Jun 2008

m_pMyLife = &dogLife;

Knowing that you would be placed with a loving & responsible family, would you choose to live 7 - 13 years as a dog? Or a 50 - 70 year old human with no guarantees? (Heh, well aside from the 50 - 70 yr. old one...)

I look at my Great Dane, Zelda, who is only 9 mos. at the moment, and think of how good she has it. She has no idea that her life expectancy is approximately 7 - 9 years (nor would you or I if we took the question's first option), but is that really something to concern yourself with when you're waited on hand & foot, void of any responsibly, and can nap for 12 hours a day YOUR WHOLE LIFE.

To be clear, I do have plenty more brain busting questions than this, its just that most of the complexity involved in discussing them seem ill-suited for the medium of the Internet.

Cheers

glBegin();

So now with TetriSDL out of the way, I started looking at other projects. Before I move on though, I've committed myself to learning OpenGL (and Kung-Fu, if there is any time leftover). OpenGL is seriously the wwwwhip, mostly cause its cross-platform and ridiculously easy to work with. Any of the games I start working on needs to be ported to other platforms; all the effort I put into XNA doesn't do jack shit if I spend 100% on my Macbook.

On a much more interesting note, I've been listening to the Flight of the Conchords almost non-stop. They're absolutely fantastic. Oh! And I've also been gearing up for Kat's return to life. I can't wait to introduce her to all the ladies I met at the bar during the past five weeks.

Enjoy the best Flash game on the Internet!

delete &myGame;

So I close a chapter in life. As noted earlier, I started a lot of Tetris projects over the years, but no longer do I have to feel defeated by lack of interest or programming ineptitude. I make it sound like it was an epic endeavor; sometimes it was...especially when the ogres showed up.

As I expected, it was 4 lines of code changed to get it to compile on Windows XP. Click here to go to the code page.

tetrisGame.Update(&errorMsg);

Its been almost two months since my last update. However, the purpose of this particular update is to acknowledge a very special moment! Teris!

Sure I started plenty of Tetris projects here and there, the first being the DirectX version I slaved over while visiting Katherine at Yale, but what I have finished here tops all of them. Its written in C++ (with some Obj-C calls for alert boxes); its my most portable version yet (runs on Mac OSX, but itshould only be a couple of line changes for both Windows & Linux). At the moment, it does everything it needs to as a Tetris game. There is still a couple of changes I wouldn't mind making:
  • Add sound & music
  • Improve CPU usage & memory footprint
  • Needs a main menu
  • No menus? No repeats!

I'm tolerant of the only 6% CPU usage and ~6MB footprint it has right now. Still, it certainly can be improved; hell, it's only Tetris; it ain't Pong! I'll post the source and a Universal binary tomorrow.