Pizza and Drinks
$10 all you can eat or $1.50 per slice.
We will kick around creative catering ideas on the night
Asteroids Presenter – Some versions of Delphi come with a clone of Asteroids called Meteor. We are looking for an extra presenter to pull apart the game and tell us how it works. Scott can provide the source files if you dont have it. Contact Scott Hollows if interested. scott.hollows@gmail.com
Topics
* 6:15pm Sharp – Build Your Own Arcade Machine – Scott Hollows
This is a bit off topic for Delphi, but leads in nicely to the following presentations on game development.
Artifactory members have been invited to attend this presentation so say hello to the new faces.
Scott Hollows owns an arcade cabinet and will bring in the key parts of the machine for show and tell. You will see how to build your own arcade machine cheaply using a Windows PC that will run thousands of original arcade games on it. (NOTE – original games not clones). We will connect the original arcade machine joysticks and buttons to the PC using a cheap add-on board. This can all be done with just a Windows PC, or you can put the PC into an original arcade machine shell as an fun hobby project.
| Scott Hollows is the vice president of the Australian Delphi User Group (ADUG). His Delphi experience ranges from Turbo Pascal 3 up to the latest Delphi Berlin. He was previously a Senior Principal at Oracle’s world corporate headquarters in Redwood Shores, USA |
* I wrote my own Space Invaders in Delphi and so can you – Scott Hollows
Scott Hollows has been kicking around games source code recently and its surprising how many techniques are applicable to commercial programming, so this will be of relevance to non-gaming development as well.
We will do a speed build of Space Invaders in Delphi so you can see the design decisions in action.
All attendees will get a full copy of my Space Invaders source code
We will look at two different ways of doing this – a tradition approach (move alien, move ship, fire missile, check collisions) and an object oriented-ish approach
Time permitting, we will take a behind the scenes look at some others games developed by Scott
* Peter Thönell’s 2D Graphics Engine
TilesAndSprites is a 2-D graphics engine that Peter made in my spare time.
Tiles: It allows for making grid based maps. They can be rendered in layers of square grids or hexagonal grids. The grids are compatible, so that you could, for example, have square grids overlaying hex grids. TilesAndSprites is easily extended to handle other grid patterns as well. The only hurdle is the math which, although not difficult, can sometimes be tricky.
Sprites: Also, one can render sprites () in these maps. (Sprites generally represent things like the player, spaceships, explosions, etc.) There are routines to return overlaps (collisions) between sprites and grids.
All this enables one to have characters running along in a map and rendered so that the program can know when they run into each other or into walls. But some other ideas popped up as well.
When playing around with TilesAndSprites, I came up with a few interesting effects, such as parallax, blur, fake 3-D.
Also, there’s a labyrinth engine that ties in with TilesAndSprites that generates guaranteed perfect labyrinths. It’s my own algorithm that I haven’t seen anywhere else
| Peter Thönell has an insanely detailed knowledge of Delphi internals down to the byte level. He is a frequent presenter at the Perth meetings where he covers topics from development theory to complex programming challenges |
ADUG Symposium Update
The ADUG Winter Symposium is an all day Delphi event packed with technical content. It will be held on:
* Thursday 4th August in Sydney
* Friday 5th August in Melbourne
ADUG Winter Symposium page for more details