EmptyCrate Software. Travel. Stuff.

In 2006 we took a three week trip to Europe. I carried an Averatec 3270 notebook for those three weeks. The notebook was light (4.5lbs) and portable (only 12.1") but it was still too much for a backpacking trip. It's possible that one of the newer ultra portable netbooks, like an Eee or Acer Aspire One would work well, however, I wanted to mention the latest toy that we took on a one week trip to Mexico.

I recently acquired a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. The N810 is now the predominant model, and they are about the same price. The N810 adds a keyboard and GPS, so it's a reasonable upgrade.

EmptyCrate Game Engine Release_2 was just posted to the Google code project page.

This release includes enhancements to the inventory box and the ability for items to interact with each other inside of the inventory.

Also, this release includes a fixed size for the flash applet so that it works properly with smaller screens, such as the Maemo platform.

The game.emptycrate.com site now includes several playable adventure games which work on all know platforms that Flash supports, including MacOSX, Windows and Maemo.

The results of the 7 hour challenge have been posted the google code project page.

Another 1.75 hours down. The days has in fact been very fragmented, but as I see it I still have 1.25 hours left in the initial challenge. The basic game play element of traveling has been implemented, but I don't have any UI as of yet. My plan is to take and modify the "radar" example from the gtkmm code and make it display my galaxy map. This should get me a start to graphical game play elements.

Well, I've now had 4 hours of time to work. My Saturday is getting broken up more than I anticipated and it looks like I'll only get about 5 hours total today. We'll see. Currently the code checked in to the google code project generates a random universe of 3-8 galaxies with 750-150 planets in each galaxy. I'm really not very happy with the distribution of planets in the galaxy and have spent probably 1 out of the 4 hours just trying to make that better. I've decided to give up on that and move on to the game player and game dynamics.

I'm getting ready to start a 7 hour challenge from my cousin to write a Elite style game called Ex Astris today. Actually, my version is inspired by Space Trader.

Last night I got the latest version of Ubuntu installed as I did not currently have a development environment set up at home that would allow me to do graphical Linux development.