Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!peter_alau@playstation.sony.com From: Darco Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.freetalk,scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Net Yaroze Tutorial Preview Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1998 20:48:36 -0400 Organization: SCEA News Server Lines: 85 Message-ID: <3606F3E4.6ECC48B8@bigfoot.com> References: <360587BD.5668FFB0@bigfoot.com> <36064067.123D@manc.u-net.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 192.dialup.datasys.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.05 [en] (Win95; U) Xref: chuka.playstation.co.uk scea.yaroze.freetalk:986 scee.yaroze.freetalk.english:2433 R Fred Williams wrote: > > Hiya... Just read through. Good one. If you can stick at it (and it looks > like being a *long* job, so good luck!), this should be superb... > Long. *sigh* Well. Perhaps it might help me get into DigiPen Institute of Technology. If I show them this and they like it, then that might help me out alot. (I feel tired already. But that's not gonna stop me) > > And now for the criticism (don't treat this as being harsh, please, 'tis in > my nature to be "picky" ;) ) > Ho-boy... ;) > > Organisation of the display area should be a *massively* important > piece of a Yaroze tutorial, and really needs a chapter all to itself. > But I agree, the "this is a good place to put the screen" would make > a good intro to it at this stage. > The basic introduction to the display hardware and VRAM is covered in Lesson 1. (The lesson I posted was a partially finished version of Lesson 2) A more indepth overview of the display hardware, including double buffering, ordering tables, and such will be in Lesson 3. Then in Lesson 4 we will go step-by-step through writing a sample program that does something simple using what we discussed in Lesson 3, such as displaying a rectangle on the screen using ordering tables. When chapter 1 is over, I hope to have a version of the familiar "balls" demos. (Except it'll probably have small squares instead. At least at first... I don't want to go over sprites in chapter 1). And I'm not sure what chapter this will go into, but I eventually want to have a version of the Net Yaroze balls demo with colision detection, gravity, scrolling backgrounds... The works. Eventually that is. And from this process, hopefully the reader will learn something. > > Hmmm. personally I do almost all my RECTs as something like:- > > static RECT screen = {SCN_VRAM_X,SCN_VRAM_Y,SCN_WIDTH,SCN_HEIGHT}; > > -where the constants are defined in a header, to allow for easy vram > shuffling. This has the additional benefits at being (literally) > infinitely faster (unless GCC's got a hell of a lot better at > optimising since last time I checked its output), and taking up about > half the memory. > > But all this kinda thing is ultimately personal preference. True, it may be faster and more code efficient. However this is a newbie tutorial... Code needs to be as readable as possible rather than optimized. > > > While we're critisising, if a newbie doesn't know about "\n", they're > *certainly* not going to know that the gcc "c" compiler understands > c++ "//" comments... Though they could prolly guess that from the > context! Oh. ... Huh? I've always used both "//" and "/* */" for commenting... I wasn't aware that "//" was exclusive to C++... I've just always done it like that. My personal code makes heavy use of both comment denotors. > > Agreed. The "this is why this bit of code is here" stuff is *very* good in > this first tutorial. > > I pretty much love it, really. The colour coding works (though I'd've > used different colours ;) ) Oh, and the "to recap" cut'n'paste bit at > the end is *essential*, coz I find interspersed code & discussion pretty > difficult to follow as code. Bravo for remembering it. I'll also have a zip file for downloading, containing working source that you can compile and run. No need to cut and paste. Or maybe that's making it too easy... Perhaps it shouldn't be that easy. Anyone have some input on this? 'Darco