partiallydisassembled.net

Compiling for G3 on OS X 10.5

2008-04-18 00:03:46

It took me a long time to figure this out. By default gcc on Leopard compiles for OS X 10.5 only. When cross-compiling to PowerPC, the default target is actually certain G4 models. The magic options for G3's and OS X 10.3.9 (it looks like you can't compile for earlier versions any more) and later: -arch ppc -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.3.9 -force_cpusubtype_ALL (both linker and compiler). Use otool -hv xyz.dylib to check that a Mach-O file is for the target you expect ("ppc" not "ppc7740" etc), and lipo -info xyz.dylib to check the contents of a universal binary.

pyglet download statistics

2008-03-23 22:44:21

I felt charty this evening, and this is what happened: That's a breakdown by release and distribution of pyglet, from 1.0 alpha 1 through to 1.1 alpha 1 (alpha 2, released hours ago, doesn't yet rate on this chart). Interesting to note: the eggs are popular for release, but not development. The only reason they're featured in 1.0 alpha 1 is that they were actually linked from the download page then. (Now people are only likely to grab an egg if they're using easy_install from the command line). The Windows installer is quite the popular, which makes me glad I spent so much time on it. (I'm not making installers available for 1.1 alpha releases). Here are the download stats for the packages including documentation/examples. Looks to me like the number of developers isn't really increasing, but perhaps those developers are testing on more machines, and perhaps there are some runtime installations being made on non-developer machines. Or maybe there are more developers but they're happy to use old or online documentation. There are currently 271 pyglet-users members (or 269, depending on which counter on the same page you read).

Play with your peas

2008-02-12 23:40:29

Danc of Lost Garden has posted a new game challenge that includes a design and sprites. Under the cover of "testing the latest pyglet features" (but really for the hell of it) I made a quick stab at it last night and today. You can play with peas-1.zip, you'll need pyglet trunk r1760. It's nothing like complete: you can place and remove blocks, and the peas will A* themselves up to the higest point and "ninja" themselves off it; but the scoring, flag raising and deathliness is missing. The physics seems quite stable (using Verlet integration with a fixed timestep), but the contact constraints on the corners are doubled, which is why the peas seem to gain energy when bouncing off walls. I made a botch of the AI movement: every specific combination of blocks that can be moved between has to be listed (e.g., left side of standard block to top side of left ramp, ...). I didn't get around to listing them all, so the peas will refuse to move around certain objects that seem trivial. If you just place standard blocks they'll do fine. I would rewrite this to something a bit cleverer if I was going to continue any further... ...which I don't think I will. These peas are cute, but I don't think the game is going to turn out all that great, relative to the effort required to fix up the AI and physics. I was able to pick up a few pyglet bugs writing this. The sprite module seems (now) pretty solid and absolutely useful for this kind of game -- I didn't need to use pyglet.gl at all.

7

2008-01-19 23:50:53

I think it's great that channel 7 chooses to simulcast the tennis on all five of their digital channels, rather than running the scheduled movie. Just like watching someone else play that Wii game.

delta-v update

2008-01-15 01:36:10

I ported delta-v to pyglet 1.0 beta 3, and also took the opportunity to fix some gameplay issues: * Baddies now die when shot, rather than just being pushed away. * The field of view is reduced. * There is a more obvious visual indicator when the player is hurt. * Player's health is gradually restored continually. * Motion blur is greatly reduced. * Survival mode score resets to zero before each attempt. This makes the game far less frustrating.