When it rains it pours.

It's flooding all over the state of Iowa right now, including here in Des Moines. I happen to be in an area with higher elevation, so I pretty much have lucked out so far and haven't felt the wrath of nature directly. I have however been witness to the many people who have not been as fortunate and who are losing their homes, access to their work, and even some people being separated from their families. If anyone reads this blog, and you happen to be the praying type, I'd ask that you do so now for those people who are having their worlds shaken up. At the same time I realize it's not like similar things aren't going on in the rest of the world, it just makes you take notice even more when it happens to hit close to home.

Speaking of weather, I've been kind of under it the last few days. I've had something of a fever and upper respiratory infection, so I've been kind of unmotivated to get things done. Not that I haven't felt that I wanted be motivated, in-fact, yesterday I attend the local Game Developer Forum Meeting, and today I completed assembling the server, and even now I'm taking the time to write in this here blog, but I've just felt un-motivated. I just hope to get back to feeling normal soon, but I suppose, just like the rain, all I can do is wait it out.

A few days ago, I did manage to complete the side by side XInput and DirectInput implementations for the engine. I also started working on a new test app, or rather a more polished demo showing recognized presses and the like for both generic and 360 controllers. I still need to finish that however. I am then going to tackle finishing up the GUI classes for the engine, which will probably end up taking me a little bit longer then I like, but it'll be a good experience.

I also decided to install Ubuntu as the os for the server. This will be good as I'll finally have a dedicated installation of Linux that I can start to code for, and work out serialization and windowing issues in regards to cross platforming for the engine. Although at this point it's not really a concern, but it's something to look forward to.

At any rate, I'll be spending time building up some resources for the server over the next few months. I'm not going to rush it, as I'm hoping to do some more professional things with the inter-web, and I also have a lot to learn in the way of the operating system, databases, server sided scripts, and server administration in general. I think I'm going to turn in early to try and get to feeling better, and to get an early start on things.

XInput Finished

I finished up the XInput implementation for the Engine this weekend. I still have to finish the DirectInput functionality though. XInput was fairly easy to implement once I found some time to write the proper wrappers for it. It was so easy I wish it were the only thing that I needed to support, but that just wouldn't be smart.

Anyways, with as little time as I have hopefully I can get the DirectInput finished by the end of this week. It's my son and my nephews birthdays this week though as well as week three and the final week of training at my job, so I'll probably be really busy. I'll still find time to code though.

I also have decided that I need to write a more flexible version of the bitmap font class that is currently in the engine, because well, it kind of sucks the life out of updates. I've never really noticed it before because I have never had a lot of text on the screen at one time, but with the demo that I'm writing to test the input you can definitely see the difference.

Here's a screen shot trying the built in picture layout functionality of blogger. ( I usually don't like these because they are not as flexible or as easy to use as simple html tags.)




The frame rate is very low when a device is connected and there is a bunch of text
on the screen, but when a device isn't connected the frame rate is in the seven hundreds. That's a flag if I ever saw one. I still have a lot to do and I'm not really sure if the proto-type release will be done by Mid March, in fact at this point I'm pretty sure I'm going to go over as I'm planning on being a perfectionist because I really want the proto-type to be pretty polished. And if not the game, at least have a very polished version of the engine.