Blog Has Moved

Yea, well I've decided that I wanted to move to a new blogging system as well as having the ability to use my own domain. So I've moved the blog and all of its previous posts over to my website at www.madsoft.org running (of course) wordpress. At the moment its all default (i apologize) but I should have something a little more unique up soon.

Happy New Year!

Just wanted to say happy new year to everybody and welcome to 2008. I just hope I can actually accomplish something this year, heh.

Plugtrade Beta Coming Soon

Last time I mentioned that I was working on this website for a friend which would be entirely Open Sourced. Well it's approaching completion and we are expecting to have the beta up and running sometime around the end of December or the beginning of January. The license has been moved to the new GNU AGPLv3 (Affero General Public License) as well. The license is much more fitted towards web applications and removes the GNU GPL's application service provider loophole. Well I think the site is a great idea and look forward to seeing the beta myself and can't wait to start receiving community feedback on the project.

Stuffs in the Works

Recently one of my good buddies Matt (aka Matsta) referred me to another one of his friends who needed a web application built for his new website. After some negotiation, I had decided that I would build this application for him for free, so long as the source code to the application was Open Source. So here I am building this fairly large web application, and although I have had to stop working on most of my other projects, a lot has still come from this little endevour.

One of the biggest things (I think anyway) which has come from this is the massive improvements that I've made to the former MadBB API. It's really starting to turn into a robust framework so to speak. I have reformed pretty much everything in it, including making it entirely PHP 5 compliant. So now it uses custom exceptions to handle errors rather than printing that nasty error message it used to show. The developer or whoever is using it, now has the power to decide how an error is handled.

Secondly, as a result of me doing this huge favor him, he bought the domain madsoft.org for me, so I/we will finally have a website. And he also offered to make me a custom template/design to go on the website. So nothing but great things should be foreseen in the future, but let's hope for the best anyway.

gSourceEdit Alpha 2 on its way

Well I've finally started to get some where with gSE. I completely rewrote it from the ground up in python and got rid of glade. I also got a pretty nice plugin system and API going that will make it fairly easy to extend the program. But the point is, the next alpha is probably on its way soon. The current SVN builds all run fine. Although I am still waiting until I get around to adding some more missing features before I make an actual release. I've got an updated screen shot on the project page which can be found here. Check it out and send me some feedback if you'd like, just use the sourceforge contact page.

MadBB API Rewritten

I know I haven't been posting anything in a long while but I thought I might put this out there. A little while ago I had taken a look at the current MadBB API and easily saw that it was a complete mess. And if want people to be using this API later on for plugins or modules or whatever, then it desperately needed to be fixed now. So I had spent a few days changing everything and making the API easier to understand and use. As a result, I'd also improved a lot of things, including how MadBB handles variables in templates and how it renders templates and so forth. So whenever I get around to it, I will need to fix many of the current front end pages because of the changes to the API. So currently and for a month or so now, the SVN code did not work, so I'll be getting around to fixing that some time soon.

OpenParachute Siwtching to C++

This has been going on for about a month or so now and have just been lazy or something about mentioning it. But I have decided that, it would be in mine, as wel as others best interest if OpenParachute switched to C++. During the development process over the last few months, that the C library was becoming a bit cumbersome and was actually making it hard to use then easier. And of course, the OOP model makes more sense with game development. As a result though, OpenParachute 0.2 is going to be greatly delayed as this transition to C++ is taking a bit longer than I expected. I am currently in the debugging stage and the source tree has already been ported to C++.

MadBB Pre-Alpha v0.0.9

I'm glad to announce yet another development release. First off, I'd like to state that this is called a 'Private' Alpha because I am not releasing any packges for this release but all of the source is freely availible in the SVN code repository.

Almost all of the updates planned for this release have been achieved. They include:

• Completed/fully working user system
  
• Improved security
  
• Topic posting implemented
  

In the previous news release, I had mentioned a possible new theme/skin, and I believe that is still in the works.

Some things to expect for 0.0.10 would be:

• Completed posting support
  
• User system intergration
  
• Initial code base for ACP
  
• Additional UCP feature implementations
  
• Improved security
  
• Possible new theme

If you would like to help, please contact me at: admin [{ dot }] maddog39 [{ at }] gmail [{ dot }] com or via sourceforge, either way. Refer to project page via the link on the right for more information.

Some Updates

Sorry for not posting anything in a while, but progress has been quite slow. I am going to release OpenParachute 0.2 some time soon. I've added custom key binding support to sprites and I've also dropped the need for having a separate timer for sprites as well, this is now done automatically. I will also add some simple camera support before the release. I am still working on gSourceEdit but have run into some issues and not sure what to do with it at the moment, although its almost done. I thought up some ideas for it, such as having a really simple plugin interface and adding default support for subversion as well as make.

OpenParachute reaches v0.1 stable

So just to be honest, this happened about a week ago and I've been neglecting to post about it with interest in other things and being busy. So I have finally reached a point where the library is stable, its not very feature rich and it has some bugs, but it works. I posted source code archives in various formats on the libop's project page. Since then I've been working on some things on my ToDo list for libop which I posted a couple posts back. I was also able to get alpha blending (transparency) working on some objects, I used it on the sprite in the demo game and it works great, as you can see (thats a snapshot from 0.2 SVN). If you checkout the latest revision from SVN and compile it, you can check it out. Im also working on text rendering but its not quite working yet. Some other things I have planned for the next few releases are interactive menus and some OpenGL acceleration thrown into the mix. Im also still working on the audio and will be separating all audio functions and making them their own entity as well as adding some more functionality to the audio layer, like pause and stop, and maybe some transition effects, we'll see. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to email me or leave a comment.