Zipplet's Stuff

LightX is now complete, well the major set of classes anyway. It's now useable for writing games for Windows! Hardware acceleration is not done yet but can be added at any time, and it's still very fast without it due to optimisations

Now I can start work on actual games, finally...

So I'm looking around youtube while I'm bored, and I find some pokemon glitch videos. Then I find this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bORKndj4Sw0

After about 2 minutes in this gets very, very disturbing....

All of the lightX input classes are now complete, apart from directinput which is not critical right now so it can be written later. A few bugs I found including some that have annoyed me for ages have been fixed too.

Now I need to write the sound classes and it should be possible to start work on some real games!

LightX is progressing, although a little slower than I wanted. The Unified Application Window (UAW for short), which is a framework to write true cross platform games with LightX, is actually working now!

I also have Pokemon Diamond, USA import. Impressed with it so far. And I'll also use this opportunity to say that the linksys WAP54G sucks, and has speed issues. Connecting both the BT Home Hub and Linksys WAP54G to my network switch, having them on channels that are far apart, and then conducting a speed test, shows that the linksys is extremely slow - about 8 times slower than the BT Home Hub, in 802.11g mode. Tests were conducted by copying files to a samba server.

I've been tinkering with LightX and I have the basic design for the joypad input working, including some of the descendants. The new Xinput API for xbox 360 controllers is also supported - with independant control of both rumble motors and the L/R triggers being on seperate axes.


Click to enlarge image

Update: Just the mouse and keyboard input units, and some sound functionality and lightX will be good enough for some test cases!

Edited on Mon, 23rd Apr 2007 at 20:32 EDT

Zipplet's Stuff is past the temporary downtime. On an unrelated note, I now have a nice test box I can use to ensure lightX performs nicely on an older system, and to allow me to port lightX to linux.

For some reason, the times shown for posts are all messed up right now - I think the new servers timezone is screwed ...

Edited on Mon, 23rd Apr 2007 at 15:20 EDT

This site will temporarily be unavailable somewhere from Thursday 19th April -> Saturday 21st April, for a few hours. The server this site is hosted on is being upgraded.

Game downloads also hosted here will be unavailable during that time.

When I want to chill and play some megadrive games on my PC I'll use the great gens megadrive emulator (get it here). It's always had a few flaws such as not putting the CPU to sleep during idle times (so your CPU usage is always 100%) but generally it's great.

That is, until I uncovered a really bad bug that many seem to have had, and the author refuses to fix it

If you use a controller that has it's d-pad mapped to a POV HAT, and push diagonals, gens does not recognise them. This makes many games unplayable, such as Thunder Force IV.

Why has nobody fixed it or released a patch? The code is available so I'd consider doing it, if it weren't for the fact I'd need visual studio installed...

This means I can't use gens with my nice new xbox 360 controller, which is a real shame. Every other game/emulator works fine with it.

The software rendering engine for LightX is almost complete! I've implemented all of the major functions, it's just a little polishing left. I've even written the documentation for it.

Now to come, roughly in this order:

• lxgfxddraw class
  
• lxsound/lxsoundfmod
  
• lxinput/lxinputkeyboard/lxinputmouse/lxinputgamepad
  
• lxinputxinput
  

Yep, I'm going to support Xinput (xbox 360 controller extra features not accessible with directinput) - why not.

No more screenshots yet - I've been up to some other things the past couple days. I've decided to make the status/progress/todo/etc list available for the public to see while I work on it. Sure it's of no interest to most people but for some it might be, so why not. LightX status and updates