Old Project - Testing Steering Behaviours with PyGame

This was done awhile ago. But it was something I quickly put together in a few hours to test out some basic vehicle steering behaviours and also learn the Python programming language game library, PyGame.

From this brief impression, I found PyGame fairly pleasant to use. The library has a straight-forward and simple interface. It is fairly thin, but is not merely a wrapper around the Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL). There are a number of additional utility functions provided that I would normally need to code by hand myself if I was using C/C++ with SDL.

Python is a great prototyping language though. It only took about an hour to get this up and running. The number of lines of code I needed to write to get a basic vehicle simulation and visualised on a screen was surprisingly small.

I still prefer Ruby as a programming language, but Python wins overall because it is so well-supported everywhere. You can find Python bindings for almost every C/C++ library out there.

Download: http://www.zensaki.com/steering.zip

Old Project - Learning OpenGL and SDL

Thought I would just put the code of this up. It was just a small demo I wrote a few years ago while playing with OpenGL. If I remember correctly, it uses vertex buffers... and per-vertex lighting. Man, that's embarassing.
The transparency was interesting to implement, since it required rendering the surfaces from back to front. I just put in something simple (and slow) to do that for me, but in any future projects, I will definitely look into the design of a proper scene management system.
Download: http://www.zensaki.com/glassy.zip

A Bit of Work on Battle Balloons

I've been getting back into doing work on my Balloon Fight clone again. I decided to rename it to Battle Balloons, just to avoid infringing any potential naming legalities. I kind of started getting back into this as an experiment to see if I could avoid writing a game in C++. I battle it out with C++ all day at work, so I would prefer something a little nicer when writing my own hobby projects. :) Kind of worrying I am spending what little time I have on this too. More late hours. I wish sleep was optional.

Basically, it's written in a mix of C and Ruby. The C is used for accessing the SDL library, which is a portable gaming library that works on many operating systems including Windows, OS X, and Linux. The rest I intend to be all Ruby. I'll jump back into C as needed.

As for the game itself, I don't really have much to show at the moment. I have just been working on infrastructure so far. :/ If you're a curious coder, then you can take a peek at what I've done so far at: http://code.google.com/p/battleballoons/

Anyway, time for some Battlestar Galactica... and then sleep. :)