Another piece of C++ code I wrote recently: a C++ wrapper for SQLite. Thanks to a few C++11 features I think it allows for really clean and concise code in many common cases. As part of the example code, I also wrote a basic schema migration function.

Get the source code here.

Don’t ask me why, but I needed a simple HTML template library for C++. I looked at a few of them, but there wasn’t a clear winner. Most were too heavyweight, hard to build or I didn’t like the syntax.

So I decided to write my own. How hard can it be?

NLTemplate is really simple. It comes in a single source file, has no extra dependencies and you can just drop it in your project and it will work. It does variable replacement, optional or repeatable blocks and file includes. You can define your own file loader to deal with path resolution and file I/O. To insert a variable, you write {{ variable }}, to define a block, you write {% block name %} and then end it with {% endblock %}.

Get the source code here.

Six years and 2½ games later, this is what I’m using now for game development:

Hardware

• iMac 21.5inch 2011 model with 32GB RAM
• iPod touch 4th generation
• iPhone 3GS

Software

• Xcode
• Adobe Photoshop
• Pixelmator
• Git

Libraries

• C++ STL
• RapidXML
• Sarah Thompson’s SigSlot
• Boost

I got tired of the constant Tumblr outages and keeping a Django site up and running seemed like too much work, so I made Tempo. Tempo is a small static site generator written in PHP. I use it for this site and will probably use it for some others in the future. It takes

• A small PHP config file
• Text files with a simple header
• Source images of any size
• PHP-based templates

and transforms them into a static html site. It can

• Resize images to fit the specified page width
• Create a blog archive listing page and an Atom feed
• Skip “draft” posts (filenames that start with #)
• …not much else, really. Isn’t that enough?

URLs are built like this:

about.txt becomes about.html
blog-2011-10-10-blog post title.txt becomes blog/2011/10/10/blog-post-title.html
etc.

For text formatting, just use HTML tags. URLs starting with http:// are automatically converted into links.

Get the source code here.

To try out pygame, I wrote a simple editor in it. It is nice to see what can be achieved with 100 lines of Python. I wouldn’t necessarily choose it to write an entire game, but for a simple interactive tool or a prototype, it is nice.

This simple editor opens a tileset image and lets you edit its collision mask. Use case: you have large graphical tiles but want them to have a more fine grained collision mask. For example, the graphical tiles are 128×128 but you want the collision mask to be 32×32.

Download TilemapMaskEdit.py (requires Python and pygame)
Example tileset from Devastro: water01_128.png (do not use this asset without permission!)

To start it, run python TilemapMaskEdit.py water01_128.png. Draw the with left mouse button, erase with right, F2 = save to .txt. This would be water01_128.png.txt in the aforementioned example.

The output file format is very simple.

[0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0]
[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0]