Category: Personal
Any posts that I’m personally invested in, mostly long running passion projects that may never see an end.
Hello, today I bring you another lesson learnt.
When you choose Haxe for a project there are a few 2D physics engines available, mostly ports of other popular engines like Box2D. There are actually a few distinct ports to Haxe of various versions of B2D, but the most up-to-date and the one I’ve been using is Joshua Granick’s port of 2.1a. You can get it from Haxelib by opening a command prompt / terminal and running “haxelib install box2d”
In brief, it’s fantastic. Once you get a handle on how it works and where all the bits you want to use are it’s pretty simple, a far cry from the engine I initially experimented with – Physaxe – which was basically 20 pages of pure maths disguised as classes and functions! But there are some small issues I’ve run across while using it, and here comes the latest.
In my new “Tower Defence” project I need to know when certain things are touching, or when object A is within range of object B, and other nonsenses like that.
In the early days of this project I implemented a collision system again with just two shape types: Rectangle and circle. It worked well enough, but the performance was awful. I had knocked together a few arrays and an update loop, but more advanced stuff like knowing which objects could be safely ignored to speed the whole process up takes time to write and test. Having experience with it previously, I dropped Box2D in to my project so I could begin prodding.
I love games. I mainly play shooters and racing games — although anything in between is welcomed if it’s charming, funny, or straight-up addictive. Anyway, I’ve played a few racers over the years and here are some of my highlights.
Continue reading “Best racing games”
A nerd through and through, I quite like hardware modding too, and I’m fierce with a soldering iron in my hand. Here’s some mods and paint jobs I’ve done in the past.
Continue reading “Xbox mods”