It has been a few months of crazy development environment ping-pong around here, but things are beginning to settle down.
Back in November the guys over at GarageGames.com announced they were shuttering the InstantAction team and that generally the outlook for all of Torque seemed really bleak.
So with the future of my development tools up in the air I did some research and started switching over to DarkBasicPro and then in tandem, the day job necessitated a crash course in Java.. which lead me to Slick2d for Java, which I’ve also done some poking around in now.
The problem is that they both (Slick and DarkBasic) seem to magnify the deficiencies of the other.
DarkBasicPro is EASY, and Fast to get prototypes up and running in. It’s also Basic, that means no objects, no event handlers, and scoping variables is fast and loose, ex arrays are always Globals. And no garbage collection, premade main loop or GUI tools, so you’ve got to write that yourself. However the community is FULL of snippets and other pieces of code so you can cobble together a nice utility library in a couple of days. Oh and it supports 3d and shaders etc.. for that reason I may come back some day.
Slick2d, on the other hand, is 100% object driven, with all sorts of good things that come with that. Tightly scoped variables and inheritance etc etc also make it really powerful and clean to code in. It is, however, not easy or fast to throw together a prototype. Especially since there isn’t much of documentation other than the auto-generated API docs. Throw in some of Java’s memory limits and stuff and it gets pretty cumbersome fast. It’s got a nice state-based game core and main loop that works really well… once you find it.
I wasted too much time on both of those only to realize that I miss Torque Game Builder. It’s not perfect, but it is very much a nice place between the two.
So, I’m really happy for the guys at GarageGames.com when they announced they’re Back! And T2D is still alive and kicking.
Now it is time to install the latest version, get tweaking on the Blood Soaked Deadly Dungeons of Doom! and get this whole thing back on track!
I’m still doing the whole Java Android development stuff, and that’s been making good progress as well. Hope to have more details and maybe a screenshot or two by the end of the month. *cross fingers*
Oh and Wenderflonia is going to be getting a minor facelift and its own Online Shop by Mid Feb and a couple more freelance projects should be wrapping up and I hope to be able to refocus my energies a bit more on development.
And to wrap it up I’m going to try and end every post from here on out with….
What I’m Playing:
- Minecraft – indie game, sandbox phenomenon. If you ever wanted to play with legos, build anything, explore a world this is the game for it. We’re documenting our latest travels here http://blocklandtravels.tumblr.com/
- SpaceChem – puzzle game of the year all time. It’s fiendish and guides you into an extensive set and before you know it you’re inventing solutions like this (my you tube video of a solution) The stats comparison lets you know how you stack up to everyone else and is absolutely addictive to optimize your solutions.
