Stevens Programming Site Blog

In about 1 weeks time I will be unemployed, thanks to the current global economic downturn, and this has given me some much needed perspective on life.  I’ve spent the last 3 weeks looking for work, and so far there’s been no replies, I’m still optimistic about finding a job.

While I’ve not been looking for work (there’s only so many sources of jobs to search and apply to) I’ve been doing some coding for the Nintendo DS, so far 2 little tech demo’s, a voxel terrain and a graphical console application.

Voxel Terrain Engine

This is a simple little engine that I wrote to see if the DS was capable of producing a working voxel terrain landscape.  It can, but it takes a little long to produce the landscape using the code I have here.  I would like to make this little tech demo better / faster at some point, so that it becomes something useable in a game – Valley flying game where you have to shoot things, or something better.

Known limitations in the current code:

• Map Memory – limited to 256×256 currently
• Slow code, the code can possibly optimised a little since it was based on a BASIC program.

Graphical Console

A nice little extension to the normal console output that is supplied with libnds.  The font’s are from the ByteMap Font site.  While some fonts are not perfect for the DS’s screen size (one font is 239 pixels high), or too hard to read on any screen (a 3×3 font!) there are some nice sizes, as can be seen in the screen grab to the right.

The current version of the console code works with the iprintf() that is provided by libnds, and includes support for many of the standard ANSI escape sequences that work on any ANSI terminal, including one of the more unusual codes – <ESC>[1?m – to allow the console to change the font glyphs part way though a line of text.

The main bad news – Thanks to the current economic downturn, and the lack of people actually flying with BA now, I’ve not had my contract renewed for the next year.  So I’m now having a few days holiday prior to starting the lovely “Hunt a job” game.  Fingers crossed I’ll not be out of work too long…

As for the good news – I’m starting to code a few little demo’s on the Nintendo DS, the first of which is a little voxel terrain engine.  The current version is very simple and does not contain any major great things, but it does do the basics:

• Voxel landscape
• Colour map
• A very simple LOD fog

I’ll write up a little about the project a little later, as well as a full blown article on how it works.

Other bad news:

• It looks like the EMS project that I was working on may have entered the abandon-ware status, mainly as I’ve not done any coding on it for so long and that the amount of features I want to have on it has went up..  I may attempt to work on it again in the future, but at the moment, it’s a dead project.
• My game project that I was going to do did not get past the “OOOH I’ll write a game” stage, mainly down to lack of time.  the work I’m doing on this voxel terrain engine has got me thinking of getting back into that frame of mind, but with a different game idea altogether.

One thing I know, with more spare time I will be updating this blog more as well as coding more, so I’ll start to feel a little happier