Going multi-platform, part 5 : Finishing touches
Posted on February 9, 2013
| Sascha
After weeks of hard work and learning a lot about the differences between coding on windows and linux, the current source revision of Phase 2 is completly functional on linux and playing the same as a windows version. So if you’d put them side-by-side in fullscreen mode you wouldn’t notice any differences!
Currently I’m putting the finishing toches on the linux release and only a very few minor things have to be fixed and adjusted before I’ll release the linux version into the wild, so you guys can play with it and provide me with feedback, the linux world is far more fractured than the windows world, so I’d love to know how the game runs on different distributions.
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Going multi-platform, part 4 : First run on a native linux
Posted on February 3, 2013
| Sascha
After another week of intense coding on “Phase 2”, trying to fix the mistake I made with nativeXML, I finally got all of the xml stuff switched over to my own xmlwrapper. As hinted at in my last posting, nativeXML wasn’t working on linux (and I haven’t been unlocked for their support forums, after over a week of wait!) so I decided to write my own wrapper unit that uses fpc’s or delphi’s xml implementation, depending on the compiler target.
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Going multi-platform, part 3 : First throwback
Posted on January 28, 2013
| Sascha
Last weekend I worked on getting the lazarus / free pascal build of “Phase 2” to look and play exactly the same as the delphi build. I had to change some small things here and there, but after a few hours you can now no longer distinguish between the two builds, maybe except for performance. It looks that some stuff that’s pretty fast with delphi is kinda slow with fpc, for example accessing stringlists and stuff.
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Going multi-platform, part 2 : First compile and run
Posted on January 21, 2013
| Sascha
I’ve been working to get the current code of “Phase 2” to compile and work under linux for the whole last weekend (and my eyes kinda hurt, again sitting in front of a monitor ;)). And things went much faster than I expected, so I was able to compile and run the game under linux for the very first time ever!
First step was to add code for all things that are specific to an operating system.
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Going multi-platform, part 1 : The setup
Posted on January 18, 2013
| Sascha
As mentioned in my agenda for 2013 (and in several older posts), I’ve been wanting to release “Phase 2” of Projekt W on more platforms than just windows. Especially in the developer community linux has a big fan base, and the bigger the audience for the game, the better.
So shortly after the last post I updated my lazarus installation to the latest one (along with a current FPC compiler) and started to make the code compile with it.
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Agenda for 2013
Posted on January 12, 2013
| Sascha
And so 2013 is here and it’s a good idea to update you on my agenda for this new year. My primary target for 2013 will be the release of a final “Phase 2” version of Projekt “W”. And with a public beta available that’s pretty close to the final product I’m pretty confident that this will finally happen this year.
People seem to be mostly positive about the current public beta release (or at least I haven’t heard any negative comments) and all comments up until now have been pretty nice, something I’ve been missing before the release of a public beta.
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2012 - Final posting (and a new release)
Posted on December 25, 2012
| Sascha
We’re in the final days of 2012 (and the world didn’t end, who would’ve thought) and continuing my “tradition” this will be the final post of this year including different topics. So first of all I’d like to wish all my friends, relatives and readers a good start into 2013!
As for my personal situation, a lot changed in 2012 (if you’ve read last years final posting you might remember) and mostly for the positive.
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New Projekt "W" - Phase 2 beta release 121
Posted on December 8, 2012
| Sascha
I have updated the “Phase 2” beta to release #121.
This is dubbed the “AI update”, as it adds a lot of functionality and tweaks to the (enemy) AI of the game. When releasing the first “Phase 2” beta, it’s AI was pretty much at the same code level as the one for “Phase 1” and it actually didn’t do a lot of the new stuff that the gameplay offered.
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Using Generics in Delphi
Posted on November 17, 2012
| Sascha
When it comes to “new” language features in Delphi (which usually have been in Free Pascal for years) I’m always willing to give them a shot. I’m using the for..in loop a lot, and also tend to shorten my code with things like ifthen (the poor mans ? operator, but sadly without any compiler magic). And I also use the with statment a lot, though it doesn’t have the best reputation amongst Delphi coders due to it’s scope problems.
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Updating the AI
Posted on November 4, 2012
| Sascha
Now that the beta is out in the wild (and up until now I haven’t heard any big complaints) it’s time to finally bring the AI in line with all the changes in “Phase 2”. In the last beta, roughly 90% of the AI code was the same as in “Phase 1” and so the current AI isn’t much of a challenge.
So I just started rewriting most of the AI code for the next beta, and one of the areas the AI was always lacking (already in “Phase 1”) was building construction.
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