A GNU Dawn

In an act of extreme symbolism (which I hope will be remembered when the time comes to award the next Nobel Prize in Literature), I have ported my artgame, Freedom, to Linux.

This version brings back the window frame because there's basically no cross-platform method for positioning windows with SDL and the window kept showing up at the bottom right of my screen. Now at least it's possible to move it to a nicer location.

Download: Linux

I don't have a whole lot of LInux experience, so I don't actually know if I can just pass around the binary and assume that it will work on other computers. I don't see any immdeiate reason that it shouldn't, though. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Oh wait. You can't. Because you're the Internet Void, and only people can test the game on other machines and let me know if it works. And we both know that no one reads this.

Yet.

When the time is right...

One last thing. Basically none of the Windows versions of my games are going to run correctly under Wine because I used clock() for timing instead of SDL_GetTicks(). In the future, I plan to stick to SDL_GetTicks(), so my games ought to run just fine in Wine.

Of course, they ought to also have Linux versions that run just fine without Wine.

Edit: Linux version += easteregg

gearGen and Linux

I finally got around to filling that empty space on my hard drive that I've had sitting around for six months. I filled it Linux. What this means is that in the future (if I can just figure out how to use KDevelop), I will be able to offer both Linux and windows versions of my games.

It took me about two hours to install Linux. I then spent 8 hours fiddling with xorg.conf and rebooting over and over again before I realized that I could just turn off overscan on my monitor. After that, I'm pretty sure Linux is actually more "user-friendly" than either Windows or Mac. It certainly seems to have a lot more fancy graphical stuff going on. And it seems you can download and install just about anything by typing "sudo apt-get install [program name]." I mean anything. "sudo apt-get install pi" downloads and installs a program to calculate pi.

Anyway, in celebration of my new operating system, and because doing it on a calculator was really tedious, I decided to write a good old-fashioned command line program. It's called gearGen and it prints out x and y coordinates for drawing gears. Those coordinates can then be converted to images using paint or the GIMP. This ought to help a lot with making sprites for a certain game. It turns out that just opening up paint and drawing a 32x32 gear from scratch is not at all easy.





gearGen code: (C=C+1)