Despite the fact that I haven't completed a game in a long, long time, I have learned a lot over the years. I also have one personal project that hasn't faded away yet. For seven years (seven!?!), I've been maintaining Derelict, a collection of bindings to C libraries for the D Programming Language. Game-centric of course. Derelict 2, a branch I've been working on off-and-on for a while, will soon be moved to the trunk. Derelict 2 includes bindings for more libraries than the original. One of those, recently added, is Allegro 5.
Back in the late 90s, when I was first learning C at the ripe old age of 27, Allegro was the first game development library I ever used. I hadn't looked at it in years, until I noticed someone mention Allegro 5 recently on a forum somewhere (maybe here). I looked into it, liked what they've done with it, and immediately added a binding for it to Derelict. But that wasn't all. Working with Allegro again has reawakened the gamedev bug in me.
My latest endeavor is Dolce, a simple framework that sits on top of Allegro. The goal is to handle all of the boilerplate and provide some utilities that can reduce the amount of code needed to write games with Allegro. It's Allegro-specific, with no plans or desire to make it abstract enough to use with other libraries (like SDL or SFML, which Derelict also provides bindings for). I'm writing it for myself, to help me get some games off the ground, but I'll be putting it up in a repository somewhere once I've got it polished and documented. Most likely DSource or github. Dolce is being written with version 2 of the D Programming Language.
I've been deeply involved with D off and on since before I started Derelict. It has come a long way since the early days and has turned into a language that makes programming fun for me again. If you're interested in following D news but don't want to bother with the newsgroups or mailing lists, subscribe to my other D blog, The One With D. Here at D Bits I'll be posting my game-related D adventures. That includes writing about Dolce, Derelict, and my future unfinished game projects.
Working on Dolce has already brought me one instance of good luck. Being a big fan of KOTOR and Dragon Age: Origins, six or seven months ago I bought Mass Effect on Steam. To my great disappointment, it was totally unplayable on my system thanks to slideshow graphics. After a significant effort in troubleshooting with no results, I gave up and uninstalled. Fast forward to a few days ago. I got the Dolce test app up and running for the first time in VisualD, the D plugin for Visual Studio. I noticed a good deal of D3D debug spew in the console. Then I remembered that I had turned on the debug version of D3D some time last year for another project I was working on. A couple of days later, while reading a blog post about Mass Effect 2, the old light bulb popped up. I turned off the debug runtime and reinstalled Mass Effect. No more slideshow. And I can finally experience the adventures of Commander Shepard. Right when I don't need the distraction, of course.
