Various articles of mine

I have an account on triond.com, where I have published various articles, please feel free to check my page out:

https://www.triond.com/users/Red+Moth

Thank you

Development Difficulties and History - part 2 or 3

After writing this article, I have decided to split this history of the beginning of my journey into independent game development into three parts, to make it a less strenuous read and write.

Here's the second part of my self indulgent history of how I got here, but luckily this is shorter.

After University I relocated from the UK to Spain and worked as an English Teacher.
During this time I discovered a little game creation software program called Game Maker. It aims to allow people without programming experience to create 2D games, while allowing more experienced users to use it's inbuilt scripting language to make more complex games. While, I found this true, I think it would be incredibly hard or tiresome to create a descent game without the use of it's language.

After making a few simple games in Game Maker, I came up with the idea of maybe using my English Teaching knowledge to make some educational software, as I had seen the strengths and weaknesses of various educational software, and how children quickly tire of repetitive and long computer games and activities.

Using my knowledge from my degree in Computer Science, I came up with a good design document (even if it was scribbled) of what I wanted. However, putting these ideas into Game Maker was a frustrating experience due to the limitations of the software and also the speed. So, after two months I archived my Game Maker files and decided to find another programming language.

After various searches, and finding C++ to strenuous for what I wanted to do, I downloaded a copy of Blitz3D..

Development Difficulties and History - part 1 or 2

I decided to create an educational game a year ago, and my current progress on the Learn and Play game for learning English is a semi-functional piece of software written in BlitzMax with only 4 games, an even less functional and older version in Blitz3D and lastly an even older and less functional version written in Game Maker. So a year has passed an I'm not feeling too optimistic.

I will tell you the history of how I came to this point.

My first experience into game making was when I was 10 or 11 in 1995 and 1996 where I bought a disk version of Klick & Play, which was and is a hilarious graphical programming for making games. I never actually finished a game but some of my highlights included:

• Military Bananas 1,2,3,4,5 and 6! - This was a one screen take on Worms with small bananas with various strange faces and guns. The enemies didn't actually move, but only shot when the user's character (I forget the name and story I made up for him) was on the same level as him
• Bebo - an awful platformer of a baby in a blue mac and bobble hat who said "eh-oh Bebo" in my recorded voice when he died.
• Various racing games - I often tried to make Formula One games, but these often looked like small cars going round a track made of Lego bricks.

However, I don't think I still have the floppy disks that contain these games, which is a sad loss for me, and even if I did I don't actually have a floppy-disk drive. But, I will try to recreate some images of the graphics or characters and post them in a future blog post even if it's just for personal sentimental value.


After just a couple of years with Klick and Play, I got bored with the limitations of the software and my inability to draw, and also the installation for the first time of the internet in my house diverted my attentions, as now I wanted to make websites,

After a few years of making websites of various quality through my teens, my next brush with game making came in my final year of University. After, two years of struggling and failing to learn the Java programming language for anything except command line programs, I was faced with the task of creating a program for my final year project, how I dreaded this.

While other people wear making complex programs for mobile phones and all sorts, I some how managed to get a project to make a train system simulation, for mostly simulating the signal boxes and a train moving through it. But let's just say my final program was incredibly less complex than my original discussions, but somehow I managed to get a 2(II) instead of the fail or 3rd I had expected.


To be continued...

Linux Software Alternatives for Windows Programs

Here is an article I wrote about software to help ex-Windows users change to Linux.

There are thousands of free programs in Linux and knowing which ones to use can be a hassle, this article discusses the best software alternatives in Linux to Windows programs...

more here

Which Linux distribution?

This quiz is dated 2005, but I found it interesting anyway.
With the many different variations of Linux operating systems, this aims to help a new person decide which one.

Click here for the quiz

Switched from Windows xp to Ubuntu

This week I have switched operating systems.

For about the last six or seven years, I have played around with different Linux distributions, creating a partition on my various computers Hard-drives and installing there. However, even though I liked them, and wanted to get rid of Microsoft products forever, I always found that in one way or another the Linux distribution that I had didn't meat one of my needs from a computer, either hardware or software.

I think I installed most of the popular 'flavours' of Linux at the times, such as SUSE, Mandrake (now mandriva), Red Hat, Knoppix, debian, freeBSD and others

However, recently after a year or two of not trying any Linux distributions and having only the super insecure Windows XP on my laptop, I decided that with the many constant frustrations, including the bloated feel of Windows, to test out a version of Linux.

Deciding which one to try came down to SUSE, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Puppy Linux, Knoppix, Mint, PCcentos.

OpenSUSE 11.0 desktop.

I was considering Puppy Linux as I have read it to have good hardware support, but I decided against it because I want a fully fledged operating system, not one that is designed for portability.

I decided against Mint or PCcentos because I didn't like the default MS Windows desktops styles, which I know they can be fully customised, but I was feeling shallow like that. However, I am considering trying out one of these, if they have Live-CD's.Linux Mint 5.0

My final decision came down to either Ubuntu with the gnome desktop environment or it's KDE brother Kubuntu. In the past I had always been a fan of KDE due to it's customisability and general feel, and on the one occasion I tried gnome out, I didn't like it. But for some reason, at the last minute I decided to download the Live-CD and try out Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 8.10

On loading Ubuntu from the live-CD, I was impressed with the slickness and feel of the desktop, and programs such as the nautilus file manager amongst other things. Also, researching things, I was impressed by the support and community for Ubuntu on the Internet.

After, playing around I decided to install Ubuntu. Initially, I had some problems trying to resize my Windows dominance of the hard-drive, and had to download and use a freeware partition tool in Windows. But this worked, and I partitioned my hard-drive giving the majority of space to Ubuntu. I decided to keep Windows XP, just in case of problems.

Installation was great and easy. The only problems being with my ATI Radeon graphics card and the lack of support from ATI, which means the proprietary driver doesn't work as good as it can, but I can still play 3D games in Linux, maybe it's a mixture of my laptop being a few years old and also the ATI driver.

Advantages:
1. Security, the lack of Linux viruses means I don't need a virus scanner, and also even though I have installed a firewall (Firestarter) it's not really needed, especially with a hardware firewall.
2. Speed, I find that booting up, and especially loading the desktop is sooo much faster, the Windows XP was taking extremely long to load the desktop and all the items in the taskbar, even after I had changed many settings and tried to improve performance. I have improved the performance of Ubuntu even further by changing the booting options, such as removing bluetooth support (my laptop doesn't have it) and changing the start-up programs. The open-office software did initialy take a few more seconds too load than I wanted, but after changing the softwares memory and java options, it loads in a matter of a few seconds.

Also, loading programs like Firefox is extremely quicker.
3. Support, the ubuntuforums are very helpful and friendly and there are also many other websites I have visited for news, tips, help and ideas.
4. Choice of software. Ubuntu comes with many default programs installed for every type of activity, but thousands of more programs are available from the Ubuntu repositories.
5. Cost, Ubuntu and the software is free and open source.
6. Customisability, unlike Windows, which gives you one desktop environment, where the only customisation that can be realistically done, is change a few colours. Ubuntu and Linux operation systems allow you to change ANYTHING about it. There are many website that offer various items to change gnome, from the login screen to the panels (like the star bar in Windows) to how gnome works. Don't like the gnome desktop? why not remove it and install another one like KDE or one of the other ones designed for speed.
7. Ease of use, Ubuntu has been designed to be user friendly, for example searching and installing new programs is as easy as running a program (Synaptic Package Manager) which lists thousands of programs available, and choosing which one, the the software will automatically install it for you as well as any other needed files to run it. Very easy.

For me, a semi-power-user, the only disadvantages for me personally, are the lack of video/audio chat for MSN messenger, as I use MSN messenger in Windows to talk family back home in the UK, but this is really the fault of Microsoft and not Ubuntu or Linux, so maybe I will try out Skype. Also, the lack of dvd, mp3 and video playback could be considered a disadvantage, but this was fixed in a matter of a few short minutes, by quickly opening up the package manager and selecting install restricted drivers.

Finally, sorry for the structure of this post, as I have written it after 20 hours without sleep, with most of those hours used learning the Python programming language