Ohhhh man! My week-long school vacation has come to an end, and April is just about to do that very same thing! That is scary!
I say this all the time, but 2012 is plain old flying by. It worries me, you know, sometimes I just don't feel like I can fit everything is! And uh, usually, I can't!
It's crazy, I want to be able to find time to talk with you guys and bring out more things, but I just can't!
I've got another nusiance commitment (coughhandbellscough) in just under an hour that will eat up the rest of my night, so there isn't a whole ton I can do, but I did at least want to write something for you guys so you know what it is going on. I say that too often.
Alright.
This just plain breaks my heart, guys.
I am sorry to tell you I have no Windows Batch scripting tutorials to release to you. I had no voice the greater portion of my vacation, and by the end of I had other things to build and focus on.
But do not fear! You know the tutorials will come. Eventually.
Now that I have time after school these days, I may be recording a few daily and let the series slowly build up. But with that process, I wonder whether or not I should upload each video as I finish it, or do like I did with the Python tutorials and release them all in a single moment once the entire series is finished.
I'll admit I do like the former option, because that will keep more viewers eyes open and keep them watching and hooked-- but at the same time it is very possible I won't have time to record some tutorials for some days and then have no content for you one day. If I had a sort of schedule and released a few each day; what if I don't have some for one day? I don't really know.
I have not started recording, but I do have a nice little outline that I will likely be following. If you are interested in what I will be covering, go ahead and check it out.
Before you go, though, take note that that document is not finished, it too is still a work in progress. I will, however, be using that as a 'live' document, updating it on the server whenever I actually continue to build the small planner.
For now I hope you guys go ahead and check out the Portal Source SDK map I made and some discussion and thoughts on the GM Animator, or in this case, Impelluate.
I have two things I would like to be able to post and talk about, but I just plain old have not been able to find the time. As you know school has just started up for me, so my mornings are devoured.
I've got a half an hour before I take off for tonight's event, so why I just go ahead and try to talk about one of these subjects I've got on my mind.
When I have the time and don't need to occupy myself with something else, I try to improve my skills with C++ and work a bit with SDL. I'm going through tutorials with the lovely assistance of both thecplusplusguy on YouTube and some help from Lazy Foo's written guides.These two two in conjunction work really well.
But I'm trying to look at real effective and most importantly efficient ways of game programming with these tools. I'm using header files and working with object oriented programming to build instances in game like blocks and characters and so on.
Now one technique I have been using considers that fact that SDL Surfaces along with SDL_ttf fonts must be removed from memory when your program has ended. This can be done with the lovely functions
SDL_FreeSurface( surface_var );
or in SDL_ttf's case
TTF_CloseFont( font_var );
Now doing this manually for each font and surface you create in your program can be tedious. So, I store each of these in a vector or array that we loop through in our closing function. This way we can automate the removal of everything we've created.
We can declare these vectors and variables and gloriousness in a global header file (which in fact I do, which makes the OOP end of things very tidy), but it doesn't look like vector functions can be called outside of another function, so we can add these in like an 'initializer' function. There are a lot of interesting ways we can try and organize these crucial pieces of data.
I do have some more things to mention, but you know, I've got to set sail, time is running out for me. I hope you guys enjoyed these tiny little tidbits of thought, but there is more to come-- and hopefully I can show you guys more code and what I really am working on!
See you all in May! :D