It was a dark and stormy night...

Winterlynx Engine - part 1.

Sounds a lot bolder and important than it actually is. I've been working on some utility objects to form a base library for my projects. I tend to suffer of the Framework Syndrome, so it's probably more than I'll ever need; be it as it may, the first two subsystems of the Winterlynx Engine are ready.

Started two days ago, the basics of Resource Management and Audio playback are down and working. Audio is still basically meh: a wrapper around resource manager that loads and plays music and sound effects through openAL.
Still ways from where I want to be, but it's a start. I'll be cannibalizing some other projects to address this. It'll be fun.

Next up: EndOfTimes gets started, of course from the middle - battleground and map representation. So far, it's going to be a top-down view; scalable, can be panned using arrows, zoomed via mouse wheel. Hopefully closed by next saturday.

Will keep you posted.

And so it came to be...

...that a man with too much to say for his lifetime decided to write; to turn thought into word; word into digital media; digital media into a tool.

I've been a professional developer for roughly 9 years - since then, I've almost constantly been working on something or other - while I'm certainly not a superstar, I keep myself up to date with new technologies and I have a fond love for software-engineering-done-well:
 I got a number of friends that ask me "can you tell me how to start with programming?" - and that, in fact, is one of the simpler and most complex questions I've faced. How does one start programming?

I know. Yet I would need a class to tell them. Lots of time spent together, supervision, assignments... So, a book. But what book? Books tell you how to write programs in a language - they tell you the sintax, the grammar, and explain the standard libraries. They teach how to do things. What they miss, and if someone has a book that describes that, please, tell me, is what lies underneath.


Everyone can learn their first program in a matter of seconds, in any known language. Of course, the first one will be "Hello, World" - it's always been that one. But the jump from there to writing a triple-A game is a blackhole of mistery to beginners.
Dedicated people (like me, like many devs out there) will write hello world, then the application that sums two numbers; then they'll try to expand it and start from there. But the most will be stuck there, because no one seems to tell how to turn a thought into code.

Well, I'm not a guru: I won't tell you anything that isn't already on the superstar blogs - and not because I dismiss them: I read them and I learn from them - and if you're intent in becoming a good developer, you should too. I'm simply not qualified to teach you breakthroughs, or to provide insights into obscure patterns of behaviour that we all have. I'll let my betters do that. But I will do something that, humbly, I think I'm good at: go over the basics.

I'll also, from time to time, blather about my own thoughts or something that pissed me off. Bear with me or ignore me, I won't complain.