Creation Crate #2 popped up yesterday, only 2.5 weeks after the last one did, and it was a nice fun little build+code event.

Note : Boxing day is what we in the UK call the day after Xmas Day. I'm not sure why it's called that! Wiki! The day went rather uneventfully. A lazy morning, waking up rather late, but then using most of the morning to prepare for what was to come.

A standard Xmas in the house of Jay. The morning was spent unwrapping the insane amount of sweets that I'd been gifted. Since folk know not to buy me Chocolate (since it gives me migraines) and they're desperately trying not to resort to buying Xmas Socks, they all seem to end up buying me a curious variety of sweets. Each one trying desperately to find the most unique sweet they can, in a bid to outdo each other. I unwrapped an alarming number of Jelly Beans, yesterday!

Thanks! \o/

It's taken quite a while to get up to this point, but I now have the engine half-doing a "Which button is pressed" function. I can push a keyboard button, or tap a button on a connected controller, and the engine says "This button!" There's a slight issue, whereby if a button is held, it takes control. For example, if you're playing on the keyboard, but your gamepad's lying on the floor, and the thumbstick is prodded to the side, then no matter what button you try to hit, it always says...

Today's been a nice none-coding day. .. with coding in it! Rather than my usual coding, a package arrived.

Note : These posts were originally posted to Patreon as a Subscriber bonus. Now that Patreon's imploding, I've decided to start reposting the contents here, instead. -=-=-

Inside Jay's Notebook - 001

When typically coding, I tend not to use pen and paper. Over the many years that I've been doing this, I've found my mind to be perfectly adequate for storing bits and pieces, and jumping between all the many random and crazy ideas that I generate. In addition, my handwrit...

A brief roundup of the things I've managed to accomplish, during 2017.

1. Online Scoreboards

It's been a long time since I last had online scoreboards in my general AGameAWeek games. iOS's GameCenter made me lazy, and I could never be bothered to implement anything more complicated into my Framework. But this year, I opted to take on the challenge, so right at the start of this year I added an "Enter Your Name" thing into my framework, and tied the scoreboard system to the server....

...by putting prices up! "we're always looking for ways to do what's best for you - creators." Yeah, but if you piss off the people who pay the creators, then the creators aren't going to be too happy!! If you're one of my three Patreons and feel that you're getting screwed by this epic fuckup, then feel free to remove your patreonage. I won't complain. Bloody Patreon. Grrr!!! I might shift the Notebook posts over to the main site. *sigh* Thanks to all Patreons!

I finally dug my heels into the Net code, last night. For the meantime, it'll be very Windows specific, and I'll have to tackle each different system in it's own way.

Spent a few more hours working on getting things a little neater.

I swear it only just updated with the Fall Creators' Update a week or so ago. But, nope.. doing it all again!!

So, after having read up on URL access for a couple of hours, I managed to get about 0% through it, yesterday. I might actually end up trying to find a proper book on the subject, and having a good focused read-through. .. Although I imagine any book would probably focus on Win/Linux, and not the cross-platform usage I'm after. I've really coded myself into a pickle, here!

Also available on SoundCloud, or the Pulpish AL Bum.

I struggled for about an hour with C Strings, or rather Char* strings. They're a total pain in my backside, so at the start of the project I opted to do something that I thought would be "quite clever"

I probably shouldn't, yet, but I feel that things are at a decent enough point that I can make a start on things. I still have oodles of things to add to the Engine, like proper load/save functions, and doing online URL requests for the online leaderboards. And, of course, I've still not got the new engine running on iOS, yet. That definitely needs doing!

Developments

I finally got around to shifting the framework over to the Mac, last night. Hitting the compile button swiftly planted around about 1,000,000,000 red "WARNING:ERROR!" flags all over the code.

Most folk seem to be giving me successful results with yesterday's benchmark test program. If you haven't already, Do so here!

Warning : Waffle ahead!

I really need to get back to working on Sheep Goes Right. It's really not a good idea to leave it half-finished like that, but I'm kinda enjoying working on the new Framework so much that I've not had much time to look back at older things.

I haven't got around to tackling Streams, yet, and have spent all morning working on audio loading functionality. Mainly that the thing kept breaking when trying to load too many files. Typical memory leaks and the like were fairly rampant, too. But I've persevered, and I think it's more or less stable, now.