All posts filed under: Game Development

Two good reasons to finish DVW

I bought my first Samsung SyncMaster 204b about one and a half years ago. Although I had some problems with it, I decided to complete my set and get a second one. As you might recognize, I did not get the colors to match exactly yet, but I’ll try twiddle with that later. The wallpaper is from mandolux.com. If you ever need excellent dual monitor wallpapers, this is the place to go. I have downloaded some of them, and while I’m writing this, I have already changed my wallpaper again because I cannot decide which one I like best. The actual reason for buying a second 20″ was to have a little more screen space for programming again after my CRT smoked away some time ago, so: happy coding!

irrKlang fully integrated

After I finished the Windows integration, Christopher did the necessary work on the Linux version (basically editing CMake files) and Jan did the OS X version work tonight (messing around with an XCode project in this case). Let me cite him to show how damn easy it was. [00:31] <sheijk|6S> sound geht ohne absturz: check (Sound works without a crash: Check.) [00:31] <sheijk|6S> musik laeuft artefaktfrei: check (Music runs without artifacts: Check.) [00:31] <sheijk|6S> das ganze hat abzueglich rebuilds < 10 min aufwand gekostet: check (Subtracting the rebuilds, it took me less than 10 minutes of work: Check.) irrKlang is now fully integrated into DVW and if the next release will overcome its last minor issues, irrKlang will officially become our audio library of choice. It’s always a pleasure to work with Nikos code. And, no, posting three irrKlang entries in a row this is not advertising but pure excitement.

Audiere vs OpenAL vs irrKlang

It’s funny to see how our requirements regarding sound support changed. When I started to incorporate sound into DVW (after our former teammate Anselm who wrote the very first audio device left us, that is) I went for Audiere. At that time, Audiere was a framework which fitted exactly our needs. We had a Windows-only game for the time being, were about to play WAV and MP3 files from memory and didn’t want to bother about threading and all the platform-specific audio internals ourselves. It had bindings for several other languages and it looked like lots of other projects were using Audiere. Eventually, even Irrlicht was using it for its demos, so I thought this was a good way to go. But things turned out differently over time.

Setting up SVN and Trac

I’m using Subversion and Trac for several projects and I always thought that I should write down my workflow to set it up. This time, I did, and I’m sharing it with you. It’s probably not the best way, but it works for me. I will not cover the prerequesites here, like installing Apache 2 with DAV and SVN support or installing Subversion and Trac. The subversion server is on a Linux box while the client is a Windows XP machine with TortoiseSVN as the SVN front-end.