Dan's Remakes - May Update

After a quiet couple of months on the remakes front I'm back in business.

There have been a couple of issues that I've been wanting to resolve before moving on with newer stuff, one relating to Windows, the other to Windows and Linux.

The main one with Windows is to do with BlitzMax and they way it works (or fails to) with some graphics cards. The method I'd been trying of autodetecting what display mode should work (DirectX or OpenGL) doesn't always work - sometimes leaving you with a black screen.

I didn't want to have to go back to having two binaries for Windows, so I've set RetroRoids up to accept command-line parameters to force it to use one method or the other. I've also used an MSI installer package to distribute the game, which includes shortcuts for both modes (and for the readme).

Hopefully that should sort things out permanently for Windows.

The other issue relates to packing games. If RetroRoids is going to work for regular users when installed then the configuration file needs to be written somewhere other than the install directory. This is true on Windows as well as on Linux. So the other change is for the configuration files to be written into the users home directory / user profile.

Now that this is sorted I'll be putting some effort into trying to provide Debian / Ubuntu packages of my games.

Cavern Lander - Tech Demo 1

Over the Easter weekend I've had a browse through the code for "Cavern Lander", which started as an experiment with the RetroRoids code to see how much work it would take to add in gravity effects.

I'd got it to a point where it pretty much worked before a large dose of the curse of the hobby programmer known as "real life" stepped in and curtailed my coding activities for a couple of weeks.

To get myself back up to speed I decided to pick up the code again - and after sorting out some niggling bugs and cleaning the code up further I'd got a stable code-base to build the game on.

I'm not counting this as a proper demo release purely because the game is so early in its development - but as a technical demo to see how a gravity game would work I think it does its job quite well.

The initial feedback has been positive too so I'll spend some more time on the game over the next couple of weeks and see what I end up with.

The game itself plays a bit like a cross between Lander, Thrust and ChopLifter, in that you have to pilot your ship through a series of caves, land to rescue miners and transport them to the blue landing platform at the start of the cave complex.

Currently the main hazard is gravity itself, but the final game should add more features like fuel and gun emplacements into the mix.



For more information (and screen shots) head on over to http://dans-remakes.sytes.net.