Code / January 16, 2019

Obtaining the user’s Windows 10 Accent colour in FreePascal

I’m currently designing a minimalistic user interface in FPC (Freepascal), and I wanted it to blend in with the existing Windows desktop. So naturally, I started looking for how to obtain the user’s chosen accent color (I’m deliberately alternating American and British spelling of colour/color to help anyone that needs this to be able to

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Icefall / November 18, 2009

More Textures than Memory

Icefall uses literally dozens of textures… (and it will probably be ‘hundreds’ by the time the game is completed). Textures are used for everything, from the mouse cursor, menus, fonts, buttons, to the game world itself, spells/action icons, monsters, equipment… everything. Although my own main PC has 512MB of video (texture) RAM, not everyone does!

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Icefall / October 28, 2009

OOP Part 2: Inheritance

Last time, we talked about two different approaches to designing objects for a game or application: Inheritance and Composition. It’s time to look at the pros and cons in more detail. Let’s start with inheritance. Inheritance When learning OOP, inheritance is what you learn! Create a common, generic ancestor-type class, and create new classes for

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Icefall / October 26, 2009

Object-oriented programming

Like almost everything else these days, Icefall is designed around object-oriented programming (OOP) principles. Specifically, Icefall uses Classes instead of objects, although the difference is not relevant for this discussion. At any given time, the game will be operating dozens of different classes and hundreds of instances of those classes, with the majority of them

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Icefall / October 17, 2009

About Icefall

I am currently working on a new role playing game called Icefall, and to help maintain clear thinking, correct decisions, etc etc etc, I’ve decided to document the development journey on this website as a blog. That way, once Icefall is released and becomes hugely popular (:D), I will have a solid record of how

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