Well apart from programming Android games … at the moment I find myself learning WordPress. I used to program in raw HTML/CSS but I decided that I should proceed out of the stone age and thus … here I am.
Obviously nothing particularly useful at the moment but I plan to add a number of posts on topics that I’ve learned something about that might be useful to others. Here are some of the things I’ve been working on that I’ll start posting about (no particular order):
- Android programming. Both in Java and through the NDK.
- Cocos2d-x programming. I’ve published my first Android game created with Android-Studio and the Cocos2d-x game engine.
- OpenCV. I’ve learned lots about vision software so now it’s time to learn some OpenCV stuff. This will come in handy now that people are carrying around fairly powerful computers with included cameras.
- My SFBC game tool for Android will be using OpenCV to convert camera images to electronic SSDs (Ship System Display — schematics of the ship and its systems, weapons, engines etc). See Google Images for lots of examples.
- Game programming. In particular some of the stuff that goes into game programming that isn’t obvious (the stuff other than graphics and sound)
- PCG (Procedural Content Generation). This is a way to generate games scenarios without going to all the trouble and space to create them individually. Pixel Dungeon and all its variants seem to use this. There seems to be a great amount of research work been done on PCG now and it looks like it is the technology to learn.
- AI (Artificial Intelligence) makes the bots do their thing and makes them act in a way that makes the game challenging for the player. But an AI can’t be to smart or the players get frustrated, or too stupid or the players get bored.
- Compiler writing. I’ve got a Basic-to-C translator working already but I thought others could use some helpful notes on how to get started here.
- A Fortran-to-C compiler is also in the back of my mind especially considering I have a few games in Fortran that really want to be converted to C.
- BNFC is a program to convert between a BNF grammer and the Flex/Bison lexer and parser for C (and various other languages and compiler tools) and looks like a fairly quick way to implement the front end of a compiler … I’ll let you know.
- Flex/Bison. I suspect that BNFC is a pretty good system but I’m not sure it will help with languages like Fortran with it’s position specific code. As well BNFC produces Flex/Bison code so you have to know how to understand the error messages to know how adjust your BNFC code.
- NCurses programming. Not terribly useful in the present day but some people are nostalgic for the old style games and this is a great way to build them (see Dwarf Fortress)
Up and running…