Wee

A very intriguing concept.

From the look of it, the levels have some redundant elements that clutter up the clean design of it and could potentially make it boring, but the idea is very interesting. Looking forward to trying this one 

I say use XCode, it is a rather nice IDE to use and there are some XCode project templates in the SDL package so you get started with the minimal amount of hassle.

If you have time, I'd recommend watching the first few parts of this WWDC talk (the last parts are good as well but mostly concerned with optimization settings so you can save those for later)

Slightly offtopic maybe, but I just finished these;

The place where I work had them printed at this place (sorry, Swedish only); http://www.parnass.se/usb-minne.html

Which would be some $5 per copy, assuming you can fit it in 256 MB and are going to order at least 250 of them...

I'll be a tester!

Put me down as interested

Since she is intendog to do a whole eutorip on december, I guess a few additional places to visit in sweden wouldn't hurt. Thanks so far.

Depends a lot on what she's interested in, I guess, there's no Eiffel Tower or something that you really *have* to see when you are in Sweden. There's not much in the sense of an outspoken Swedish culture that you need to see things to take part of, as I understand it it's mostly about how we behave and that's something she can experience anywhere. But going for the "Culturally and folklorically", Stockholm has a lot of museums of different kinds and a few art exhibitions as well as the Royal palace with the daily guard exchange show, though I guess that's mostly historical. If she's staying during the summer there are some festivals I could recommend, but it depends a lot on what music she listens to... If she likes Winter sports there are a few nice skiing resorts up north (Åre, Duved, Vemdalen etc). The island of Gotland could is a nice place during the summer as well.

This quickly became a wall of text. In short, I wouldn't fret too much about it, there are lots of things to experience in Sweden but nothing outlandishly special, and I think she could probably find it out once she gets here.

Aye, I guess I should have provided some more info. She'll be studying a masters degree on Sustainable Development (that I barely understand anything of), shell be staying at uppsala's dorms IIRC, and its more akin to visiting cool places (culurally and folklorically is a bonus) and eating some good shit. Basically, anything you would suggest a long term tourist.

Ah, I see. Well, the above restaurants are good, also there is Domtrappkällaren, Pub nitton, Bill & Bull and a few more if she's interested in eating Swedish food, though quite frankly it's not that interesting.

As for sights, the university and (some of) the student nations themselves are quite interesting, being from the 16th century... There's a museum close to the church with some history of education. Also the church itself is the largest cathedral in the entire Nordic region... There are some parks and a museum dedicated to Carl Linnaeus if she's into botany. Other than that you have your usual assortment of cultural and entertainment centers.

Stockholm is only 40 minutes by train away, though someone living there should probably give you the run-down of what to do there. There are some other places in Sweden I'd recommend visiting, but it kind of depends on how far and for how long she'd be willing to travel.

Oh, definitely. If she's a student, she's probably going to want to hang out at the student nations and attending the student-related events but there will be people telling her all about those when she arrive so I'll leave that for now.

As for food, there are a few really good places depending on what you want to eat;
Il Forno for italian food, their pizza is especially good
Ayako for Sushi. There are two of them in Uppsala
Hambergs for seafood, though if she's a student it might be a bit expensive

But some more info would be nice. What is she studying? do you know where she'll live? what kind of of entertainment is she looking for?

How about Castle Crashers?

http://forums.xbox.com/22490189/ShowPost.aspx

Having a toggled "ledge grab" seems better yes, the other games I remember playing recently featuring this do it this way. If you want to add some challenge to it you could make the character loose his grip in a few seconds, Shadow of the Colossus style (although that would affect the area with the moving spikes on the walls in the vertical shaft). Or you could let the player choose. Anyhow, I played with the stick on the 360 controller and that only goes in one direction =/

Another suggestion for the water would be to add more foam and underwater stirring to the waterfall in the beginning, the water seems pretty calm as it is now. Might not be necessary but seeing as it is the first thing you see it is more noticeable.

Nice! the platforming is well-designed, ramping up the difficulty in a good way and you do a good job of setting the mood. I have a few points though.

The game looks really nice, but the water often seems kind of out of place. It is very shallow and relatively slow-moving so the waves shouldn't be as high as they are - and if you really want them to be, they would do well to have more internal movement instead of just scrolling.

The climbing ledges didn't work well for me since you had to press one direction to stick to the ledge and then release it to hit another to climb it; not sure if there's a trick to it but I fell down quite a lot.

The platforming was very clear and precise, but the movement felt a bit sluggish as there was always noticeable delay between command and execution. If you are going for a Prince of Persia feel this might be what you want, though. Also on a related topic, you might want to add a sliding animation to show when it is possible to jump from a wall.

The talking savepoint was cool.

The combat didn't really do it for me due to the slow movement and the only thing you could really do was attack, it didn't feel very enjoyable and the best way to get past it was to just get in and hammer the attack buttons. But again, maybe I'm missing something.

The tutorials were good, but it was a bit unclear where they would appear - I like how they aren't forced, but maybe you should keep them around longer the first time they're shown instead of repeating them for every obstacle. As it was now, a few flashed by without me having a chance of reading them or knowing where to stand for them to appear again.

All in all I had a good time with it, though. Great job!

[unless]

Separating axis is definitely the way to go for 2D collision, and if you're worried about performance for poly-poly tests do broadphase culling (AABB checks, hashes, sort&sweep, spatial partitioning trees) before you do the actual polygon-polygon test.

As for the test itself, you can use hillclimbing to reduce the number of tests - essentially, you exploit the fact that for a convex polygon projected onto an axis, any point will have one neighbour projected further along the axis and one in the other direction - unless it is an extreme point. What you do is simply pick a point of the polygon, check both of it's neighbours and continue searching in the right direction until you hit the extreme point - this way, you'll never have to test more than half of the polygon points, on average about a quarter.

I have some code of these things that I could probably dig up if you need it.

Ok, I believe in following standards. Thanks for pointing out the ARB vs. EXT difference.

You are quite welcome.

Another word of warning, though, using the latest & greatest will in this case mean that people with drivers more than ~6 months old might not be able to run the game. Sure, updating drivers is usually simple enough but as a precaution I would recommend seeing if "glGenBuffers" can be found and if not try and find "glGenBuffersARB" (and possibly "glGenBuffersEXT" after that).

A problem I had with doing that is that I seem to be unable to find PFNGLGENFRAMEBUFFERSEXTPROC. Do you use the method described above?

Do you know if your code compiles with MinGW, and also, what headers do you include?

Yes, it compiles but I do not use glext.h either, I just typedef the function pointers myself. All of the information about the function prototypes can be found in the extension registry ( http://www.opengl.org/registry/ ).

Code:

typedef void(APIENTRY *PFNGLGENFRAMEBUFFERSPROC)(GLsizei _nFrameBuffers, GLuint *_pFrameBuffers);

Framebuffers have moved from being an EXT extension into being an ARB extension and then included in the standard, which means the older ones might have been deprecated and removed, so check for types where you exchange the EXT for ARB or remove it altogether. Careful though, I remember a few standardized functions working differently than their ARB counterparts on NVidia hardware a few months back, but that should be resolved by now.

I manage GL extensions myself like above for a couple of reasons, mainly due to driver issues and to avoid dependencies. You mentioned that this is important to you as well so this might be superfluous, but if GLEW seems to bulky you might want to look at GL Easy Extensions (GLee);
http://www.opengl.org/sdk/libs/GLee/

This maybe won't be of very much help to you as I am using commercial software, but you never know 

I usually use Max for modeling, rigging, skinning and animating, or sometimes Maya. It's purely a question of personal preference, the modelers at work use Maya but I was taught modeling in Max.

As for formats, I hacked together a simple XML exporter in MAXScript to give me just the data I wanted; you could go with .fbx or collada files I guess but to be honest integrating the API and sorting out the usable data would've taken me longer than to just writing the exporter. Of course, this was because I already knew MAXScript (which is often a pain to use), but it is mostly a question of knowing what data you need and how it is structured, and you need to know that to be able to create the content and handle it in code anyway.

I also did the actual real-time animation system myself; seeing as it is a fairly simple process (I don't support partial animations or IK just yet) and quite integrated with the vertex pipeline it wouldn't have made sense to use an external library for just this part. I have not really looked that much at any third-party solutions for animation, but it seems to me like you would want to replace the entire pipeline if you choose to go down this route so you can get optimal results and the work needed to integrate it would be worthwhile.

Do you know how much it would cost to mail?

I would guess somewhere along the lines of 20-30 SEK. It's what I usually pay when mailing DVDs and stuff to people.

Fuck, I can't believe I did this again

I forgot my 360 controller there, it seems. Anyone got it?

We wondered whose that one was.

Don't worry, Martin should still have it, unless he pawned it to fund the restoration of his apartment.