Tommy Reddish
Mid-Term Report 2/24/08
The process in creating an interface between the game engine and the user has been up a
search for developing concepts to enable me to deliver what I want to accomplish for this
program. So far I develop methods to configure the keyboard and joystick in a graphical way for
the user, but to combine them into one working program was the problem. Of course, I can just
create a multiple thread program to solve this problem, but the way allegro opens it’s window
makes it hard to keep it within one working program, so I’ll have to create separate windows in
order to display my interface environment in the way I wanted. With this change I would have
to handle bitmaps files myself. Because I wasn’t expecting this problem with the allegro
program, I will only focus on using the windows platform to develop my program, and if I have
time I’ll develop it for the Mac and Linux platforms also. Using the windows platform and their
C libraries like windows.h, would make creating multiple windows within threads easier and
faster. Up until this point, I’ve have been using vi to code it along with the standard c and
allegro libraries to create my source code, but using the Dev c++ compiler with other libraries for
the windows platform will speed up my development time.
As far as hardware issues, more attention is needed in developing graphically for the Mac
using standard C. I could use XCode witch makes it easier, but that would add another factor,
I’ll have to focus on. The windows platform as I stated earlier is easier to developer for because
of all the libraries and tutorials I found on the Internet to help guide me through the topics that
are closely related to my project. I’ve haven’t tested the linux platform yet, so I’ll have to just
focus on the windows platform for right now.
The timeline I have to complete a prototype of this program is a little over a month, and if
I concentrate solely on the windows platform as I stated earlier, I will be able to have a prototype
inplace with a limited amount of features. For the first month and a half I’ve been reading up on
