Tom Leo's Blog

Writing Games for Linux

Microsoft Rant

So In college I took a course in Game Programming. We used C# and the XNA framework. I wrote two Windows Phone 7 games which worked but I wanted to polish after the semester was over and put on the Windows Marketplace. Since that time I have been working exclusively on Linux, and when going back to my Windows Desktop discovered my Visual Studio license has expired. I figured I could go online and download Visual Studio Express edition and be on my way. But XNA 4.0 does not work in Visual Studio Express.

It seems like Microsoft believes that they are too big, and have too large a market share to really care about the UX of developers. If I didn’t have to go through this BS, I could have contributed two games to the Windows Phone marketplace which now will not see the light of day. Having owned a Windows Phone for about a year I can honestly say its a great mobile operating system but it severely lacks applications and a suitable maps/navigation solution (sorry bing maps).

OpenSource FTW

I have been looking around at various libraries and languages suitable for writing a beat em’ side scroller game like Turtles in Time. Three solutions that I am particularly leaning towards atm are:

• SDL (Writing the game in C carmack style)
• PyGame (I write Python code by day, why not by night?)
• MonoGame (MonoGame is the opensource implementation of XNA, but it’s even better because I can port to more devices than VisualStudio)

To a hacker, a closed door is an insult, and a locked door is an outrage. Just as information should be clearly and elegantly transported within a computer, and just as software should be freely disseminated, hackers believed people should be allowed access to files or tools which might promote the hacker quest to find out and improve the way the world works. When a hacker needed something to help him create, explore, or fix, he did not bother with such ridiculous concepts as property rights.

— Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy

Python’s Lazy Exception Clause

Python’s except clause lookups are done lazily and are only evaluated if an exception is raised. This can be usefull because the exception arguments themselves can be figured out at runtime.

Ben Bass’s Example

>>> import sys
>>> def current_exc_type():
...     return sys.exc_info()[0]
...
>>> try:
...     blob
... except current_exc_type():
...     print ("Got you!")
...
Got you!

Some great tips for writing better python code. See notes [here]

The PDP-1 (the initials were short for Programmed Data Processor, a term considered less threatening than “computer,” which had all kinds of hulking-giant connotations) would become known as the first minicomputer, designed not for huge number-crunching tasks, but for scientific inquiry, mathematical formulation … and hacking. It would be so compact that the whole setup was no larger than three refrigerators

— Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

drieduptiedanddead:

this is the best thing ever

(via kristinaplusplus)

…innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

— Dieter Rams

Good design is unobtrusive — Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

— Dieter Rams

Java…managers kind of like it because it looks like your getting a lot done…it looks like you wrote 100 lines of code… even if in another language it’s 5 lines. You know it’s like you can eat a one ounce steak or you can eat 100 pounds of shoe leather and you feel a greater sense of accomplishment after the shoe leather.