semi/signal

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.

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.

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

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

New version of Doppler is up (see Doppler page for d/l link). Changes are as follows:

-Doppler will no longer freeze if you switch away from the client panel while a client is loading and then try to switch back to the client panel before the client is finished loading.

-File updates from client->server will now work correctly and will not result in the client giving an incorrect file message, and timing out

-The log now labels where the message it prints out is coming from

Note: file updates from server->client are not yet supported.

New version of speaker switch is up. I updated the text for the speaker switch system tray icon so that it will now display the current speaker config when the mouse is over it. Also, an “about” message box has been added.

btw, licenses are now included in all the binary and source packages I’ve uploaded.

New version of Doppler is up. This version fixes a few major bugs found in the initial release (including server timeouts and file transfers stalling). In addition, a few things have been reworked internally so things run more smoothly, including the server startup code and the client connection code, both of which will now execute as background threads, so the UI doesn’t freeze.

Doppler Beta 1 is up. You can find the download link on the Doppler page. Still quite a few bugs and annoyances in the code, but it is fairly stable and functional (hey, it’s still at beta!). Beta 2 will probably be out sometime next month, a long time, but I won’t be focusing as heavily on Doppler for the next few weeks, I’m going to shift gears and focus on a few other projects I’ve had on the back burner:

Kiwi: a markup language designed as an alternative to XML for application developers. I have a love/hate relationship with XML, I hate the verbose syntax, the ambiguity between attributes and elements, all the ugly DOM stuff, etc. What I love is not XML itself, but the amazing level of support it receives from almost every company and software product in the world. In fact the only real reason I use XML is that it’s supported by the .net framework, so I don’t have to do too much work to read/write XML data. yea, I’m lazy 😉

Rex: a resource file format specification (of course I’ll have to make a utility app as well – no way in hell am I going to add/extract files using a command line).

QuadSpace: A generic version of NZEdit2 (the Nemesis Zero map editor). Will have Rex file support as well as support for TGA, PNG, and JPEG textures. Oh, btw, by “generic” I mean it will be flexible enough to be used as a map ed. for other games.

[really-cool-name]: A generic version of the NZ Particle FX Editor.

Helix: A 3D level editing program with support for importing .X files and CSG (I mention this specifically b/c so many of the free 3D level editing programs out there don’t support this).

Zero2: The second version of the Nemesis Zero engine; rebuilt from the ground up and utilizing shader model 2.0

Curve: A 3D game engine. That’s it. Haven’t really thought much about the specs as yet.

I’m also thinking it would be really cool to do a side scrolling engine, with graphics similar to NZ (i.e. 3D characters on 2D backgrounds) but where the characters can aim in any direction, kinda like a more advanced version of Abuse (anyone remember that game?, from the ill-fated crack-dot-com).

Obviously, I can’t focus on all these projects at once. So I have some serious pondering to do.

Any programmers interested in working with me on Doppler or any of the projects listed above, contact me.

Well as you’ve probably figured out by now, Doppler beta 1 is delayed. Working with threads is such a pain. As soon as I get it stable I’ll release the beta.

Anyway, I made a small utility program, Speaker Switch! I frequently change (nay…switch!) my speaker configuration between speakers and headphones and got tired of having to go through control panel every time. So speaker switch runs in the system tray and provides a quick way to change the speaker configuration. The Speaker Switch page is up at http://aautar.digital-radiation.com/speakerswitch/ , executable and source code available (C# w/ MDX).

Wish work on Nemesis Zero would continue, but despite my recruiting efforts, I still haven’t found any new artists. So NZ is still on hold 🙁