The Iowa crew will be doing a small get-together in Des Moines.

It's just a *little* more pragmatic to use keyboard_string.  Set it to "" when the player starts typing, and it'll handle multiple key-presses in a step, backspace and all that for you.  It won't handle a cursor that can move around in the string, but you can do that by keeping "before cursor" and "after cursor" strings if you really need to.

The big thing about portaudio is you need to learn to do lockfree multithreading, or your audio will glitch.

Recommended reading to scare you straight...
http://www.rossbencina.com/code/real-time-audio-programming-101-time-waits-for-nothing

Also:
http://www.rossbencina.com/code/programming-with-lightweight-asynchronous-messages-some-basic-patterns

[To The Moon]

To The Moon

Called to aid a dying man who'd left something undone,
We dragged and plugged and tapped on our machines.
Our place, you see, is making second chances for someone
Who's left unworked the designs of his dreams.

This puzzling person's wish was simple -- venture to the moon.
But when we asked him why, a shrug!  'Twas not something he knew.
His eyes, they burned with passion still, his course as sure as death.
We pledged he'd live this other life before his final breath.

We crossed the limn 'twixt mind and matter, peered into his memory,
From present and back to his early days.
To witness from within and understand what made the man he be,
And how we'd send his life another way.

This line of work is not for all, for intimate we touch
The lives of other human folk; their feelings weigh so much..!

I recall being very amused with the Dungeons of Dredmor flavor-text; give that game a look if you want some inspiration.  Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has a more neutral tone, often using historical quotes or passages of poetry, though it too has the occasional joke.

Personally, if your tone is humorous I'd try to make a good joke of everything.  Don't be afraid to occasionally get a bit long-winded in the name of silliness; if the player doesn't want to read, they won't.

Portaudio requires a lot of learning to get off the ground with.  I'm writing a free system, linked in my sig, which is meant to be an FMOD alternative.  It's a little immature (don't use AudioClip yet) but I plan to release a new version soon including documentation.

Additional caveat: the current release has some template semantics that clang doesn't like; these will also be fixed in the patch.

A union could work just fine, as long as you're okay with the objects sometimes being a little larger than is strictly necessary, and as long as you are cautious not to reference the wrong item within the union and cause memory reinterpretation.

I'll parrot the remark about this being why C++ exists, though.  Often it's said that C is better to learn first because it's simpler, but starting with C++ is fine as long as you avoid its more complex features until such time as their usefulness is clear.

It is over now.  And it was good.

Thanks for a great time to Mike Boxleiter, the Holowka twins, Noel, Kurt, Marlon, Chrissy, Michael, Cassie, JP, Hangedman, and like a billion other people my tired mind can't remember the names of.  Special thanks to those who put up with me ranting about my dream project.

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3

[B]

A

Entity -> Actor -> BasePlayer -> Player
Entity -> Actor -> Enemy


B

class Entity
{
  List<Component> components;
}

Component -> BasePlayer  (or encapsulating object)
Component -> Actor       (contains health logic)
Component -> Player      (accesses Actor)
Component -> Enemy       (accesses Actor)

Legend of Dungeon is a 4 Player Co-Op Roguelike-like Beat'em'up with dynamic lighting on awesome pixel art.

Nobody who isn't a game developer is going to give two shits about "dynamic lighting", unfortunately.  The same more or less applies to pixel art, I think, though your mileage may vary.  Those would condense into "the game looks super neato" which doesn't really deserve more than a single word in your pitch and risks sounding haughty.

You and up to three companions are looking for treasure and glory in a dark flickering dungeon full of deadly. Legend has it there is a massive treasure all the way down on the 26th floor. Your quest: get the treasure, and make it back alive. Which you won't, you'll die... ...the game is about dying, and treasure.

Always try to be succinct with marketing materials.  People are lazy readers, especially when they're looking for amusement.

"You and up to three companions are looking for a legendary treasure, rumored to lie at the the 26th floor of a deadly, flickering dungeon.  Your quest:  Get in, get treasure, get out alive...  Which you won't.  No one ever does."

We got stranded 70 miles south of winnipeg by the storm.   

You need to zoom in and out a lot and iterate to get a convincing impression.  I spent a few hours on these!

Kinnas -- that last one gives me a "The Road" vibe.  I like it.

I will offer myself as an example of a game developer who does compositions for my games but not complete arrangements.  I may well have use for an orchestrator (as defined) for future projects.

Honestly I've been uncertain whether it's the sort of thing a musician collaborator would be comfortable with, given our styles might differ or their skill might exceed my own.

A lovely portfolio.    Perhaps I'll give you a prod someday.

[EDIT:]

Ultimately I really hope to be on Steam somehow, so hopefully, if that happens, this intense security work might not be necessary, but in the mean time I think we will code a simpler and safer exe just to make distribution of the latest version easier for alpha testers.

I think we'll try and make a tool that simply checks our webserver for a newer version of the game that is installed, and if it finds one, prompts the user to download the entire install er for that version through a browser. (no write access of it's own)

Does that seem like a good idea?

This is what I did for Infinite Blank (minus automatically opening a browser) and it worked well.  It's a good way of doing things.

It's still technically possible your web server could get hacked, but that risk applies to any web download, so it's not any different from no update mechanism at all.  Just make sure you secure your server reasonably well as you would anyway.


EDIT: Klaim, no, I'm not working on a patcher right now as I haven't been active on Infinite Blank.  If I do make one I'll probably release it, but that's not necessarily happening soon.

There's a potential security breach when you transfer the build to the offline machine for signing.  More importantly, it's all for naught if your server's hacked and the source of the public key used to verify the signature is changed. 

Anyway, the bottom line is it's a very complicated problem to do this securely and it's usually better not to do it yourself if you aren't a cryptography expert.  I know enough to be aware of this, but not nearly enough to qualify as such an "expert".

Rule #0:  Every autoupdater has the potential to be a massive security hole in the user's system.  If someone performs a man-in-the-middle attack or hacks your update server they can distribute malware to every user of your software, and you might be liable.

Be aware of the extremely dangerous situation you can create for yourself and your users if you are incautious.

I'm still pretty cautious about using C++11 for crossplatform game development.  Some platforms (ahem, consoles) are bound to be dinosaurs and will refuse to accept it.

I would honestly recommend learning to use regular function pointers first.  The syntax is confusing as hell, but they're a well-established part of the language and can be as powerful as anything else as long as you're willing to deal with that.

Use a typedef to make life easier, though:

Code:

typedef void (*Callback)(int);

void printCallback(int val)
{
  cout << "printCallback: " << val << endl;
}

void call(Callback callback, int val)
{
  (*callback)(val);
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  callCallback(&printCallback, 42);
}

I really dig the sense of isolation in your art, Jack.