Rik Griffin <nos...@denbridgemarine.com>

I'm please to announce new release of a RISC OS game, and a new version of
the game development library, Popcorn.

The game is Hive - which is actually an enhanced version of the original,
now with 32 bit graphics and hardware acceleration on the Iyonix platform.
Not only is Hive a full game in its own right, as source code is provided,
it also serves as a detailed demonstration of how to use the Popcorn
library.

Hive can be downloaded from http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rik.griffin/

(Hive requires a couple of third party modules, see notes at the bottom of
this post).

Popcorn is a game development library to aid in writing RISC OS games in C
(or other APCS compatible languages). It provides several useful features
including:

- A resource manager, for easy loading of data (graphics, sounds etc).
- A fast sprite plotter, for 8 or 32 bpp screen modes, with clipping,
  and alpha blending.
- Table based handling of game objects, with automatic collision detection,
  and "callbacks" to the application for objects that need attention.
- Hardware independent high resolution timer.
- Hardware acceleration on the Iyonix platform.
- Various other functions, like key handling and logging.

Full source code is provided. Also there's a tutorial explaining how to
write a very simple game ("Pong"). There's a StrongHelp format manual too,
which supports keyword lookup.

Popcorn is available from http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rik.griffin/

Popcorn and Hive were originally written by Matthew Bloch and described in
a series of articles in Acorn User several years ago.

Both Hive and Popcorn are still "works in progress", if you have any
problems or comments please contact me. I'd suggest followups to this post
concerning development go to csa.programmer and those concerning the game
itself go to csa.games.

If anyone actually wants to write a game using Popcorn, please get in touch
via email or newsgroups if you have any questions, I'd be more than happy
to offer help and advice.

Notes - modules required:

Hive needs the THSound module to play sounds. This is available from

  http://www.snowstone.org.uk/riscos/realh/index.html

However I just discovered that the module on that page is not 32 bit
compatible. The source code is there so you can recomplile it if you have
the facilities. I've contacted the owner of that page and hopefully a 32
bit binary will be available soon.

Hive also needs the HAL26 module to run on 26 bit hardware (ie RiscPCs,
A7000s). HAL26 is available from

  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~theom/riscos/othersoft.html

Popcorn also uses several modules for hardware acceleration on the Iyonix
platform, these are "AppAcc" and "IntelDMA", these modules are bundled with
Hive as their licences allow this. Popcorn also uses the "HALTimer" module
which too is bundled with Hive.

--
Rik Griffin
Standard disclaimer, not speaking for anyone but myself, blah blah
(Reply-To may be broken: use rik dot griffin at denbridge marine dot com)