Command and Conquer Clone for DS Project News

Command and Conquer Clone for DS Project News

September 26th, 2006, 00:55 Posted By: wraggster

Another update from rbritt about his CNCds game for the DS:

Got annoyed the other night working on the game, seemed to spend ages not getting anywhere! My main goal was to just change the graphics mode I use to mode 5 2D.

I'd moved the output folder of the project so it doesn't sit in the same folder as the source code. It's cleaner and lets me see what the final game folder will be like. There's also a lot less files in there, which should HELP the file system. Instead it's back to its old tricks. One of the first files it accesses inside a subfolder is loaded and read fine, but from then on it seems unable to read any data in a folder. It's fine with the root, but not a subdirectory. It means the maps aren't loading right now because the tiles and maps are in subdirectories. It's doing my head in!

I still haven't downloaded the latest library files because it's all hidden away on a CVS, and I've not had to use WinCVS before. It's a total ball ache but I'm hoping someone at work can give me a hand... grumble grumble just give me a ZIP to download lol. I'm not sure when r20 devkitpro is out, but I can't wait.

Anyway it turns out I got the change in graphics mode working almost straight away, but when it didn't display properly (due to the map not being loaded correctly) I spent ages looking for a bug in the graphics and not the file system, costing me lot's of time. D'oh! I've got some playing to do still with the graphics to get an in-game HUD working propely over the tilemap but I don't think it's far away.

Playing with the graphics has pointed out though that my SDL graphics core could do with a lot more work to make it useful. It's current approach to emulating the DS is ok but not great for debugging. This is something I'll do after I release the first beta though to not 'waste' too much time

In other news I just want to point out that this really isn't a port of C&C on to the DS because I'm not updating the original source code to work on another platform - because I don't have the original C&C souce code ;p This is a totally new code base written from scratch. I'm just being picky really pointing that out

It does mean that people can't see the source code and get an idea on how to port a game, but they can see the source code and see how to write games for the DS. The code is actually pretty generic in most places, and I don't mind at all if people decide to lift the code for their own stuff. Of course they might not like my C++ singleton 'hell' but that's the way it's written so ha!

Anyway, yes I will be releasing the source code for the game.. but not for a little while! I'd like to get most of the systems cemented first and clean the code a little. Gotta make it presentable ;p

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