MadSoft » General

Blog Has Moved

Alec Hussey — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 19:58:01 +0000

Yea, well I’ve decided that I wanted to move to a new blogging system as well as having the ability to use my own domain. So I’ve moved the blog and all of its previous posts over to my website at www.madsoft.org running (of course) wordpress. At the moment its all default (i apologize) but I should have something a little more unique up soon.

Happy New Year!

Alec Hussey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:12:44 +0000

Just wanted to say happy new year to everybody and welcome to 2008. I just hope I can actually accomplish something this year, heh.

Plugtrade Beta Coming Soon

Alec Hussey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:12:18 +0000

Last time I mentioned that I was working on this website for a friend which would be entirely Open Sourced. Well it’s approaching completion and we are expecting to have the beta up and running sometime around the end of December or the beginning of January. The license has been moved to the new GNU AGPLv3 (Affero General Public License) as well. The license is much more fitted towards web applications and removes the GNU GPL’s application service provider loophole. Well I think the site is a great idea and look forward to seeing the beta myself and can’t wait to start receiving community feedback on the project.

Stuffs in the Works

Alec Hussey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:11:20 +0000

Recently one of my good buddies Matt (aka Matsta) referred me to another one of his friends who needed a web application built for his new website. After some negotiation, I had decided that I would build this application for him for free, so long as the source code to the application was Open Source. So here I am building this fairly large web application, and although I have had to stop working on most of my other projects, a lot has still come from this little endevour.

One of the biggest things (I think anyway) which has come from this is the massive improvements that I’ve made to the former MadBB API. It’s really starting to turn into a robust framework so to speak. I have reformed pretty much everything in it, including making it entirely PHP 5 compliant. So now it uses custom exceptions to handle errors rather than printing that nasty error message it used to show. The developer or whoever is using it, now has the power to decide how an error is handled.

Secondly, as a result of me doing this huge favor him, he bought the domain madsoft.org for me, so I/we will finally have a website. And he also offered to make me a custom template/design to go on the website. So nothing but great things should be foreseen in the future, but let’s hope for the best anyway.

gSourceEdit Alpha 2 on its way

Alec Hussey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:10:32 +0000

Well I’ve finally started to get some where with gSE. I completely rewrote it from the ground up in python and got rid of glade. I also got a pretty nice plugin system and API going that will make it fairly easy to extend the program. But the point is, the next alpha is probably on its way soon. The current SVN builds all run fine. Although I am still waiting until I get around to adding some more missing features before I make an actual release. I’ve got an updated screen shot on the project page which can be found here. Check it out and send me some feedback if you’d like, just use the sourceforge contact page.

MadBB API Rewritten

Alec Hussey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:09:37 +0000

I know I haven’t been posting anything in a long while but I thought I might put this out there. A little while ago I had taken a look at the current MadBB API and easily saw that it was a complete mess. And if want people to be using this API later on for plugins or modules or whatever, then it desperately needed to be fixed now. So I had spent a few days changing everything and making the API easier to understand and use. As a result, I’d also improved a lot of things, including how MadBB handles variables in templates and how it renders templates and so forth. So whenever I get around to it, I will need to fix many of the current front end pages because of the changes to the API. So currently and for a month or so now, the SVN code did not work, so I’ll be getting around to fixing that some time soon.

OpenParachute Switching to C++

Alec Hussey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:08:59 +0000

This has been going on for about a month or so now and have just been lazy or something about mentioning it. But I have decided that, it would be in mine, as wel as others best interest if OpenParachute switched to C++. During the development process over the last few months, that the C library was becoming a bit cumbersome and was actually making it hard to use then easier. And of course, the OOP model makes more sense with game development. As a result though, OpenParachute 0.2 is going to be greatly delayed as this transition to C++ is taking a bit longer than I expected. I am currently in the debugging stage and the source tree has already been ported to C++.

MadBB Pre-Alpha v0.0.9

Alec Hussey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:08:22 +0000

I’m glad to announce yet another development release. First off, I’d like to state that this is called a ‘Private’ Alpha because I am not releasing any packges for this release but all of the source is freely availible in the SVN code repository.

Almost all of the updates planned for this release have been achieved. They include:

Completed/fully working user system
Improved security
Topic posting implemented

In the previous news release, I had mentioned a possible new theme/skin, and I believe that is still in the works.

Some things to expect for 0.0.10 would be:

Completed posting support
User system intergration
Initial code base for ACP
Additional UCP feature implementations
Improved security
Possible new theme

If you would like to help, please contact me at: admin [{ dot }] maddog39 [{ at }] gmail [{ dot }] com or via sourceforge, either way. Refer to project page via the link on the right for more information.

Some Updates

Alec Hussey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:07:42 +0000

Sorry for not posting anything in a while, but progress has been quite slow. I am going to release OpenParachute 0.2 some time soon. I’ve added custom key binding support to sprites and I’ve also dropped the need for having a separate timer for sprites as well, this is now done automatically. I will also add some simple camera support before the release. I am still working on gSourceEdit but have run into some issues and not sure what to do with it at the moment, although its almost done. I thought up some ideas for it, such as having a really simple plugin interface and adding default support for subversion as well as make.

Partially working parachute

Alec Hussey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:03:12 +0000

Okay, so I’ve been screwing around trying to get my (2D only at the moment) game development framework called OpenParachute (libop) working. So being quite frustrated with “Segmentation fault (core dumped),” I went on the Ubuntu forums and asked for help and also tried out a awsome C/C++ development tool (exclusive to linux) called valgrind. With the combination of the two I was able to finally get a working development version of my library. I do have a screenshot of the “demo game” that comes with the source although input and sprite movement is broken at the moment but this does show some basic functionality working.

Some features I have planned for the future, leading up to a stable release:

Alpha blending (transparency)
Menu creation system
Game saving and restoring
Level creation and loading (maps)
Possibly adding OpenAL support for 3D audio
Multi-threading support (for dual core and multi-CPU computers)
Adding a seperate library called libopgl which is entirely OpenGL accelerated and focuses at 3D graphics and games
Possibly adding some OpenGL acceleration to the 2D library

The project is entirely open source and licensed under the GPL version 2 only, I have very strong feelings against version 3 that I will leave for a later time. The project is hosted on google code and can be found here along with the source code.