Category Archives: Programming

SDL tutorials

SDLTutorials.com offers a nice set of tutorials to get you started in game programming with the SDL library. SDL stands for “Simple DirectMedia Layer” and is a convenient layer between your application and audio, mouse, keyboard, joysticks and the screen. It also supports 3D via OpenGL.

And the good thing about SDL is that it is cross-platform: it works not only on Unix-based operating systems such as Linux and BSD flavors, but also on Windows, MacOS and MacOSX.

Check out the Yoshi branch!

The first set of tutorials introduce the SDL video screen and the SDL events. You will also learn about the basic composition of a typical game, and how to deal with animations and object collisions. The second set of tutorials deal with separate subjects within SDL which may be useful in your projects. There is an SDL playground project using C++ on my GitHub which is based on these tutorials. Don’t forget to check out the branches. Feel free to fork from it!

I have different projects in mind with SDL, such as object detection from webcam streams, and an artificial world with artificial entities in a client/server architecture. And you, what would you make?

GitHubbed

Sticking to old habits is bad – people need to develop, especially programmers, because the rate of development in software engineering is amazingly fast. I have been a SVN user for a long time, and found myself comfortable with it, so comfortable I didn’t bother checking out other revision control systems, such as the popular Git.

I should have done this a long time ago: I created myself a GitHub account. I have made quite a few projects in the past, but they are kind of lost. I am going to recreate them, and keep them in this GitHub account. To start with, I have uploaded the code of the base controller class from the previous post in the ZF1E project.

If you have a GitHub account, or know of interesting repositories, why don’t you share it with me?

Automatically prepare your pages with Zend Framework 1

When you make a new website or work on a new project, you want to keep it as easy as possible to add new pages. Zend Framework 1 offers a few ways to do this, for example if all the actions in your controller share some common code, you would put that in the controller’s init() function. But what if your whole site shares some common code?

Continue reading Automatically prepare your pages with Zend Framework 1