Scott T: The Blog
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Posted Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 12:12pm by ScottTagged: games, programming
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[[img|/images/gallery/4/62_med.jpg||float=left]] How many people remember the game The 7th Guest? One of the original CD-ROM based games, it was filled with rather devious puzzles and featured full motion video.
Although a windows executable was developed for the game, it was originally written for DOS and neither run particularly well under XP or Vista. Due to this minor issue, I decided to attempt to learn C# by trying out the idea of a making a full windows compatible version. With the help of the Xentax and Multimedia wiki's, I am now able to read in any GJD file (the large ones on the CDs) with help from the RL file (small ones installed to the hard disk) to play any of the in-game animation sequences.
Unfortunately I currently am not getting too great a performance from using either the SDL (via SdlDotNet) or XNA library when trying to play the video sequences which involve palette changes (eg, whenever the camera moves within a room) while the FMV sequences play with ~20 to 30% CPU usage.
It's Here!
Posted Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 10:41pm by ScottTagged: fires, programming
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For all the budding programmers out there, I've found out that Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 has been released. While that may seem expensive, Microsoft has done the same thing as the 2005 versions and released an Express Edition, which although is slightly stripped down, is also available for free!
In other news, I've now only got one exam left this Friday. Also, the fire at home has now been officially contained. Here are some photos from a few days ago.
[[img|/images/gallery/4/59_med.jpg]] [[img|/images/gallery/4/58_med.jpg]]
Paging and RMI
Posted Sat, Oct 13, 2007 at 11:04pm by ScottTagged: programming, ssc, uni
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So the RSS feed wasn't the next thing on the list, but it is coming sooner rather than later! In the mean time, paging has been implemented (at least on the front end) to make it easier to read through older posts (and it was only a 100 odd lines added according to Trac)
Now to the bulk of this post. At uni these past few weeks, we've been working towards handing in an assignment for Computer Programming, however this one has been one I've really enjoyed working on (despite some of the head-banging moments) and even think it would be cool to take further. What we were working on was a multi-player Pac-Man style game.
The language of choice for the Comp Programming topics is Java (although other languages are taught for various topics), and cross-JVM communication for Java requires<0> the use of 'Remote Method Invocation' (or RMI). After being given the basic source code as a framework, we were essentially turned loose to fill in all the TODO's.
Initially, this assignment didn't grab much of my attention since it was just implementing the basics for a stand-alone game, however once Stage 2 started, things got more interesting. With exception of actual coding of connecting to the RMI registry and initiating connection between client and server (the source of much frustration), the ability to get a server set up and have myself and friends join it (each with our own coded client) was quite enjoyable, to the point I was determined to work as hard as possible to eliminate server game-state spoiling caused by problematic clients.
Despite the fact that there were people who despised the task, it brings out the need for tasks to be enjoyable. Idealistically, projects and assignments should be as fun as possible (although the write-ups usually accompanying them aren't) as this encourages further learning and better understanding.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend :)
<0> - A Google search informs me CORBA can also be used
NB: Post titles are still hard to come up with ;)
