The Struggling Games Developer

Extrakun@GamesTopica.Net

Archive for September, 2009

Tips for the Novice Freelancer #1 – Virtual PC and VMWare

Sep 20

Posted by Extrakun in Uncategorized | No Comments

Got Windows 7? If you are going to do applications development on it, makes sure you get the Professional one – this allows you to write an emulation of Windows XP. Don’t have Windows 7? You will have to go for VMWare server. Why these two programs. Testing for backward compatability. With the expactions of web-applications to work on IE6 (this is a big debate, but the sad fact is that IE6 isn’t going anywhere any-soon), you need to test your web-apps and applications on different type of machine builds.

One problem is IE6 – You need to a fresh install of Windows XP and SP2 to get IE6. Well, that’s troublesome – however, with Virtual PC and VMWare, you can run multiple copies of OS with different builds on your PC. Just make sure for Virtual PC, your intel/amd chip supports virtualization and that it is turned on in BIOS. And you need  a freaking amount of hard-disk space.

Installing QWT and getting it to work with QT 4.5 Windows

Sep 17

Posted by Extrakun in QT Programming | No Comments

After much trial and error, here is how I have managed to get QWT working with QT 4.5

  1. Locate the QWT web-page at SourceForge
  2. Make sure that you download the QWT 5.1.2 version. For some reasons, SourceForge lists the older version 4 first
  3. Read the INSTALL file – that pretty much covers what you need to do, but for more control, generate the Visual Studio project files (qmake-msvc vc)
  4. Go find the project file in the \src\ folder
  5. Complie a release build from it

If all you need is a release build, then this is all fine and good. However, if you want a debug build…

  1. Go to project properties, select Debug
  2. Go to Linker, General, and add a “_d” to the end of the generated file
  3. Complie

Of course, you have to remember set up the input files to the examples (qwt5.lib_d instead of qwt5.lib) for them to work. Now for the goody – you can now complie the plugin (found in the \designer folder) using either release or debug, and even both, since you can have both verisons of QWT existing.

The fnal step is to place the two new dlls (the release one, and your own debug one) into the qt\bin folder. Place the plugin dlls into the \plugins\designer folder. Then this whole thing should work.

Hopefully.

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Opensource Turn-based Strategy Games

Sep 8

Posted by Extrakun in Open Source Games | No Comments

Writing a Turn-based strategy games can be quite a daunting process; there’s the map, the AI and the all-important GUI elements. Over at the Freeware Genius you can find 19 such games. Of particular interest to me is 8 Kingdoms, which reminds me of the Total War series, and PHP Diplomacy. I would be looking over them to see which one I could base my own game on. Hopefully I have luck!

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