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General => SFML projects => Topic started by: JohnMcF on December 11, 2009, 08:59:49 pm

Title: Planet Generator
Post by: JohnMcF on December 11, 2009, 08:59:49 pm
Hi,

I'm writing a program which procedurally generates the surface of a planet. Currently, I'm working in OS X but aim to port to Ubuntu and XP when I get the opportunity. (I'll probably also put the code out there at some point once it's a bit more polished.)

From SFML, it uses Graphics, Windows and System libs to do the windowing, keyboard I/O and multi-threading. I'm also using ODE for physics and collision detection. Here's the page:

http://john.mcfarlane.name/planets/

I'm running on a MacBook Air 2,1 which raises three issues:

Firstly, support for Linux is terrible on this computer. If you want to run linux on a Mac, don't buy an Air! Otherwise, I'd have a Linux binary build already.

Secondly, I don't have any confirmation that my demo runs on any other mac including 32-bit Intel machines. If anyone can/cannot get this to run, I'd really appreciate the feedback about your system. IIRC, you'll need 10.5 or above.

Thirdly, as a long-time SDL user, I'm very impressed with SFML so far. It has a very thoroughly thought-through interface - very highly engineered without being obfuscated. However, the only real decider for me was drawing text to screen straight out of the box. You don't get very far into a graphics app before wanting to display the FPS and this really frustrates me in SDL.

If I have one criticism it's the size of the resultant app. My binary is - perhaps - 200k and the final download is about 9MB. Nearly all of this is the SFML frameworks. I might try incorporating the SFML source into my project some time to see if that helps.

Thank you and keep up the good work. :)
John
Title: Planet Generator
Post by: Luinechor on December 11, 2009, 10:30:26 pm
Hello,

I just ran the application on my MacBook Aluminium 13" (like the new pro) on Mac OS X 10.5. It's working fine. No errors. No problems till now. Nice work. (:

Greetings,
Luinechor
Title: Planet Generator
Post by: JohnMcF on December 12, 2009, 12:44:47 am
Thanks. That's good to know.

BTW, some useful keys for navigating are:
- A, S, D, W, Space, RShift to move
- Q, E, Arrow keys to turn
- number keys to change move speed.