I’ve spent a portion of the day trying to pump out some decent music for our RPM2008 contribution with little results. It happens sometimes, so I went out for a walk and tried again. Still nothing. I am however, finally getting my rsync repo setup so Paul and I can share the raw GarageBand tracks. I said I’d do this a week ago, but I obviously lied. The files are copying now, so that’ll be done soon.
In the meantime, trying to do something creative, I thought I’d toy with Pygame - an open source multimedia framework written in Python. It looks intuitive, and is a wrapper for the SDL libraries. Unfortunately, it doesn’t play well with OS X. I originally had the idea that I could hack it so it would run on my box, but quickly realized that I’m missing the point. If I ever wanted to distribute my project to others, I’d have to provide crazy instructions to those that wanted to run it on OS X. I need to be closer to click-and-run.
So, I started looking for an alternative framework. It doesn’t look there are any real solutions in Python or Ruby, but I can go the pure SDL route or use Allegro if I’d like to (or have the guts to) use C. Both are robust and proven, and I had written a few small games (more like demos) in SDL back in college. I wish I had the brains to use revision control then, because it’d sure be nice to look over what I had done. Oh well.
It’s been a while since I’ve done anything serious in C, so I’ll probably make some ugly mistakes. The first time I ever worked with C was in 1996, and I was 16. I was trying to get my Slackware linux distro to use my network card, and the device driver wouldn’t compile. I had more balls than brains then, and decided that the best way to solve the problem was to comment out the offending line. And it worked. The driver compiled and my card freakin’ got out on the local net. Wow. I felt like I had been initiated into some sort of secretive occult group. It is now more than obvious that it was all dumb luck, but hey, it was encouraging.
Most of my college CS courses were rooted in C, and I did pretty well in them. Towards the end of my course work, the staff decided to move the department to C++. I got the basics without much trouble, but never felt that I mastered it. For example, if you ask me what a template is, I’ll just give you a blank stare.
Now I’m working with it again. I just wrote a simple app that uses the Allegro libraries, and I have a little guy that walks around my screen at the command of my keyboard. Not too shabby for very little work. Even better, this code can be compiled on the three platforms I care about - Linux, Windows, and OS X.
We’ll see if I’m still smiling when I get my first segfault 
