mono

Just a quick note--we've dropped Sharplike 0.4.0 over at my open-source software site. It's quickly approaching what I'd call "full featured," and while I wouldn't yet release a game with it, it's in a state where you could easily begin development. We're pulling a feature freeze for 0.5.0 to fully document the code we have now and to provide some examples and demos, and 0.6.0 (which shouldn't take us too long) will add most of the remaining major features needed to push a really polished roguelike out the door.

Personally, I'm excited--I want to get started on developing the game I started this project for! (Spoilers: it involves zombies, procedurally generated cities, and a lot of sandbox gameplay.)

As before, it's both .NET Framework 2.0 and Mono 2.4.4 (and newer...I hope) compatible.

Recently I started a smallish .NET/Mono with some friends, to build a library to make writing roguelikes a little easier.

It's...uh, kind of progressed beyond that. And we finally decided to push a release to people. The below is copied over from the announcement I put up on our semi-not-really-official site for it. I wouldn't be releasing it if I didn't think it was cool. (I know that it runs on Mono 2.4.4. Right now we're all building in VS2010 so I don't claim it'll work on later versions, but if it doesn't please file a bug.)

Features include:

Spent most of yesterday reinventing the wheel for XnaTouch (an awesome, awesome API on top of MonoTouch that makes this stuff way easier than maybe it should be), but it was worth it.

I'm not particularly interested in Objective-C for its own sake, but I want to be just like everyone else and make TEN BEELION DOLLARS on the back of the iPhone. I've been trying to play around with MonoTouch--which is, to borrow a technical term, really really cool--but it seems to require enough foreknowledge of Objective-C and Cocoa that I have to learn that first.

And I have a question. Well, two questions.

Question the first: How drunk were they when they came up with this insane language?

Question the second: What made the XCode developers decide they hated other people and wanted to punish them?

I had a guest article published today on Boycott "Boycott Novell!". Cue shameless self-promotion.

Also, somewhat unrelated: life is a lot nicer when you don't read Slashdot.

Originally found here, and re-captioned:

OK, so while I love Linux as a server environment, it gives me the creeping horrors on the desktop and I stick to Windows there. This means I need a terminal emulator, and a good one would be nice. I've used the old stand-by, PuTTY, for approximately two centuries. (Or about ten years, but who's counting?) It's very functional software: does pretty much anything you need. No complaints about that, and I'm grateful to Simon Tatham and company for making such handy software. But it's always had some very un-Windows behaviors, and they're a real pain. Some are understandable, although could be worked around (for example, Ctrl-C is used as an abort command on the terminal side of things, but if you're highlighting text, it's not exactly rocket science that you want to copy that text when you hit Ctrl-C) with a little thinking. Some are not, and after having eight different PuTTY windows on my toolbar¹ today, I had enough of this crap.

I dig a lot of electronic music, and I'm interested in the guts of the technology used to make it. I was looking around the interwebs a few minutes ago for a copy of the Virtual Studio Technology specification for audio plugins (used by Ableton Live, my digital audio workstation of choice) and stumbled upon something way cool: VST.NET, an implementation of the specification for use with .NET applications. Ihaven't checked out Mono for VSTs on Mac OS X, but I'm curious.