It's for Visual C++ 2005 (or one of the Express Editions, which is what I have).

Just shows what Google can do, doesn't it (search Simple Direct3D Tutorial C++ in Google)

First Game Completed: Pong

Well, we all have to start somewhere, so I decided to write a simple game to learn the basics behind game design before I went to some more complicated project. It definitely paid off, with my first game being a clone of the hit game 'Pong'. Ok, maybe not a hit, but close enough :D. My next project is to write an Asteroids clone... it would be nice to show those asteroids in real 3D, not just wimpy 2D renderings of 3D models for my DirectDraw engine... why must they make it so hard to do anything in Direct3D? I've searched for ages just to find a tutorial just to initialize Direct3D - not even draw anything... I found some thing called D3DX, but couldn't be bothered downloading anything and I read that it only comes with the SDK after version 9 - I just so happen to be using version 8... if you have any idea how to do Direct3D, please send an email pcmattman@gmail.com.

I'll keep this space up-to-date with the happenings of the Asteroids implementation, until then, farewell for now.