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Develop
You can't have a game without developers! And you can't have developers without tools. We'll try to archive development notes, guidelines and tools here as they become apparent. If you have any development questions, please send Tyler mail personally or post to one of our mailing lists.
Link Topics:
File Formats
- Portable Network Graphics (PNG)
- The Salp Wars team prefers to use the PNG over GIF as far as graphics are concerned. If you're curious about what makes PNG's cool (or rather, GIFs suck), have a peek.
General
- GameDev.Net
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GameDev provides a great variety of resources for aspiring game developers. If you're curious how to create a game (or graphics, or music, or whatever comes to mind), check here first. For your convenience, here are a few sections you may particularly enjoy:
- Animation and Modelling
- Artificial Intelligence
- General Programming
- Multiplayer and Network Code
- Sprites and Tiles
- Salp Wars Mailing List Notes
- Before we moved to SourceForge, we used the salp-dev mailing list at Yahoo. Since that group has been dissolved in favor of the SourceForge mailing lists important old messages have been archived here.
- Tyler's Development Journal
- Tyler kept a public journal of his first month or so on the Salp Wars project. Here you can read all of his thoughts, some of which might not actually bore you to death.
SourceForge
- CVS Tree
- View all versions of the game's source code in the comfort of your own browser.
- Mailing Lists
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- Join our mailing lists if you want the latest news on the game's progress. We post news here more often than our own forums. Upon joining the list you may submit your own posts. This is the first step of becoming part of the Salp Wars community!
- News Archive
- Check out our more important news messages, geared toward the end user.
- Project Summary
- Admire the hub of all things Salp Wars at SourceForge. If you're looking for something related to Salp Wars and SourceForge, you're almost guaranteed to find that it's linked from this page.
- Public Forums
- Post messages here if you're too scared to use a mailing list. Still, the use of our mailing lists is strongly recommended over forum use.
Tools
- Concurrent Versioning System (CVS)
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If you plan on developing code or graphics (or even testing), you might find it helpful to learn CVS (a tool that helps people collaborate on files, particularily source code). There's plenty of documentation for it on the Internet; here are a few you might enjoy.
- A Sparse Introduction to CVS
- This tutorial is a reasonable way to be introduced to CVS. It's in English, in any sense of the term.
- CVS Quick Reference
- Is your recognition better than your recall? Join the club. If you think you've "seen that command before, but can't remember what it is," try checking here.
- Open Source Development with CVS
- If you prefer the pedantic, comprehensive look at CVS. If it reminds you of a book, that's for a good reason. The author has been kind enough to put pieces online.
- Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
- The SDL allows for easier cross-platform development. Inside are hooks for joysticks, threads, graphics, audio and more. SDL code is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
- Standard Template Library (STL)
- The STL comes in handy when developers are in need of cross-platform data structure code. Please note that though Silicon Graphics' (SGI) STL approximates many others' STLs, there are differences between the various "flavors" of STL. Thus, some of the functions you see in the SGI reference might not exist in your compiler's default SGI implementation.
- Tile Studio
- In order to create game maps and item tiles, you must have Tile Studio. Don't worry, it's free - GPL'd, even! Make sure you have SalpServ.tsd in the same directory as TILESTUDIO.EXE so that you can export files in the proper SalpServ format.
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