____  _____  ___  ___  ____  ____   ____   ____ ___  ____
          |    \(____ |/___)/ _ \|  _ \|    \ / ___) / ___) _ \|    \
          | | | / ___ |___ | |_| | | | | | | ( (___ ( (__| |_| | | | |
          |_|_|_\_____(___/ \___/|_| |_|_|_|_|\____|_)____)___/|_|_|_|

something must be going crazy.

Nope – everything here is pretty normal. The Cuttlefish Engine is coming along quite nicely – after all this time (almost a year now) it’s exciting to see it all finally come together. Shipping an engine is way different than shipping a game – this is getting to be less and less true, but still, with a game, most of the code you’ve written you know isn’t going to see life beyond the game DVD. With an engine, it’s different – with an engine, shipping is the start of the fun, not the end. I’m definitely looking forward to getting your guys’ opinions on the engine, and seeing what you’re going to create with it.

So, I left KAOS. I went to GDC, got some great feedback on the Cuttlefish Engine, and decided to concentrate full-time on it. I’d been thinking it had some really awesome potential, and was constantly disappointed in the lack of time available for it. After all of the positive feedback at the conference, I quite simply couldn’t have lived with myself had I decided not to pursue it wholeheartedly.

I’m staying in NYC (because why would you ever leave?!?!), so if you’re local, hit me up for beers or something. I’m going into a bit of a communications blackout, so email’s best.

Almost finished with the new Cuttlefish Engine site. It’s been far too long in coming, but now there’s only a few nagging things left before I flip the switch.

The engine itself is progressing well, I really think you guys are going to love it. If you’re thinking about making a game for iPhone, Droid, or iPad, definitely keep an eye on http://www.cuttlefishengine.com, and sign up for the email list.

I know, I know, not exactly the most content-rich post in the world, but everything is busy busy busy now, so it’ll have to do. Next time, promise!

Never try to calculate the bounding rectangle of a circle when you’re tired, distracted, or less than fully sober. I must have been some combination of all three of those when I wrote this masterpiece:

public override RectangleF BoundingRect
{
  get
  {
    float x = WorldPos.X - (m_radius / 2.0f);
    float y = WorldPos.Y - (m_radius / 2.0f);
    return new RectangleF(x, y, m_radius, m_radius);
  }
}

I spent an hour this morning wondering why my mouse click code thought my circles were half as big as they were. Sigh.

I work for a company that restricts access to the internet. Today I set up my iPhone so that when it’s docked, my work computer uses its tethered 3G connection to browse the internet, bypassing the filter. Here’s how I did it. more »

I posted a lengthy Q & A about my upcoming Cuttlefish Engine – a cross platform cell phone game engine for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry – over on the Cuttlefish Industries blog, for all you cell phone game makers.

Old and busted:

public State FindByName(string name)
{
  foreach(State thisState in this.StateList)
  {
    if (string.Compare(thisState.Name, name) == 0)
    {
      return thisState;
    }
  }
  return null;
}

New Hotness:

public State FindByName(string name)
{
  return States.Find(
    state => (string.Compare(state.Name, name) == 0)
  );
}

Sweet sweet syntactic sugar!

Just now I was browsing some ancient code of mine. Part of the Cuttlefish Engine is a UI layer, and so I thought I’d dust off all the old UI code I wrote for Quaternion and modernize it. Anyone who’s written a UI framework will tell you that the hardest parts are the nuances of message processing; making sure controls and windows behave as the user expects when they click over there, drag, press ESC while dragging, etc.

I happened upon a comment:

...
// release: 1.02 on 06/24/99 by Mason (now safe for realloc)
...

Holy crap. That comment’s from exactly TEN YEARS AGO! The summer of 1999. I was… 22 (lol), working on Quaternion, a few months before I knew it was an IGF finalist. Apparently I had memory allocation issues.

The comment I found wasn’t in the UI code, but I want to believe that today ten years ago I was working on UI, browsing flipcode and sweet oblivion (aww yeah!), wondering what the GDC was like, dreaming of working in games, thinking Visual SourceSafe 6 was a pretty good tool….

Anyway, apologizes for the public introspection, but some coincidences are just too cool not to share. I also recently resurrected my gamedev.net login. Join date: 8/3/1999. At 1am. It’s now 12:40am. I guess some things will never change.

I’m happy to announce what I’ve been working on so intently for the last few months: The Cuttlefish Engine. It’s a cross-platform game engine and game designer (think Yoyo Game’s Gamemaker), for iPhone, G1, and Blackberry.

More info at http://www.cuttlefishengine.com.

There’s probably a few of you who have found this blog through the Cuttlefish Industries site, and you may be confused about which blog to track. If you want to follow the technical development of the engine closely, this is the blog to subscribe to. I’ll post entries here about the minor engine decisions I’m making as I go. If you just want to know when it’s ready or when it hits major milestones, I’ll post those “big announcements” on the Cuttlefish Industries blog (and here too).