Vittorio Romeo

Hello everyone, hope you had great holidays!

I’ve finished part 3 and 4 of my C++11 tutorial series, Dive into C++11.

They’re available on YouTube.

Part 3 talks about C++ variable lifetime and manual memory management. Part 4 explains what smart pointers are and how to use them.

I’ve also uploaded a new operation bloodshed devlog.

Hope you find the videos interesting!

(I’ve also added links to the Open Hexagon 2.0 release candidate in the downloads page. 1.92 servers were shut down so that version may have issues starting as the IP address does not exist anymore. 2.0 RC1 should be playable.)

Let's expand our Arkanoid clone and our C++11 knowledge.

Learn more about constexpr and uniform initialization, and how to deal with FPS and framerates.

Watch on the TUTORIALS page.

Let's build an Arkanoid clone from scratch in 40 minutes, using C++11 and SFML 2.1!

Watch on the TUTORIALS page.

Many, many thanks to Daniel Porter!.

I’ve been working on a new project lately, operation bloodshed, an attempt at the creation of a spiritual successor to Operation Carnage, one of my favorite childhood games.

Operation Carnage is a 1996 abandonware arcade game with a very simple but addicting and fun gameplay. It has a very interesting shooting/strafing mechanic that is easy to learn but hard to master. Unfortunately, it also has some design flaws that I’ll try to solve in my game.

The gameplay is very fast-paced, a typical feature of overhead retro-shooters. I worked on persistent blood particle effects and used my custom pseudo-physics engine, SSVSCollision, to deal with collisions and enemy movement. It works quite well so far.

operation bloodshed is very work-in-progress, but I’ve recorded some video devlogs that you can watch on my youtube channel.

Here is devlog #13 showing some gameplay!

The project will be free, open-source and crossplatform.

I’m also trying to maintain an updated devlog here on TIGSource.

I’ve finally participated in Ludum Dare 27, a 48 hour game-development competition.

My game is 10corp, a reflex-based, frustrating, puzzle platformer.

The game is written in C++11, using only SFML2.1 and JsonCpp as external dependencies. It is written using my personal “SSV framework”, written from scratch, which is free, open-source and available on GitHub.

I couldn’t manage to polish the game as much as I wanted to. There only are 7 playable levels, no gfx options, no key rebinding, et cetera.

Still, being my first Ludum Dare, it was a very interesting and learning experience and I’m glad (and surprised) I managed to create something (in my opinion) worth playing that could become a fun little game with additional polish.

Hope you enjoy my entry!

Gameplay #1 Gameplay #2

Also, Open Hexagon news:

• 2.0 is still under development, don’t worry! It will take some time, though.

• Here’s a cool video of Open Hexagon running on OS X, with Wine!

After adding discount to my static website generator, I was unsatisfied with the C code introduced in my project:

extern "C"
{
    #include <mkdio.h>
}

// ...

FILE* f1 = fopen(mdPath.c_str(), "r");
FILE* f2 = fopen(mdResPath.c_str(), "w");
MMIOT* in = mkd_in(f1, 0);
markdown(in, f2, 0);
fclose(f1);
fclose(f2);

I looked for alternatives, but I couldn’t find any native C++ Markdown library or any C++ wrapper for C Markdown libaries. So I decided to create a C++11 wrapper for discount, called DiscountCpp. It currently implements very few functions from Discount, but offers a very easy-to-use interface to quickly convert Markdown to HTML.

The updated code looks like this:

#include <DiscountCpp/DiscountCpp.h>

// ...

discountcpp::getHTMLFromMarkdownFile(mdPath);

Now I can sleep in peace.

P.S.: I also implemented syntax highlighting on the site thanks to highlight.js.

I added discount to my static website generator.

Writing blog posts is now much easier!

###ffmpeg, twitch.tv

I’ve also started occasionally streaming myself code on twitch.tv. It was painful to set up, but these are the commands I use:

• Setting up loopbacks to record both microphone and pc audio

    #!/bin/bash
    pactl load-module module-null-sink
    pactl load-module module-loopback
    pactl load-module module-loopback

• Launching the stream itself

    #!/bin/bash
    KEY="<your twitch.tv key here>"
    ffmpeg -f x11grab -s 1920x1080 -r 20 -i :0.0+1680,0 \
        -f alsa -ac 2 -i pulse -c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast \
        -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 1920x1080 -threads 4 -acodec libmp3lame \
        -ar 22050 -qscale 3 -b 712000 -bufsize 512k \
        -af aresample=44100 \
        -f flv "rtmp://live-ams.twitch.tv/app/$KEY"

• After launching the stream

    pavucontrol # to set up loopbacks redirection

###school finals results

After the last blog post my exam score was announced: I graduated with 100/100 cum laude!

This is a great achievement for me. I am already looking forward to start computer science in university in a few months.