Well I can’t believe that it’s been almost two years since I last did anything with this website. The day job and life in general have used up all my time and energy. I’ve had many ideas and still wanted to work on my games but all have been pushed aside whilst I did other tasks. But, I’m back with renewed vigour and determination to work on some of the half-finished projects. I hope to complete at least one of them this year. My latest idea is to redevelop my remake of Cavern Fighter to run on the Windows Phone. This should be an interesting project as the design work has already been done. It will be more of a port to C# from Delphi with some improvements along the way. I’m not too sure how to control the movement and firing but a bit of research should resolve that problem. I have already converted the map data from the Delphi game into an XML document. The file is only 200k in size but once I’ve adjusted the data I may well convert it back into some other format to give a bit of security and compactness. Depending on how well this goes, I may convert my Iron Sphere game to also run on these phones. I’m off to DevWeek 2012 in March so come up and say hello if you spot me.

I’ve found some time to do a little bit of work on my old Tank game. This is a two player split screen shooter. I wrote the original tank game years ago for my son and started this as a sequel. This version has a larger playing area and multiple weapon types. The idea is to attack the other players base and destroy it. There will be items littered around the screen than can be used as shelter or to hinder progress. All the items are positioned using an XML file. This makes the screen design a lot easier. In the top right of each screen is a radar that shows the position of everything. I need to implement collision detection and some scoring / health information. I don’t know when I’ll be able to do more work on this project but it will have to be soon else my son will be too old to play it. I have produced a short video which can be viewed on this site or on YouTube. Please leave any comments you may have about this game. At the moment it’s written in Delphi and uses the SDL library for the graphics and BASS for the sound.

In case anyone is interested I passed the Amateur Radio exam a few weeks ago. I now have the call sign M3ZQR and will hopefully be available on the 2 meter band in the coming months. I start the next level course in a few weeks, so with any luck I’ll pass that and be able to crank up the power.

No major changes to the main site but I have added a few development pages that will allow me to test and develop ideas before moving them to the main site. Lots of work to do in the day job but I’ll try to squeeze in some interesting updates over the next month.

At long last I seem to be getting somewhere. I have removed the old html table tags and replaced everything with div tags. The RSS feeds now seem to work although I’ll need to make some small changes to these in the future. At the moment I only have two pages working, so when I get some time I’ll need to add some others. Once I have something worth searching I’ll implement some code to the search control. Keep watching and bits will appear over the coming months.

Just to finish off the day I have added all the current files to the download section. I need to add some additional images to brighten the whole area up as well as applying some more CSS classes. More to come as I get time.

I had a few spare minutes so I added some details to the download page and made the Iron Sphere map available. This is more of a test to see if the master page structure is working correctly. So far it seems to be working the way I wanted it to. I’ll be adding more downloads soon.

I’ve just added feeds from YouTube to show my development videos. I just need to sort out some issues with the table borders and I’ll be ready to upload the site.