hello

[Brian Beuken]

The forum now seems to be stable and happy but a bit empty and in need of a bit of colour, I'll work on that but need to focus on cleaning up demo code for the main site.

However if you've just arrived, hello, and welcome, please take a few moments to register and say hello.

Over the coming weeks I will add as much content on here as I can, hints, tips and occasional rants about using SBC's for graphic programming which is my main area of interest.

Why? You are probably asking yourself, and with good reasons, almost nobody buys an SBC to write games on.
Well, my reasons are really simple, I'm a console programmer, but I am not allowed tell people how to write games on Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo consoles.. So I wanted to try to simulate both the experience of working on a console as a target system, and working at a fairly low level to get the hardware to work. That's possible on PC's of course, but there's just too much variety of system and speed. Having a system with fixed constraints forces you as a coder to consider how to get the best out of it and that in itself is also a lot of fun. There's a fantastic sense of achievement in getting a Raspberry to do Shadows and post processing effects fast enough to be useful in a game, and that's the kind of dogged determination that console games coders need to develop.

And, if you like SBC's generally, they really are a lot of fun to work with. You are not going to make any money writing games for SBC's but you will learn a lot about HOW to write games, by using SBC's

If you are experienced with SBC's and are aware of some of the common pitfalls beginners have getting them set up to be useful in a coding situation, please register and post your experience, the more people we can attract with a little knowledge the more we can help those seeking knowledge.

One very important point that will become apparent when people start reading the book, is that I did NO (zero) optimizing of any of the graphic code in the books. That was to avoid confusing new coders and also to present challenges for them to find and resolve. We can discuss optimization of things here as any game with a decent GPU load is going to need some considerable thought about optimizing.

Log in, say hi, and lets see if we can get a nice community of SBC game coders started

[Brian Beuken]

made this a sticky, please register, and say hi

[jomoengineer]

Hey Brian,

Is this the right place to post a howdy? 


My name is Jon Morss and I've been a big fan of Game Development for some time. I originally studied Computer Science to get into to Game Dev, but my career path took me down other roads.   Back in the day I went though "Spells of Fury"  by Michael J. Norton and "Tricks of the Game Programming Guru" by Andre Lamothe  ( he currently has a PCB class on Udemy) but I kept getting diverted away from the game path.   I even bought and worked with the Hydra Game Development Kit that Andre created with the Parallax Propeller which as an interesting Retro 8-bit game platform. However, coding in Spin was just not my bag.   Although an old fart in tech years, I still have an interest of doing something with Game Dev. I'm not sure if it is still viable to pursue a job in games these days, but I would be content just working on my own thing just to see where it goes. Heck, even an Indie game for the PS Vita would be cool since I am one of the few owners of that device.  

I do a bit of Voice Acting on the side and have lent my voice to some games in the past, so it certainly would be awesome to voice in me own game for a change. 

I'm also interested in Embedded Systems and Robotics and am a frequent participant in the element14 Road Tests and Project14 challenges.  I have worked on a bare metal Space Invader game using a TI TM4C123 ARM M4 board for an Embedded development MOOC which was cool. 

I'm looking forward to working though the The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming: Using Target-based Development on SBC's book and absorbing what I can from the forums.

Thanks a ton for creating the awesome book and for putting all the time you have into this site. It's something I have been looking for for some time.


Cheers,

Jon

[Brian Beuken]

Hi Jon

Thanks for the nice message. I always enjoyed Andre's books, I think I worked through all his original books before he switched to editing. Back before the internet his books were the best way I knew to work out a lot of stuff I didn't know then

It is still viable to work in games, I am still involved in commercial games, and I teach at Breda University of applied science where our Games Development program is producing new generations of coders, artists, designers and producers. Many of our grads end up working on some massive AAA titles, so its still very much an industry to thrive in.

The book is not without flaws, I had to rush the ending of it, I could easily have made it 200 pages bigger, and the typesetters (and me) have put in a lot of small errors, but I hope it still gives you a taste for writing games and gives you access to some of the basic ideas we use over and over again.
Maybe a 2nd edition will fix the flaws...if it keeps selling, who knows

This site will continue to grow with additional content and some new lessons and game concepts that can be taken to any platform.

I like the SBC's because they are basically mini consoles, so once you can make something like a Raspberry produce a game, you can do the same on a Switch, Vita, PS4 etc...they are just SBC's on massive doses of steroids.

[tolpan]

Hey Brian,

I'll follow Jon and say Hi as you have suggest in your activation mail.

My name is Mario Grießer and I'm working, after a few other jobs, now as an ABAP Developer.
But since the late 80's I'm always interested on Game Development, this is related to my Neighbors, which where the founder of the Austrian Development Studio MayDesign (original designer of the Anno-Games). As Teen I was always in there Studio and have looked what they are doing.

Now I'm reading your Book and try to do self some Game Development as Hobby.

Cheers,

Mario

[Brian Beuken]

Welcome Mario
if you have any issues, please just post and we'll try to fix it. Do please note there are some problems with the new Raspberry Pi 4, which I'll try to provide some updates for in a few more weeks. I am still trying to work out the best solution.

[RobertG]

Hi Brian, hi everyone,

I just wanted to follow the invitation and say: „Hello!”

My name is Robert Grosch. Reading other portraits here on the forum, I feel a bit intimidated, because I neither have a strong background in coding nor with SBCs – I am even rather a novice to the Raspberry Pi. But maybe this is not so much a problem and I can help making the subject of game programming on the Raspberry Pi more accessible by giving this group a voice …

I have a background in Engineering, Dynamic Simulation, and Process Control. I self-taught myself Turbo Pascal in my youth and had a C/C++ course during my studies, but not much kept sticking of the latter. Later during my time at university I did some developing of numerical computational routines in MathLab and only used C to write wrappers which allowed me to hook up numerical Fortran code like the classic DDASSL to MATLAB to simulate my models. Since a few years I teach Process Automation at a vocational college which involves some basic programming of Siemens (in the past) and Phoenix Contact Controllers (more recently)... At my school we usually build ourselves the demo process plants which are then automated by the students during the course work. (The demo plants are really mostly build and extended by graduating student during their final projects.) There is a tradition at my school to only use industry standard components, which the students will encounter at their working environment. However, with the rise of IoT and Industry 4.0, I started thinking about braking with this tradition, because some things are just so much easier, quicker, and cheaper to develop and demonstrate with Arduino type controllers or Raspberry Pi type SBCs.* Triggered by my fascination with these, I recently started taking a closer look at them in my spare time. I doubt that we will ever be able to squeeze programming an Arduino or a Pi into the already crowded syllabus, but these could be used in some of our demo applications. Also programming games on a Pi or developing robots based on Arduino boards could be fun topics of voluntary courses or extra-curricular clubs.

For now though, I am here purely a hobbyist and was drawn to this site and the book through the articles in The MagPi Magazine - the final article of the 12 paper series in the German print issue to be specific - which I had bought just for fun! However, coding my own game was something I always wanted to do and I also always planned to deepen my C/C++ skills. Doing this on a Raspberry Pi just seemed to add so much to the fun!  Also, I very much liked the writing and teaching style in the article, so I finally got the book. I will be moving houses soon, so I will only have time to work seriously with the material in a month time (hopefully).

By now, I actually PDF-printed all articles of Brian’s 12 series tutorial from the free English version of the MagPi and would be happy to share these here. Others might enjoy them as much as I do and they might also decrease the entry hurdle to this topic for others…

Thanks again to everyone for the warm welcome and I am looking forward to working through the articles and the book & sharing successes and failures here in the forum!

Cheers, Robert


* For example, we spent weeks and still could not get an RFID sensor to work with our type of Phoenix Contact Controller. The Controller types we have installed are a bit older models and Phoenix Contact does not have their own RFID sensors. So we ordered an IO-Link (supposedly new plug & play industry standard) RFID Sensor from Contrinex and connected that to a Phoenix Contact Modbus IO-Link Master. The later we were told interfaces with the sensor via IO-Link, while it communicates with the controller via ModBus protocol over the internal LAN. All in all we talk about equipment costing around 1000 €. But even after hours and hours we did not get it to work and could finally demonstrate that the IO-Link implementation in the IO-Link master was not complete. Supposedly this is now fixed in the new version of their IO-Link master, but there is neither a fix nor a firmware update for our device.
The crazy thing is, that using an Arduino Uno clone I was able to do read / write from/ to an RFID tag just after 2 hours… that being an absolute novice to Arduino with a cost of the hardware of less than 20 €…

[Brian Beuken]

Welcome Robert, looking forward to seeing you progress.

[web2gamedevconvert]

Hello,

I prefer to keep my name anonymous, but Brian seems to remember me as seen in our email exchange.
I used to be a student of Breda University of Applied Sciences (back then it was still called NHTV) 12 or so years ago, but then I dropped out, became an authorized 3rd party Nintendo game developer a month before having to leave, so I failed education and also failed console game development after releasing 2 mediocre games, so ended up in the web development industry first in the Netherlands, and nowadays in Japan.

But I have really grown to dislike the direction the modern web has been going into, so I'm frequently joining game development meetups in and around the Tokyo area to work on my own game and game engine from scratch, which so far I've been enjoying way more than even web development in plain Go using only the standard library.
I noticed that every time you get something to work in game development, it feels like an achievement, and you get motivated in doing even more.

And while in the web development space you get frown upon and insulted for not using Laravel, in the game development space you get cheered on for not using Unity, which is quite the difference.

[Brian Beuken]

of course I remember you, its upsetting that your web work is not being appreciated, but I am pleased you are finding the joy of game development again. Its what I tried to teach you and all other 1st years, that making a game is a process that takes some effort and requires commitment, which you can justifiably take pride in when done.

This forum is a little quiet at the moment as the book is now at its EOL, but there's a new edition coming and some more tutorials being worked on that will get it buzzing again.

In the meantime welcome back to games and keep pushing.