Blog

Pixelation finally started. I fired up Photoshop CS5 and grabbed a ton of inspiration. Mainly Metal Gear. Then I just flicked out some pixels. The result is what you see to the left. Next step is to animate the character running down. I did one try and didn't look to hot. See my failure below

---

- Elrinth

me: "Does anyone have any good frameworks which eases game development?"
friend1: "sdl"
friend2: "nebula3"
friend3: "qt"
friend2: "ogre3d"
friend1+friend2+friend3: "yeah, qt with ogl is basically what you want. since you want: 1. portability 2. networking 3. input 4. gui 5. sound"

So I decided to give QT a go. QT is developed by Nokia and it's great, because you can use it under LGPL or GPL license. However, getting started is easier said than done if you use Visual Studio 2010 with 64bits Windows 7 like me. Which basically most people do these days. After getting spoiled with C# and DX or XNA for the past 3-4 years other development tools just feel crippled. This is the case with QT aswell. Their latest version 4.7.1 with it's Visual Studio 2010 addin should work right out of the box, right? Wrong! You have to rebuild QT to fit your environment. Here's how to do it, or simply follow what I did below. Anyways, to build it you'll have to do this.
1. Install QT with it's source code and everything. Put it preferably in c:\qt\4.7.1 then from your start menu navigate to the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 folder and then to the Visual Studio Tools folder and choose to run: "Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010)".

Once the program is launched, type:
cd c:\qt\4.7.1
Then type "configure" (you can remove options, but I decided to rebuild everything (it takes MUCH longer this way, and it's really recommended to remove a bunch of stuff you know you won't be needing))
Here just accept running the Generally available version, the GPL/LGPL version.
Then it'll start reading thru all available files in the QT library, once done, type NMAKE
Now qt will be built for 64bit visual studio compatibility.
Once done, you can shut down.
Now. Before you do anything, make sure the QTDIR environment variable is added in windows environment variables. if not. then add that and point it to c:\qt\4.7.1
or wherever you did install.
Now fire up visual studio 2010. New project and choose QT project. And add whatever you like (I added multimedia, all xml, sql, ogl). Build, and you are good to go.
Here's what your first project should look like once built and started:

---

- Elrinth

f7 in #renoise gave me the nice hint to use talkbox to achieve fun vocals. So I gave it a try and added some song to my previously called song: NES FATSO. I've renamed it now to "Build, Debug, Compile, Release" because that's what I'm singing. Plus I borrowed some vocals made via a text-to-speech site :)

---

- Elrinth

I added two new songs I've been working on. They are still in WIP-state but I've allowed them downloadable, because I might not work any more on them.

---

- Elrinth

I started adding some content to the music page. There's much more to come. Yesterday night I actually remade everything for the site in .NET 4.0. I mean seriously, why not run the latest and greatest? :) There was a couple of issues before I got it running but it was mainly that everything I was using had to be rebuilt from .NET 3.5 to 4.0. A couple of tweaks had to be done to the web.config. The problems were mainly to get the url rewriting working.

---

- Elrinth

Testing a OL

Item

Item

---

- Elrinth

I added some css to the layout. Looks a bit more alive now than the grey boring stuff.
It's not the best styles ever, but it'll have to do for a while forward.
Thank you: tigsource for inspiration! :) and css3 gradiant generator for speeding up preview of colors.

Also finally got some help with choosing platform for my upcoming game engine. I'll be developing in Visual Studio using C++ with Nokia's QT. It's supposedly really great. Yeah, no more news, sorries!

Guess I can share a tune made by Nighthawk: Nighthawk - Jet Lag

Problems with audio player:
* Play button might need to be pressed twice.
* Volume control can be dragged but it's not actually doing anything.
* Progress of loaded tune isn't shown atm
* Pausing and playing makes the song starting all over from the beginning
* Text showing how long it's played can't be clicked, it blocks you from changing to the end of the song

Peace! YO!

---

- Elrinth

Fiddled alittle with an old tune. Here's the result: Elrinth - My Dropbox

---

- Elrinth

Yay, now it's almost done.
here's a preview. Currently it only works with ogg (firefox) but I'll add support for both mp3 and ogg laters. So all browsers will be supported.
Elrinth - testingffs

---

- Elrinth

Recently I posted a standard html5 audio player. Now I've taken it a step further and tried to implement jPlayer. Sadly, I've got some pretty heavy bugs. It starts playing the same song increasing in instances. Why? I haven't got a single clue.

Listen to BitArts, MickRip & Elrinth - Forest Girl 3.0:

Stuff I might add to the player is display of songname. Show playtime like so: 00:05 / 01:35
It's still pretty buggy and I'm going to have to look into why, but for now. I'll just leave it as it is.
Next step is to make it dynamic. IE: replace a normal link to a mp3/ogg with an audio player if it has a certain class.

---

- Elrinth