Hey all you Allegro guys! You may or may not have a problem in your project where it seems to flicker – this is casue by it attempting to clear and redraw the screen a hojillion times per second. We can solve this using a technique known as double buffering. Remember how we were drawing [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Getting Started category.
Form From Functions
Remember our last lesson? With putting things on the screen? Good times, good times. If you’re an astute observer, you noticed that to actually put the image on the screen took some strange commands – blit() in Allegro, and spriteBatch.Draw() in XNA. They each took a number of pieces of information to do exactly what [...]
HEY LOOK!
Still got your sample project around from last week? Good. (If not, go back and make a new one – and hang on to it this time.) We’re going to make our very first steps toward building our Space Invaders game – we’re going to draw something on the screen. Granted, it may not SOUND [...]
Development Styles
There are a wide variety of “development methods” out there, and a lot of them have their very useful purposes in a large team or corporate environment. Odds are that if you’re reading this blog, you’re not a large team or corporate developer – or at least you aren’t for the sake of learning to [...]
Do it again – Loops in your game
The very first computer programs, for gigantic systems that filled entire floors of buildings, were essentially just giant equations. Whole basements were full of nothing but extremely large, extremely precise calculators. The notable thing about these old systems is that they were one-pass – you gave it some input, you started it running, it gave [...]
Remembering Important Things
At the very heart and soul, programming a computer is nothing more than math, math, math. Don’t let that frighten you away, though, we’re not talking ridiculous amounts of super-calculus or anything (at least, not yet) – it’s all the same skills you use to balance a checkbook. Programming languages exist almost for the soul [...]
Your First Automatic Program
If we’re going to write a video game, or a program of any sort, we’ll need to look into some of the tools of the trade. I’ve worked in several different environments, and you are going to end up doing the same (trust me), but for now I’m going to pick out two specifically that [...]
Your First Assignment
…is to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
When I was a much younger boy, still in high school, thinking I knew everything, I took a programming class. Hey, I’d written some stuff before, just for fun. How hard could it be? The first day I came into class, the teacher broke us into groups [...]