Holidays!

Wow, so it’s been a while since my last post… I guess exams do that to a guy. I’ve got lots of catching up to do, e-mails to write, presents to buy (birthdays), work to do, etc. Since the last update, I turned down IBM for OpenedHand (and can’t wait to start!) and started work on a new, small, spare-time project, which has been named ‘punnet’. Originally, I wanted to write an improved version of the excellent game apricots, but as often happens, things expanded. My main two goals were to get an improved, and possibly multiplayer-able version of apricots, and to get a reasonable knowledge of gtk+-2 doing so. I was going to call this ‘peaches’ (because peaches are a superior alternative to apricots). I got to talking with some friends at university, and I was put onto a nifty embeddable language, Lua. That’s when things changed – The idea evolved into a general purpose engine (at the moment, 2d, but very easily extendable to more dimensions) that uses gtk to provide an interface and drawing functions, and gives a small-ish set of c functions to lua scripts to use. A friend quite aptly named this ‘punnet’ (a type of basket, often used for holding fruit). At the moment, it has the ability to load lua scripts, which can then provide functions for the other scripts to use, and/or to be run once on initialisation, and/or to be run on every screen update. I’ve also written a fairly nice (HIG-compliant? Not totally sure…) interface for selecting what scripts you want to activate. To demonstrate the abilities of the engine, and to give myself a little start in Lua, I’ve written two scripts, that when activated together, bounce a ball around the screen 🙂 At the moment, there are many missing feature, most importantly, input and network support… I have some interesting ideas for the network support, but whether things happen or not is yet to be seen. Source will be online as soon as I get input and a slightly better demo sorted. Screenshot

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