~phil's blog

I might as well make one last post this year, before going back to working my ass off on my GS1 code. Also, 4000 page views… thanks?

Christmas has been alright, althought it’s a bit depressing when you have a deadline constantly looming over your head, and you spend every moment you’re not working thinking ‘why am I not working?’ So… yeah. Cheery. Between relatives and money from an old bank account, I’ve currently got around £450 to spend on a laptop, methinks I’ll go for a Dell Vostro 1310 which should cost me around £570… I’d better wait for my loan to come in first in a few days time, then I’ll have money in my account to actually buy it ¬¬

And then there’s my Games Software Development ICA. Actually, after the work I did yesterday, I’m feeling pretty confident, as I have my tile manager / map generator up and running and drawing 342 tiles at 220fps – I wouldn’t mind modifying the blit function to accept vertical tile strips rather than horizontal (better efficiency, less memory jumping), but that’s the least of my worries. By no means am I anywhere near failing the module (I managed a defnite pass 3 or 4 weeks ago), it’s just whether I’ll get it up to the standard I see in my head. As far as major game elements go, I still need to do collision, as well as a bullet manager and tile-based AI. And I have a week left to do it in. Great. It doesn’t help that I’m downscaled to a single 17″ monitor and no speakers, but it’s not so bad. I just need to put the effort in.

Merry belated Christmas and all the best for the new year,

~phil