Bleeding Eyes and Blistered Fingers

Well of course they’re not an irrelevance. They have enormous buckets of money and have software on the vast majority of machines out there.

Still. Boring as hell.

And not my platform of choice.

Though I do enjoy the performances by their trained monkey.

Oh hell now I’ve started I can’t stop. Look at the monkey dance. They’ve even trained it to sell.

That stuffs all old. But still so funny. Any why Microsoft need to get rid of Ballmer as well as Gates.

Its funny how Microsoft has become almost an irrelevance to me in terms of wider development work. Sure my day job is all about churning out the C# and SQL Server code but when I have more choice as to platform or language it hardly even enters my head to look at the Microsoft offerings.

Contrast this to 5 years ago when stepping outside of the comfortable Microsoft box would have been freaky and strange. My visits to the MSDN back then were almost daily to catch up on the latest COM developments and this strange new thing called .net.

And its not that I don’t like Microsoft stuff. For the database apps I write for a day job its fine. C# is a nice language and SQL Server does the job. So whats the problem? Why do they hold no appeal for me?

I think part of the answer is that outside of work I don’t write database apps. But thats not all it is - when I’m writing code in the office that isn’t shipping to customers I’ll generally choose something else too (such as Perl or Ruby). Sometimes its to get the chance to try something new and different but I think more than all of those reasons its that with Microsoft it always comes back to Windows and an effort to tie you in utterly to their platform.

A platform that to me appears increasingly frail in the face of the now all pervasive Internet. Whether or not it is frailer than Linux, Mac OS or any other platform is in someways irrelevant. Like a government accused of sleaze the damage is in a believable accusation and not the truth.

With the diversity of platform now available for hosting applications why would I want to be tied to any one platform: frail or otherwise. In my home alone I have two Mac OS boxes, a Windows box and a Linux box. On all of those I can use MySql yet on only one of those can I use SQL Server.

If you were a developer coming from a Windows background 5 years ago it was harder to break out. The MSDN library was like a comforting blanket where answers were easily found. Now there’s such a wealth of information available on subjects like PHP, Python, Linux - you name it - that its almost the other way round.

The world has changed and like many corporations before it Microsoft isn’t changing with it.

(and to add to all the above why oh why after more than 20 years can’t they supply a decent command shell)

In my original MouseTrek starbases were attacked but you never saw it. You just had a deadline by which time the enemy ships in the sector had to be cleared out else that starbase would be destroyed.

CocoaTrek differs from this in that an attack on a starbase begins the minute you discover one and takes place in proper game time. If you’re in the starbases sector you can actively participate in the defence (and be shot at too). This isn’t entirely realistic, after all why would the enemies wait to be discovered, but I had to do that for game balance reasons. If all the starbases were attacked simultaneously and you didn’t know where they were you’d have no chance to save them. Similarly it made absolutely no sense to have all the enemy ships in the same sector just sitting there…

It wasn’t on my original todo list but is a worthwhile addition I reckon!

In the rare event that you’re a regular visitor to this blog you might notice a few things have gone missing: my photographs. Rather than persistently clutter this game development blog with irrelevant off topic material I’ve moved it out to a blog all of its own: The Creative Kroaker.

For my friends and family who use this blog to keep track of me… well you’ll just have to subscribe to that blog too and suffer yet more of my verbal diarrhea.

Wooo! Done some work on CocoaTrek: docking at starbases is coomplete.

Finally got round to knuckling down to some work again. CocoaTrek edges closer to completion, All thats really left to implement is:

Damage control
Docking at starbases
Loading and saving games

Well I’ve found myself almost totally distracted from development since buying the new camera. Been busy taking lots of photographs and having a lot of fun exploring that. Its quite nice to be using my computer for a change like a regular user.

About the only development I’ve done in the last two weeks is adding my flickr photostream to the sidebar of this page. And that took, oooo, all of 2 minutes.

I really have to get back to CocoaTrek and the bigger project soon!

Still beavering away on CocoaTrek. Its turned out to be a nice little mini-project in its own right and I’ve had a lot of fun writing it while learning Cocoa and Objective-C.

Couple more screenies posted below.

After looking at the “real” project with some art in it we’ve decided to up the art scale to make things bigger. Got quite a way through updating the various bits and pieces in the engine to support that (scaling effects, updating maps etc.) and the prototype will soon be running again in all its larger glory. Hopefully this is going to make things a little easier on the eye for the player and allow the artist to get a little more detail into the sprites.

Downside of this is that the viewable playing area is no longer as large and I’m concerned it might feel a bit cramped. We won’t really know until we try it out though. Game development… all about tradeoffs!

I still don’t have a real name for this game so for time being I’ll be referring to it as Project Humpeldink.

Development on the game as been slow for the last week or two. Until I get more bits and pieces of art from the artist there’s only so much I can do. I need the artwork to start defining precise collisions and other bits and bobs.

In the meantime as I said before I’ve been teaching myself Objective C and Cocoa. The fruit of my labours is, somewhat predictably, a small game.

I love the old mainframe style Star Trek games and have often used it as a tool to teach myself new languages and frameworks. Its also a game I have really fond memories of as it marks my first steps into C and “real” programming when I got my first PC. Before that I was mostly coding in BBC Basic and 6502 assembler.

I couldn’t even find a native graphical one on Mac OS X so this all seemed like the perfect excuse.

I’m really getting on with Cocoa. Its come pretty naturally to me and fits my style of development quite well so despite only spending an hour or two an evening on it and starting from scratch I’ve got a lot of the game written already.

There’s a screenshot below with placeholder graphics ripped from R-Type (and one of my own). I expect it to be finished in a couple of weeks (one solid day ought to do it) and when it is I’ll replace the ripped graphics with distributable ones and post it on my site as a free download for anyone also into this ancient game.

No not Jolene Blalock, though she is, but the first piece of artwork that I’ve been given for incusion in the game. It rocks