glixl, pyxel and pixels
I had a long period off over the summer, then, after I went back to work, I was busily doing things that were barely even worth doing in the first place, let alone writing about. By which time I was well out of the habit of writing at all.
Most recently, I have been working on my OpenGL-based pixel engine, in the form of my test game RPG which is playable here.
I did quite a lot to it, including adding (slightly rubbish) lights and finally got the whole ‘depth’ thing working properly (please, no-one ever go back and look at how I did it previously). I also reworked the framework itself, making some changes to the way you actually go about making games; making much better use of javascript classes and namespaces and whatever.
Prior to these updates, I tried my hand at porting the whole thing to Python3! Which met with some success, including a TK-based canvas version, before seeing sense and moving to OpenGL. It all came crashing down following a single throwaway comment given after I showed someone. They pointed out that the application icon was missing (of which I was aware of course). “No matter” I thought, I’m sure it’s easy to change it.
It wasn’t, and thus followed about 3 days of trying to install various python GUI frameworks, all of which appeared to have a dependency list longer than my framework code so dead were any hopes of ever actually distributing my games to anyone normal.
And so I returned to the warm embrace of WebGL and Javascript.
I much prefer programming in Python, but I get quickly frustrated with how difficult installing simple packages can be, dashing all hope of distribution. I know that various py2exe type things exist, but they won’t help with the issue where pyOpenGL installed without any dlls on my Windows machine, forcing me to copy them across manually and so on and so forth.
I have also begun a fools quest to build my own mechanical keyboard. Pray for my soul.