Learn C Games Programming

A command line editor in C

Posted on July 6, 2020June 30, 2020 by David

The screenshot is of an open source command line editor for Dos, Windows and Linux called TDE which is short for Thomson Davis Editor.

As the website says “TDE is a simple, public domain, multi-file/multi-window binary and text file editor written for IBM PCs and close compatibles running DOS, Win32 (console) or Linux. TDE is suitable for editing batch files, binary files, text files, and various computer language source code files (with configurable syntax highlighting). The only limit on the number and size of files that TDE can handle is the amount of memory. Likewise, the only limit on the number of windows is the amount of memory. There is no preset maximum number of files or windows that may be open at any one time.”

What interested me with this was that the editor should work for Linux. It includes a viewer mode where files are loaded read-only, file search (text or regular), can load files as binary, run a file as a Macro and display several source files with formatting. It certainly sounds a loty better than nano which is a terminal editor.

Using small delays in C with SDL ticks

Posted on July 5, 2020June 28, 2020 by David

Running a game at 60 frames per second means that handling things like key presses can be interesting. In the game, I call various SDL functions and via a giant switch statement set flags. Then later in the game loop, those flags are used to determine actions

So if you press Q to rotate the player ship anti-clockwise (counter-clockwise to yanks!) without some limiting thing, it would whizz round through 900 degrees each second. (There are 24 rotation angles for the ship, each 15 degrees. 60 x 15 = 900) .

I use a very simple technique to limit it. SDL has a function called SDL_GetTicks that returns the number of ticks since SDL was initialized in the game, i.e. when it started running. A tick is 1/1000th of a second, i.e. a millisecond. By calling this function twice, you can measure a time period. It’s not as precise as the nanosecond CPU clock that I use but for the kind of delays I’m talking about it is more than sufficient.

This is the code that is called each frame in the game loop.

void RotatePlayerShip() {
	if (rotateFlag && (SDL_GetTicks() - rotTimer > 40)) {
		rotTimer = SDL_GetTicks();
		if (rotateFlag == 1) // CounterClockwise 
		{
			Player.dir += 23;
			Player.dir %= 24;
		}
		else
			if (rotateFlag == 2) // Clockwise
			{
				Player.dir++;
				Player.dir %= 24;
			}
	}
}

Because the game loop syncs to the vertical fly-back, the time between two successive calls of this would be about 16.666 milliseconds. (=1000/60), but the check to see if 40 ticks have passed slows it down to 25 x 15 = 375 degrees rotation per second, i.e. just over one complete revolution which is more manageable than 900/360 = 2.5 full rotations. Plus if you wish rotation speed to be faster just change the 40 to a lower value.

This measured time delay is used quite a few times in the game. You could use it as a means to make the game get harder by having shorter delays on say aliens moving or firing.

How to Draw a circle in C

Posted on July 4, 2020June 28, 2020 by David

In the asteroids game, when you press the s button to put up a shield, it draws a circle. I must confess, I didn’t know how to draw a cuircle so looked it up and found an example on StackOverflow. You can use code from StackOverflow, licensed under a MIT license. I include the link to StackOverflow in the game code (in the chapter 48 zip file) in a comment.

Here’s the code in the game.

void DrawCircle(SDL_Renderer *Renderer, int _x, int _y, int radius)
{
	int x = radius - 1;
	int y = 0;
	int tx = 1;
	int ty = 1;
	int err = tx - (radius << 1); // shifting bits left by 1 effectively
								  // doubles the value. == tx - diameter
	while (x >= y)
	{
		//  Each of the following renders an octant (1/8th) of the circle
		SDL_RenderDrawPoint(Renderer, _x + x, _y - y);
		SDL_RenderDrawPoint(Renderer, _x + x, _y + y);
		SDL_RenderDrawPoint(Renderer, _x - x, _y - y);
		SDL_RenderDrawPoint(Renderer, _x - x, _y + y);
		SDL_RenderDrawPoint(Renderer, _x + y, _y - x);
		SDL_RenderDrawPoint(Renderer, _x + y, _y + x);
		SDL_RenderDrawPoint(Renderer, _x - y, _y - x);
		SDL_RenderDrawPoint(Renderer, _x - y, _y + x);

		if (err <= 0)
		{
			y++;
			err += ty;
			ty += 2;
		}
		else 
		{
			x--;
			tx += 2;
			err += tx - (radius << 1);
		}
	}
}

it’s as simple as that! To make it more interesting, it is called each frame with the shield throbbing by increasing the radius from 38 to 46 pixels by 2 then restarting at 38 again. Here’s the code for that. Note that when the shield energy is below 10, it no longer works.

void DisplayShield(SDL_Rect * target) {
	if (shieldFlag && shieldStrength >10) {
		SDL_SetRenderDrawColor(renderer, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff);
		DrawCircle(renderer, target->x + (SHIPWIDTH/2), target->y + (SHIPHEIGHT/2), shieldRadius);
		shieldRadius += 2;
		if (shieldRadius == 46) {
			shieldRadius = 38;
		}
	}
	if (shieldStrength < 100) {
		TextAt(target->x + 10, target->y + 58, sltoa(shieldStrength), 0.67f);
	}
}

The number under the player ship is the shield energy which drains while the shield is being displayed and recharges back up to 100 when you take your finger off the shield button. The number is only shown when the value is less than 100.

Open source repositories are worth a trawl

Posted on July 3, 2020June 28, 2020 by David

Repository — Image by Jagrit Parajuli from Pixabay

How many C language projects do you think there are on GitHub? If you put language:C in the search box, you get the astonishing figure of 980,752! That would take some trawling through.

There are other search terms you can use as well. Click the cheat sheet link on the bottom left of the page and it will popup a form explaining how to filter for various things. You are probably as well reading the GitHub search help. There’s a lot more to search there.

Confusingly the searches sometimes seem to come up with different values. I’ve seen it vary between 578,000 and over a million! Add game to the search and there’s only 31,426 projects! Only…

Should you use #pragma once?

Posted on July 2, 2020June 26, 2020 by David

The traditional way of using an include guard is to put all of the header inside a #ifdef like this.

#ifndef hr_time
  #define hr_time
  #include <linux/time.h>
  #include 

// rest of code here
#endif

However the modern way is to put this at the top of the header file.

#pragma once

And this seems supported by most compilers I’ve tried. Certainly Visual Studio C/C++, gcc and clang all work.

In fact when you add a new file and choose header in Visual Studio, it put the #pragma once in automatically for you!

Given that those three C compilers are the main ones I use, I much prefer this pragma and use it. But I would be interested in hearing of any C compilers that don’t use it.

Willing to take a Risc?

Posted on July 1, 2020June 26, 2020 by David

One of the understated and wrong assumptions about the Raspberry Pi is that you can try any flavour of Linux on it but Linux is really the only OS. It is true that most of the 20+ OS that you can try are based on Linux but there are a few that aren’t.

Windows IOT Core – a limited version of Windows
Risc OS – Created by the inventor of ARM
RaspBSD – More Unix than Linux.
Chromium OS. Turn your Pi into a Chromebook.

Of these, I think Risc OS looks the most interesting. It certainly isn’t Linux and it reminds me of the Archimedes, the first ARM computer.

Risc OS is 33 years old, it started in Cambridge in 1987 and is a descendant of the BBC Micro OS. And yes they do have a BBC BASIC available. There’s lot more background to it on this page but bear in mind that it and the comments date back to 2012. It has an ARM C compiler called Norcroft.

I won’t be oing any more with Risc OS, but thought it worth a mention. All of the stuff I’m doing will be on Linux OS.

Not. ARM is in the news because Apple have just announced that they will be transitioning from Intel CPUs to ARM over the next year or two.

How to find files in Ubuntu

Posted on June 30, 2020June 25, 2020 by David

In this I’m looking for the SDL2 header files. These are installed when you install libsdl2-dev as we saw yesterday.

While you can do it from a terminal with the find command, I find it easier to do it from the GUI. We need the Files utility which you get by clicking on this icon on the left toolbar. Now click Other Locations on the left and you should see something like this.

Click Computer. This will let you search through the entire Linux file tree.

Click on the magnifying glass icon and in the text box that appears type in sdl2 and press enter. It will spend a few seconds or minutes searching and then find a number of files/folders.

The first result was SDL2 and the usr/include is a big clue. Double-click on this and it will open on a folder full of header files!That’s what we want.

When you are configuring gcc/clang and want to add paths for include files like SDL2, it’s important to know where those files are located.

Publishing excerpts from my 2nd ebook

Posted on June 29, 2020June 25, 2020 by David

I’m changing horses in midstream so this won’t appear as it’s been done so far. Rather than let it go to waste, I’ll be publishing it in parts here. My next book will be Learn C Games Programming on the Raspberry Pi.

Installing SDL2 on Ubuntu/Debian

The SDL2 library is an open source library available from the libsdl.org website. However in Ubuntu it’s fairly easy to install. We do need not just the binary files but the headers so we can include them.
On Ubuntu (and Debian system) the apt tool maintains a cache of files. You can search these from a terminal with this command.
apt-cache search libsdl2
On my PC this output.
libsdl2-2.0-0 – Simple DirectMedia Layer
libsdl2-dev – Simple DirectMedia Layer development files
libsdl2-doc – Reference manual for libsdl2
libsdl2-gfx-1.0-0 – drawing and graphical effects extension for SDL2
libsdl2-gfx-dev – development files for SDL2_gfx
libsdl2-gfx-doc – documentation files for SDL2_gfx
libsdl2-image-2.0-0 – Image loading library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 2, libraries
libsdl2-image-dev – Image loading library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 2, development files
libsdl2-mixer-2.0-0 – Mixer library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 2, libraries
libsdl2-mixer-dev – Mixer library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 2, development files
libsdl2-net-2.0-0 – Network library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 2, libraries
libsdl2-net-dev – Network library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 2, development files
libsdl2-ttf-2.0-0 – TrueType Font library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 2, libraries
libsdl2-ttf-dev – TrueType Font library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 2, development files

We’ll eventually need libsdl2, libsdl2-image for graphics support and libsdl2-mixer for sounds. We’ll also need libsdl2-dev so let’s start with that. Run this command . It will probably ask for your password.

sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev

That downloaded and installed 73 MB of files. More to follow

A large collection of ARM links

Posted on June 28, 2020June 23, 2020 by David

ARM being the CPU brand inside Raspberry Pis. This is a collection of talks and links to articles about the ARM architecture, concurrency, performance and way too much other stuff to list. There’s a lot in there and I defy anyone with the vaguest interest not to find something of interest.

I’m not a hardware person myself, but dipping into stuff like this can yield benefits. Remember the CPU in the Pi 4B has four cores. If you are writing software that just runs one one thread then it’s like driving a car with a four cylinder engine but its only firing on one. And if you manage to write software to use all four cores, do you know how to avoid false sharing? (Yes it’s a thing!)

Added the sources of another game

Posted on June 27, 2020June 23, 2020 by David

This was a text mode game, my idea being to do something like the old Star Trek BASIC game but better. I called it Star Empires and it’s on GitHub, just follow the link to GitHub on the C Games sources link.

The zip file includes both C and a C++ version. Both will compile with Visual C++ 2019 Community edition. There is a minor compile error, a = that should be == in the C++ source. I ill get round to fixing it and uploading a replacement.

I do get a bit of pleasure (more like an exercise in masochism!) converting old BASIC games to C. I’m looking at the two Creative Computing books (and while 95% of the games are not exactly great (well lets be generous and say they were good 45 years ago!) but there’s one or two that might be worth the effort! I bought these in 1982 lost those and then bought them a few years back again.

Plus when you think how the games industry has matured since the late 70s and 80s, and many of those early programmers will have cut their teeth on games like that before learning more advanced stuff, so lets not be too harsh!