A post in time..w00t!

There's one thing I completely forgot to mention yesterday - I've finished most of my tiling engine. Its almost complete and I've implemented everything including collision detection. Only one part remains, the map maker.

However, I've decided to take a break and start doing something more interesting for a while. Enter the Pong clone. I've just started it, and it should hopefully be done in a week or so, maybe more since I have my final exams going on at the moment.

I've also discovered a nice way to learn more on game programming. All I need to do is take a trip to SourceForge and look at some 2D games. Most of them are written in C++, and some of them use SDL, so they'll probably be a great help in my quest to become a great game programmer.

I've been playing around with other programming languages like Ruby. Its seems nice and simple to use. I could probably make good use of it for AI purposes later on, from what I've heard about scripting languages.

To be honest, I've really got too many projects right now. I plan write my Pong clone, then I'll write the map maker, after which I'll try a nibbles clone, then I'll try a 2D RPG, and I haven't even started GUI programming yet. Considering how complicated WinAPI is, I'll probably be better off trying something like Qt for GUIs.

So that's this week's randomness.

Internet TV is nice

I've been using this great video podcast downloader and player called Miro for a long while now. Its pretty nice, and I can get all my favorite video podcasts automatically downloaded and ready to watch, which is great. The interface is also nice and iTunes-like.

However, Miro is far from perfect. It has more bugs than you can shake a stick at, and often downloads one video multiple times. Videos frequently disappear for some podcasts and have to be re-downloaded, which is very annoying. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any similar software that can do a similar job, let alone do it better.

Then again, I can get my weekly Zero Punctuation and TED videos for watching simply by leaving Miro open and let it automatically download whatever I want.

Its a great piece of software, but I really hope they fix the bugs soon. Although I'm not sure that's going to happen, because I found the newly released Miro 2.0 buggier than the previous one.