Blog Pav Blog

Category: Programming

  • HyperCard: What Made it Leet

    I posted a blog entry on HyperCard yesterday on The Huffington Post: HyperCard: The Original Bridge Over the Digital Divide. From the comments and tweets that I got it was pretty clear that us older hackers have fond memories of HyperCard. But there’s the rub–Us older hacker. Kids today, i.e., people in their twenties, missed…

  • ARC Memory Management in iOS 5 and Cocos2d-iPhone 2.0

    My rewrite of Dungeonators is crawling along at a glacial pace. Mostly because I can only work a couple of hours a week on the project. But the iOS 5 way to manage memory with ARC (automated reference counting) is making the process far less painful than it was the first time I wrote my…

  • Sprite Playground

    I wrote a little Cocos2d-iPhone test app and committed the project to GitHub. (Like every dutiful hacker should.) You’re welcome to download the project and fool around with the code. My goal was to figure out how to create a composite sprite, make sure it could respond to touches, and rotate and move it round…

  • Cocos2d-iPhone Sprite Rotation to an Arbitrary Point

    I had some time during the Thanksgiving weekend to work on Dungeonators. I’m hoping to get an upgrade out to the App Store soon. One thing I needed //TODO: is refactor my rather poor implementation of rotating a sprite to face another sprite. My original code worked ok, in a roundabout way, but was ugly…

  • Dungeonators iPhone Game Released in the App Store!

    Writing a real game, from scratch, in Objective-C, with original Art and sound effects, took a heck of a lot longer than I imagined. Even with the help of the Cocos2d-iPhone framework! You can find it here:  http://bit.ly/rkZvCJ Here’s what the sprite atlas looks like (formatted by Zwoptex) … And here are some stats: 28…

  • Fraction: Does not recognize selector forward::

    If you’re crazy like me you love reading really good primers on programming. Not just to learn about a particular language but to enjoy well written technical prose. (Yeah, I said I was crazy). Yesterday, I started reading Stephen Kochan’s classic Programming in Objective-C (original edition), which was published in 2003. What I like about…

  • Hey It’s Easier Than You Think (Xcode 4 and Subversion)

    I love how the new Xcode 4 shows you code changes side-by-side with it’s version editor view. But I had a little problem. I’m a subversion fan. Yes, I know, totally not cool. I keep this flaw a secret and I don’t force my preference on my co-workers nor do I tweet about it. I’m…

  • Cocos2d Tip#3: Making Your iPhone Game Fast

    My first iPhone game, that might actually make it to the App Store, is just about done. (Not done done but almost ready for testing and tweaking.) With the idea that other people beside me might actually play my game I’ve started to do a very dangerous and high risk activity: Optimization! The all the…

  • Cocos2d Tip #2: Using CCTimer in Your iPhone Game

    If you’re writing almost any type of game, from a puzzler to a FPS to an RTS, tracking time is critical element of the game play. (Except for Angry Birds. You can ponder an Angry Birds level until your iPhone battery runs dry without penalty.) Cocos2d-iPhone provides several means for tracking time in your game…

  • Objective-C Memory Management For Newbies

    Below you will find a list of memory management rules that will make your Coco2d game coding experience easier and your games less buggy. But before you dive in please read the caveats below: These rules are based on several sources written by engineers with much more experienced than me in Objective-C and Cocos2D development.…