Play The City @ Linux Info Day 2010
Posted by Johannes Stein on Feb 22, 2010 in Miscellaneous | 0 comments
This post would only interest you if you are living in Germany and/or are willing to travel to Augsburg, Bavaria on the 27th of March 2010. Play The City (Link to german page) is an application I’m developing with a few of my fellow students since last semester.
As for the technical side, you may have already guessed or read on my blog post from about half a year ago we are using FreePascal and SDL (and the Elysion Frameworks of course).
The big news is that we are going to show Play The City on the Linux Info Day (german link again) this year. We are probably distributing some Play The City Live-CDs, you can watch and talk with us live and you can try the application for yourself.
Simple iPhone example using FreePascal and SDL
Posted by Johannes Stein on Feb 17, 2010 in Development, Games, Libraries, Mac OS X | 3 comments
I’ve made a quick how-to on how to set up a simple iPhone example using FreePascal and SDL and run it with the iPhone simulator.
Please watch in HD. There are englisch and german subtitles available on Youtube.
Video Link on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm4UIPl1GqA
Video Link on Vimeo: http://www.vimeo.com/9522466
The example source code can be downloaded here: http://www.freeze-dev.de/files/SDLiPhoneFPC_Colors.zip
The SDL 1.3 iPhone header I provide in this example is still incomplete and at best Alpha.
Also I’m using ElysionLogger from the Elysion Frameworks Subversion repository to create a HTML log file in the directory of the application bundle. If you don’t any log files to be created, delete ElysionLogger from the uses clause and any calls that begin with TelLogger.getInstance.
Update
If you rather develop with Lazarus, you might want to try this project file, which allows you to install the application on the iPhone Simulator right out of the Lazarus IDE. You need Lazarus 0.9.29 and the iPhone Laz Extension (http://wiki.freepascal.org/iPhone_Laz_Extension).
http://www.freeze-dev.de/files/SDLiPhoneLaz_Colors.zip
Elysion Frameworks: Structural changes
Posted by Johannes Stein on Oct 26, 2009 in Libraries | 0 comments
As for now, the different branches of the Elysion Frameworks consisted of just one single unit (e.g. ElysionLegacy.pas), but this is gonna change (or already has changed but is not commited to the SVN repository).
Why is this change necessary?
- I got to the point of nearly having ~150 kB code in one unit. It got a bit difficult to manage to say the least
- I’m in the progess of adding Irrlicht as a backend and found me in desperate need of an abstraction layer. The defines alone just won’t cut it.
Elysion Frameworks = This is just an example for an unit (ElysionKronos, ElysionLegacy, ElysionMobile)
ElysionTypes = Basic types like TelPoint, TelVertex and so on
ElysionInterfaces = Contains abstract interfaces
ElysionMath = Arithmethical functions for basic types, espacially for older Delphi versions (earlier than Delphi 2005), but can also be used to combine TelPoint with TelVertex or an array of TelRGBColor
ElysionClasses = Basic classes like TelObject, TelLogger and so on
The backends can also be combined for example using SDL_mixer with Irrlicht graphics engine or using SDL graphics backend with IrrKlang.
Read MorePlay The City
Posted by Johannes Stein on Jul 24, 2009 in Applications, Development, Games, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 0 comments
I would like to share with you guys what I’ve been doing the last few months and why I didn’t participate in a few competitions like Game Jolt Shocking Contest or Mini LD #10.
It all began two months back on May 20th in school when a few volunteers including me were introduced to the idea of a business game. The goal was to develop a business idea within eight weeks with a seed money of only five euros.
Our idea: An educational game about a city. We choose Augsburg (a nice city in Germany), it was an obvious choice, because we all (our team) are studying at the university of Augsburg.
And on top of all, we won this business game. *YEAH*
Sneak peek on Elysion Frameworks
Posted by Johannes Stein on Apr 7, 2009 in Development, Libraries, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 2 comments
What are the Elysion Frameworks? It’s a cross-platform wrapper based on SDL (and OpenGL) I’ve been working on since Summer 2005. When I began I felt there was a need for a 2D library where pictures could be sorted via Z coordinates, nice particle effects, lightmaps and what not. I even created a nice little empty sourceforge site for it a few years ago where you can download a really old version.
What changed now? First of all, besides the name change, Elysion Frameworks is splitted in three branches:
- ElysionLegacy: Based on pure SDL with no OpenGL hardware acceleration the purpose of ElysionLegacy is to make a prototype or a small not very feature-rich application/game with the possibility of converting it later to ElysionKronos without changing a single line of code (Progress: Pascal port: ~ 80%; C++ port: ~ 33%)
- ElysionKronos: Much more sophisticated than ElysionLegacy and uses OpenGL featuring lightmaps, Z sorting, camera management, particle effects and all the good stuff. (Progress: ~ 20%)
- ElysionMobile: Specially designed version for mobile devices such as GP2X. (Progress: ~ 2%)
Click on the flash movie to play it. As you can see, the frame rate dropped from Five-hundred-something to about 270 when I recorded the screencast. I never had this much frames under a Linux system, so I the performance issues are gone now.
