A critical look at Unity

Ubuntu 11.04 comes out later this month, it's currently in beta. The main feature of 11.04 is the brand new desktop shell called Unity. I've been using Unity on and off for some time, but now we are near to release I decided to install it onto my desktop machine and use it full time.

Perhaps I should've posted this blog post earlier, but the truth is that although I've had Unity on my laptop for some time, I haven't given it a real proper test drive. Now I have, I'm not quite as excited about Unity as I was, and in fact, I'm a little worried.

Investigating X-Wing (OPT and XWI file formats)

The other day I was reminiscing about the old PC games I used to play back in the 90s when I remembered the Lucasarts classic X-Wing. I remembered that in the late 90s I used to make levels for it using an editor. A bit of searching found me two different editors that I remember fiddling with, one was the DOS based "X-Wing Mission Builder" and another was the Windows based X-Ed.

I found downloads for both (the X-Ed website still exists!) and both ran fine on my Ubuntu PC (XMB using DosBox, X-Ed through Wine). Little did I know that these downloads were going to start a chain reaction that would drive me to spend hours of my weekend staring at a hex editor. :)

C++ Timer Class

Just thought I'd shove this somewhere public as it's probably useful for someone.

Earlier today I had a problem where boost::timer was always returning zero. The cause was boost::timer uses std::clock which only returns the elapsed CPU time. If you use sleep(), std::clock won't update!

So here's a little class that returns the elapsed time since the timer was instantiated (or restarted) which works with sleep().

 Copyright (C) 2011 by Luke Benstead  
   
 Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy  
 of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal  
 in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights  
 to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell  
 copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is  
 furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:  
   
 The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in  
 all copies or substantial portions of the Software.  
   
 THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR  
 IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,  
 FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE  
 AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER  
 LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,  
 OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN  
 THE SOFTWARE.  
   
 #ifndef TIMER_H_INCLUDED  
 #define TIMER_H_INCLUDED  
   
 #include <sys/time.h>  
   
 class Timer {  
 public:  
   Timer():  
     start_time_(now()) {  
   }  
   
   void restart() {  
     start_time_ = now();  
   }  
   
   double elapsed() const {  
     double t = now();  
   
     return double(t - start_time_);  
   }  
   
 private:  
   double now() const {  
     timeval t;  
     gettimeofday(&t, NULL);  
     return t.tv_sec + (t.tv_usec / 1000000.0);  
   }  
   
   double start_time_;  
 };  
   
 #endif // TIMER_H_INCLUDED  
   

Yeah I know, it's basic and anyone could've written it, but still might save someone 5 minutes :)

Linux Mint Debian Edition - First Impressions

This morning I got up early and replaced my Ubuntu 10.10 installation with a nice shiny install of Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). LMDE is based on Debian testing, and is a rolling release. I've always wanted to try a rolling release, and one based on Debian ticks all the boxes. The important thing is that Debian and Ubuntu share the APT packaging system which thinking about it, is probably the main reason I use Ubuntu.

I've used regular Linux Mint a few times in the past and I've always been impressed, although I always end up back on Ubuntu, I'm not really sure why that is, probably that I can't wait to test out the newest stuff so I jump on Ubuntu as soon as a new release comes out. A rolling release of course solves that problem.

Reverse Engineering the Abandonware Game "Ignition"

Ignition has always been one of my favourite racing games. It had a quirky charm that was reminiscent of Micro Machines, but set in beautiful outdoor environments.

It's now one of the most prominent cases of Abandonware ever. First published by Virgin Interactive, which was acquired by Titus Software, which then became Avalon Interactive. Both Titus and Avalon no longer exist. So who owns the rights to the game (and more importantly who has the source code) is a mystery.

The other day I decided to take a look at the files that come with Ignition, I wondered if there was anything salvageable for an indie game developer. Perhaps I could knock together a level viewer or mod the game. The first thing I noticed is that Ignition uses a lot of different file formats.

PPA For My Game Developer Kit

So, I've spent the last few months focusing on developing cross-platform games. I've started small with Ubuntu Bug Blast, and gradually I'm going to build to more and more complex games. The idea is that I will identify bottlenecks in development, and create small modular libraries to cover the repetitive parts of developing a game in OpenGL.

5 GUI Apps that Ubuntu is Missing

Ubuntu has come a long way in the past few years. I've been using it as my only desktop OS since Hoary, and it's come along in leaps and bounds. There are however a number of things that just seem to be "missing".

This list is a set of GUI apps that I have discovered to be missing, either on my own desktop (1, 2, 3, and 5) or while installing Ubuntu for friends (4).