Marmalade #3 - Getting over it

The Hump of course. I am finally getting over the initial learning curve associated with any SDK for any machine, or machines.

Now in this post i want to talk a small amount about actually working with Marmalade.

In the previous posts i mentioned setting up Marmalade on my PC, i also tlak about the issues i have had with REAL asimple tasks. BAH! Well now i know more and am learning all the time, i can say more about working with this system.

1. If you remember i had issues getting the simplest asset into the project. Well no longer. In fact i now use what they term as resource groups. These are great for organising your assets into various groups for say levels or maybe cut scenes etc. Though i currently load everything in one go, I have still organised the group, in fact i have oprganised a couple of groups, one within the other.

2. I got the GxFont working for my game. This is the font handling side of the SDK and i have to say quite feature rich. The main issue i had initialy was getting a Font to use. Well it was easy, i can say with certainty that it was very easy. All ya have to do is use the provided tool and whammo ya get the two files ya need per font. Then using them is also really straight forward and easy. I was very happy with the way it turned out. Then.. i realised that the strings being rendered were all below the layers of the sprites and this was an issue. I really needed them to be in rendered overdraw order. Well a quick post on the forum and a short time later i had my answer. It was as expected a simple answer. They use batching to render like or similar mode operations, like drawing sprites for example. This is a great thing, as i believe in batching tasks myself. So all i had to do was add a single line of code whenever i was going to draw some text, and hey presto it was all aok.

3. My only current problem using the Iw2D for rendering sprites is i cannot seem to scale the X and Y independantly. Which seems a little odd. I hope at some point soon to locate the way to do this, or i shall ask for the feature to be added. I see no logical reason for it not to exist. Still, only a small problem.

4. Sound looks like it will be a doddle to get into the game as i will use www.DrMop.com tutorial for this purpose, and glancing through that makes the task look really easy.

5. Next up will be the handling of the Ad api, and that will bring me into a whole new area of using the SDK with an extension api.

Next Blog post will be what happened when i wanted to test my game not in the simulator but on the iPhone for the first time.

Good luck,
Da Voodoochief