Rob C, Making FoxPro Misbehave I was watching a YouTube video explaining how the original DOOM fire effect works. No fancy animation. No video files. Just 37 colours, a grid of numbers and some very clever mathematics. And naturally, I thought⊠âHang on. Could I do that in Visual FoxPro?â Well, apparently, yes. đ We’ve now got a working procedural … Read more
The extraordinary brilliance â and occasional spectacular stupidity â of AI-assisted software development. I’ve been a software developer for decades, primarily working with Visual FoxPro. Yes, Visual FoxPro. That ancient Microsoft development environment that supposedly died years ago but stubbornly refuses to go away. Recently, I’ve been using AI to help build something rather ridiculous: … Read more
How a small rendering bug made a surprisingly big difference to Galactic Gladiators. Sometimes the biggest improvements to a game don’t come from adding new features. They come from fixing something that’s been broken for ages. For quite some time, the subtitles in Galactic Gladiators have been behaving rather strangely. They’d appear for a split … Read more
Galactic Gladiators now has a music-reactive graphic equaliser in its pause menu. Yes. A pause menu. In a space game. Written in Visual FoxPro. Essential development work, obviously. Weâd talked about this before. The bars were already there, bouncing around and looking rather pleased with themselves. But they werenât actually following the music. Getting them … Read more
One of the features I’m particularly pleased with in Galactic Gladiators is controller support. The game uses Microsoft’s XInput interface, with DS4Windows allowing PlayStation controllers to be recognised as compatible controllers. This gives the game proper controller support, including vibration effects for explosions, collisions and other suitably dramatic moments. Everything worked nicely on my development … Read more
The continuing adventures of building an arcade game in Visual FoxPro 9. It’s been a little while since my last Galactic Gladiators update, but that doesn’t mean things have been quiet. Quite the opposite. The game has continued to grow, with more features, more polish and, inevitably, more opportunities for things to go spectacularly wrong. … Read more
There comes a point when âit worksâ is no longer quite enough. The ships move. The weapons fire. The health goes down. But does landing a shot feel satisfying? Does a huge enemy ship look as though itâs actually being damaged? Does its retreat give you a moment to enjoy what youâve achieved? Thatâs where … Read more
BARF’s voice has bothered me for ages. He’s gradually become much more than a way of delivering instructions in Galactic Gladiators. He complains. He panics. He’s sarcastic. Occasionally he’s even impressed by the player â although he’d probably rather not admit it. The problem was that his voice never really reflected any of that. Tonight … Read more
The shield cell in Galactic Gladiators had a problem: it only absorbed one hit. In an asteroid field full of tempting salvage, that didnât give you much reason to pick it up. It now has four charges. The cargo display shows SHIELD [ 4/4 ], counting down with each impact. That makes finding one feel … Read more
Iâve spent the last few weeks making a series of changes to LawnProâs route planner. You can now choose a start point, select the calls you want to include, and set a finishing call. Behind the scenes, LawnPro uses each callâs geographic coordinates to calculate its distance as the crow flies from the start point. … Read more