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Get your own Free home pageThis is The Free Game Development web page. The purpose of this, and its linked pages is to provide a forum for the exchange of code to develop specific games for Dos, which will be freely available to everyone, or, if they are commercial quality, the will be released as shareware, with much of the proceeds going to the DJGPP development effort. The rest will be split amoung the particular projects contributors.
This is the news section, which will contain dated updates.
30-5-97 ; The Ultimate Tiling Engine is progressing well, the basic C++ files are there. It draws to screen from a buffer using Allegro. The main game loop it there, I'm just filling in the details. As envisioned, it will work in any graphics mode, with an any active screen size, tile size, and sprite sizes. It will implement a generic game engine, not just a set of abstract routines. About two weeks till a proper release.
Info lists will be available from the information page which show my catalogue of contributors, and what they contribute.
The Platform chosen (as you can probably see from above) is DJGPP V2, and Dos. This way our code should be compatible. The idea will be to develop code with modular design, and all our interfaces to this code documented. The code should be specific to games programming, and only the ultimate game code, which basically just calls external objects/procedures, should be specific to an actual game.
I will also maintain a tile/map/sounds/etc library, or links to peoples personal free libraries of data, with converters for formats we might want to use.
Although I'm not new to games programming (10 years ... nah) I am new to DJGPP, so perhaps I'm not the one to be running this ! However I plan to learn as much as I can as I go. I also am finding it very easy to use - I started learning programming with microsoft quick C, so I have some C background. Mainly though, I use Turbo Pascal 6, for the IDE, but RHIDE seems just as good.
Code is sectioned in this project, and split up into pages. Each section may have a library out there all ready (I know of GRX, Jlib, and Allegro for graphics alone), so our work will be in making these specific to games or a specific game, and Dos, as well as fast assembler where required, and giving them a clean interface and documentation, as well as supporting, simple example programs, and a naming convention, to distinguish versions/ types of code. Phew.
My email address is joelu@oocities.com , please start subject lines with FG: so that I know that the subject is these pages. I hope to get up and running a few sample files in some of the areas, as well as the documentation, and to check out GRX and Allegro libraries before these pages are operational.
Games will be split up into tasks, which have clearly defined goals and requirements. Modules of source code is sent to me, then I will compile and test them, document them in the info files, and put up a zip with the current stage of development of this particular game project on here. All source requirements will be listed in the readme's in the zip, Thus ;
Requires Allegro, all Input code from the page (ie Input.zip), and all sound code.
The zip file will contain an exe of the compiled program for Dos, as well as and specific code and documentation for this project. It won't contain modular code developed elsewhere on the pages, or code used from libraries, such as Allegro. You source these separately from elsewhere.
Each specific game project will have its own page with notes, and links to all files and source files needed for its development, as well as its specific zip file.
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