Archive for August, 2005

VC++ 2002 with VC++ 2003 Toolkit

I’ve been using VC++ 2002 (waiting for 2005 to be released until I upgrade) to do most of my serious programming work. As most programmers know the VC++ 2003 toolkit was released way back when and you can simply replace the 2002 compiler, linker, and libs with the 2003 ones. However, for no better reason than plain old laziness, I never got around to it. Well I’ve been playing around with templates recently and the fact that the 2002 compiler is not very standards compliant when in comes to templates finally forced me to “upgrade.” The process is fairly painless. Simply copy over and replace the /bin, /include, and /lib directories for VC++ 2002 with the ones in the VC++ toolkit 2003 directory (of course it’s always a good idea to do a backup). The only difference I saw when building was that, with a release build, the linker will produce a lot of warnings about missing a PDB (program debug database) file for the runtime library that the code is being compiled with. I can’t imagine this ever being a problem, other than a small annoyance in the build process.

xstr and unicode

Well I’ve gotten some harsh criticism on the xstr class, I won’t go into it, but some important issues have been brought to my attention and I will be working on improving the class. By far the most important thing I discovered was that Unicode to ASCII conversions can’t be done by a simple cast (due to ligatures) and neither can an ANSI (or whatever the current codepage is) to Unicode conversion, which was never really supported. I did a bit of research and found the necessary Win32 functions to do the conversion and AFAIK there are no standard C++ functions to achieve the same result. I also discovered Unicode defines a few more whitespace characters in addition to the ASCII ones.

xstr page

A page for xstr, a C++ string class I wrote, is up. The code is released under the zlib license.

Rex is coming

I’ve just wrapped up work on the Rex file format and RexUtil, a utility application for working with Rex files. Rex is basically a resource file format that will support zlib compression for selected files (compressing all files would be stupid as there is little to no gain in compressing jpegs, png, mp3, etc). RexUtil currently does not support this compression, but future version will. Aside from creating a resource file format which I, myself, will use in my projects, I’m also hoping other indie game developers (or any other type of developer, in general) will embrace the format and use it in their projects as an alternative to zip.

The Rex specifications and RexUtil will be up as soon as I create a project page for Rex. If time permits, something will be up by tomorrow night.

New Version of Doppler (Version 0.13)

New version of Doppler is up. This will be the final Beta-1 version.