Project I've been working on

[rudie_rage]

Lately I've gotten sick of being a gamer shackled by non-compatibility with my choice of OS. I also know a thing or two regarding C/C++, and with a little digging found out about SDL. Well me being the type to take on projects I find interesting, I taught myself a little bit and then asked some of my classmates to help me start making games.

Now I'm anything but an expert, but it didn't take much for me to realize that people make game programming out to be much more difficult than it has to be. So I fired up vim and started making a website.

Hopefully the site will launch in the next 2 weeks right before classes start again. Its goal is to be a two-fold site for both my little group of people making free, cross-platform, open-source games, and to teach those interested how to make computer games.

I've never had a successful site before, but I attribute that to having a lack of anything worth putting online. So I kind of have high hopes for this project.

Does anyone here have much experience with launching community-oriented websites? I'm just curious to know what I will be up against.

Did anything unexpected come up? How long do you guess I can coast this out on my own apache server with an outbound connection throttled at about 70kb/s? What hosting companies do you recommend after that becomes too slow?

There are a lot of things to consider, and as comfortable as I am with just 'winging it' it cant hurt to ask.

and as far as game programming itself goes, I'd be interested in hearing any info you have on cross-platform issues and game theory in general.

I have almost got a decent collision detection model running, and I've been playing with motion and changing sprites to animate motion for a while now. From there it seems the rest falls into place naturally.

[Cabhan]

I'd be very interested in checking this out. I admittedly don't know much about games programming (nor do I have a huge amount of interest: my main interest in application-writing), but I would be interested in checking out SDL and OpenGL and learning about actually using them.

[tommytabib]

Just curious: what will these game(s) be like? is there going to be many small games (like atanks, pp racer, ect)? or will it be a few large-ish games?

[djap]

I'd be very interested in checking this out. I admittedly don't know much about games programming (nor do I have a huge amount of interest: my main interest in application-writing), but I would be interested in checking out SDL and OpenGL and learning about actually using them.

For SDL I've found this site handy

[rudie_rage]

For SDL I've found this site handy

That is my number 1 tool for learning

N Tutorials is also a great resource for learning simplistic collision detection. The first thing I realized is that any immediate approach to collision detection had n! complexity, which just wouldnt do for a game that had more than 4 or so objects that could collide. The site above breaks it down into something much nicer both to learn and nicer on your cpu.

as for the kind of games we're making, we're starting small. Just get a few arcade style games out to both learn what we're getting into and to have something to show. Our games will get more and more complex from there. I'm thinking we will be staying with SDL and 2 dimensional games for a long while before moving to openGL and 3D. I know a bunch of people that are going into the media course at the college this year, and within the next 2 years they will upgrade from our pixel artists to our 3D artists. I think they get an added dexterity bonus for the class change or something

Our first 2 games are already planned out. one was what I was working on while learning SDL, and the other is going to be the first group project.

The first is an overhead tank game. you drive around with the arrow keys, and the cannon points to wherever your mouse is aiming. Drive around, blow things up. Simple, classic, fun. I'm working out the final kinks in the collision detection, then its on to simple AI. after that the rest is just mapmaking, adding a health/damage system, and general polishing.

The second (and more complicated) game is going to be a sort of contra type game. Only the theme is pirates vs ninjas. To be honest, so far we only have a small portion of concept finished for this one. Not a whole lot of anything has progressed.

Anyway, when this site is completed, it would be cool to have a user base that didnt simply consist of the few of us locally. I'll definately keep you guys informed, and hopefully some of you will be inclined to check out the forums I havent built yet

[ryokimball]

Link! Link!!

You have to put a link up when you finish....

Gaming is my main past time (my evil Xbox should come in today!!), and one of my to-be pet projects once i become a capable programmer... person... thingy....

Oh, and if you have/want any experience with Java, I have a book called Java Programming for the Absolute Beginner by Joseph P. Russell that comes with a CD that has the code for all the games discussed in the book, which at least includes a Tetris and minesweeper game. Not that you'd have to go out and buy this, necessarily: I could probably just email you the code if you express a desire to obtain such stuff.
I haven't personally looked, but you might be able to find some stuff by this "Russell" figure online for free as well.

[rudie_rage]

Link! Link!!

You have to put a link up when you finish....

Gaming is my main past time (my evil Xbox should come in today!!), and one of my to-be pet projects once i become a capable programmer... person... thingy....

Oh, and if you have/want any experience with Java, I have a book called Java Programming for the Absolute Beginner by Joseph P. Russell that comes with a CD that has the code for all the games discussed in the book, which at least includes a Tetris and minesweeper game. Not that you'd have to go out and buy this, necessarily: I could probably just email you the code if you express a desire to obtain such stuff.
I haven't personally looked, but you might be able to find some stuff by this "Russell" figure online for free as well.

I'll definitely link when finished, don't worry

For the first little bit, it will be more of a community think tank than an 'us teach you' website, since we're not much more experienced than anyone else that just rolled out of a 20 minute programming class and got curious about games. but we do know some, and eventually we'll be able to help other newbies. With any luck someone who already has some experience will join.

As much as I don't have need for a tetris game, you bring up a good thought. I'd be very interested in looking at some very small but well documented code for some simplistic games so I can see if I'm doing things the hard way or not. Just because I have an education doesn't mean I know anything. There's a difference between being able to write a few functions to perform a single purpose in class, and managing a much larger game with complex cycles. They don't teach you how to modulate a program to keep the code managable, so far I've just been winging it and hoping for the best. I've had trouble not mixing the collision part of the program in with the rest of the program, which makes the code very hard to read. When I pick it up again I'll have to devise some way to keep all that in a separate function somehow.

But for now, my main concern is this website. I can think about all that C++ stuff when it launches (and when school starts again... its been months since I've compiled a thing, gotta kick-start my mind again)

The impression I am getting from your responses is that if I do this right then my website traffic will spike pretty fast. There is a lot of enthusiasm and inquiry when it comes to games, and If I can properly help some people then there will be more people....

Again, my problem is that I'm running this site off my own computer with a fairly throttled connection. A single user gets pages pretty slow, I could imagine I couldn't handle more than 5 or 10 at a time without having my connection unintentionally ddos'ed.

Should I start dishing a few bucks a month out of my pocket right away? Or should I risk coasting it out a little bit to see how it goes?

I also need a few hosting suggestions. There are a million hosting companies out there, and just about as many sketchy looking ones.