Five Hundred – Steam Release It’s been a few hundred hours of work, a whole lot of testing, a huge amount of reading of the Steamworks API – but Five Hundred – Steam Edition – is coming this week! Screenshots New Features As previously discussed, the Steam Edition includes a very large amount of new
Consider this pseudocode: Is there a memory leak in the above code? This is just pseudocode, so I’m not trying to be tricky with syntax and I haven’t omitted any key steps in init or shutdown. The answer I should get is “no”. And yet, in reality, the answer is “maybe”. All the code does
I’m currently reading a book about the evolution of Windows. One of the most interesting things I keep finding is how stupid some 3rd party application developers must have been…. for example, it seems to have been common practice that if you wanted your app to grab a particular Windows setting (let’s say the Fonts
I thought I’d cover this rule first, because I listed it as number one and also because it’s probably one of the most controversial. Let’s begin: a simple Why/Why Not argument should suffice for this one: Why Allow Windowed-mode: It’s more convenient for your users. Some users multitask (gasp!), even while playing games. This is
In Windows (like every operating system), when you’re writing an application or game there are certain things that your application is responsible for handling: some of them are easy, some of them take a little bit more effort. On his excellent blog, Microsoft’s Raymond Chen calls these responsibilities “Taxes”, and there are good reasons why
What’s a reasonable minimum spec to aim for these days? With Icefall, I’ve already taken the decision to target Direct3D9 – I get a lot of extra capabilities compared to DirectX8, and it still works with Windows XP unlike 10 or 11… a pretty simple decision. But what about in terms of video memory? And
Should Icefall come with an Installer/Setup program? My previous games (like the Five Hundred card game) didn’t require any installation at all: it assumed you had DirectX7 (the game just failed if you didn’t), and all of the files it needed were in the same directory as the EXE itself. You just unzipped it to
I’m working on the follow up to my Object-Oriented Programming post, but in the meantime I had to share this: I tested Icefall on Windows 7 for the first time today (having developed & tested exclusively on Windows XP SP 3 up until now). It worked perfectly, in fact it ran a little more smoothly