So my friend, the lead programmer of Elysian Shadows, the game we're working on, was wanting to look into coding it for the PSP. So far it's gonna be windows, linux, mac (probably) and dreamcast. If anyone knows of any good PSP game dev forums, lemme know either via massassi, irc, or the random instant messenger handles you may have.

Also, we're looking to pick up another sprite artist to do characters. If anyone's interested let me know and I'll work with you (right now I'm doing characters and it's extremely ****ing slow going).

Thanks guys.

Hey that shiz has come a long way

Game dev on the PSP? I don't understand.

I can't believe I watched so much of that video. Ugh.

Btw, you can dev for the iphone /ipod touch using normal C++. You just need a little objective C/C++ to get it going.

Speaking from experience, that little bit of Objective-C is really, really easy. They have iphone templates that basically give you an opengl rendering context and you can do whatever the hell you want after that. The suckiest part is that you have to pay $100 to test your crap on a device (iphone/ipod touch), but if you are serious about releasing a game, the $100 is really no big deal.

Yeah, we'll be alright.

And the game HAS come a long way. Right now the programmers are looking at developing it for other platforms because, to be honest, their jobs are getting close to done. Art is the only department that's behind because until recently the team was always in some form of turmoil or another. I'm looking for another sprite artist or conceptual artist so guys, feel free to apply on the forums if you're at all interested.

Zanardi, looking at you buddy.

Seriously though, I'm trying to get some help so we can push this thing forward. We're starting to get a big following (we have a guy from EA and a guy from Harmonix who are avid fans of our movies and have offered to help us get jobs when we're finished with this) and we've got a good bit of momentum. We're all really dedicated to this game and making sure that it comes out and is everything we want it to be.

I appreciate the help so far guys, hopefully someone knows of a good forum for PSP development.

OMG, nobody on their forum knows a damn thing about C++ or good program design. It's all singleton this and c-string that.

There's a lot of kids just learning C/C++ who are just getting into game development and probably finished their "Hello World" program less than 6 months ago. There are a lot of people who DO know their ****--we have a guy from EA and someone from Harmonix who regularly follow our videos and are on our forum. For every guy who knows what he's doing though there's a thousand who have no clue.

Yeah yeah I know. I was just shaking my head at that 'forget strings, jump on the char* wagon!' thread.

Lock yourself in your room for 100 days

And then freak out, destroy my own studio, and whine? Because I made an ugly game and I want to release it on the DS even though it only uses one screen, when I could just release it on windows and people could actually play it? Also because I look vaguely Japanese but am actually just an American brat who wishes he was Japanese?

Pretty much

DevKit Pro is a compiler and library package for several consoles including the PSP, you might wanna look into that.

Not sure if you can code cross-console with it (I don't think so).

I barely program and that annoyed me.

What size are the sprites? Can we see an example of the art you've already done? Also, a friend of mine has done some stuff with PSP and he told me to send you here.

Oh, have you seen the thread about "what's more powerful, C/C++ or C#"

It's

32x64 pixels, width x height, and I'd rather you show your style. If it seems like it can at all mesh with the one we've got working we can work something out, if not then no harm no foul.

Sage advice : The only acceptable negative answer for an application is a polite no thanks or a nice form letter explaining that the candidate is 'not right for their organization'. Not hostility; that's just unprofessional.

If you're thinking about it, don't bother. Their attitude is 'why should we let you work for us?' but they just don't have the portfolio to back that attitude up.


The idea that a language is 'more powerful than' another doesn't even make sense. They're both turing complete. They both can do anything the other can. Now if they were asking 'which is better suited to style of programming X', we could actually get somewhere.

You're an idiot btw, JM. They acted with hostility and arrogance towards you because of your dumbass comments on this thread (which they saw before responding to you), and your ignorant attitude towards the game/team (speaking of, how do you know the portfolio if you haven't read up on the game, haven't checked out the forums, and have only seen one random video out of ~50+). I doubt you know what the programmers have accomplished or where we are in the stage of development.

I'm not trying to brag or be conceited but the team is very solid and we've got quite a following. We have that attitude because we've let people mosey into the team before and it's never ended well. Letting someone casually attempt to do work on the game ends up with them not holding up their end of the bargain, us kicking them out, animosity, and drama (and maybe a few attempts at taking down our forums/site from random script kiddies). There's definitely a bit of a prickly demeanor to the team reviewing new applications, but the fact that you really had nothing to show as an example of your work and acted like a douchebag here didn't help your case.

If you wanna apply I'd suggest not being a dick and having a bit of work to show. Even if your **** isn't up to the standards we've created you'll still get a polite "Thanks but no thanks" if that's the case. Otherwise you'll probably get the shaft like JM enjoyed for being a douche. For example, if Emon wanted to apply I'm pretty sure they'd laugh in his face. But the thing is, if you're going to laugh at a team for their "inabilities" or shortcomings or whatever it is you're laughing at them for, turning around and trying to join the team isn't such an intelligent idea.

Most people are smarter than that though (most being the key word apparently).


Yeah, unfortunately for every well established competent programmer there is on those boards there's 50 kids who wanna be a "game programmer" when they grow up and still don't know what cin does. It's the nature of the business though, from what I can tell.

That thread scares me. There is little reason to use C-style strings in a modern C++ program. Not to mention that the example function posted is totally incorrect. Someone should tell the poor kid about asprintf().

Where are the "well established competant programmers" I've been hearing about. I see this avansc guy posting everywhere, he has the title "Respected Programmer" but he doesn't know a goddamn thing.

That's based on postcount. Most of them don't really wanna make themselves known to the public forum because they'd get mauled with requests on how to fix someone's tic tac toe game and thousands of questions of how to get into the industry and other ignorant questions. I don't blame them, so I'll respect their privacy, but like I said we have a guy who works at harmonix (actually does the drum parts for Rock Band's DLC) and a guy who works for EA (EDIT: Medal of Honor series--apparently the whole series. Impressive.) who follow the game, have talked to our lead man and even offered to help him get a job on at both places when he graduates college (which is still a couple years away). There's also a few guys who just do some mundane bull**** for a living, but are still career Software Engineers (at least I know one is). The point is, there ARE a lot of stupid kids on there who may make the entirety of the site look stupid--but you have to view it the same way you view youtube (especially considering that's where 90% of our fanbase is from); 99% of the people on there suck at life. 1% don't and make awesome **** that we enjoy.

Actually I just wanted a copy of your application so I could make fun of it.

Kudos to the bulk of the team - the gameplay programming looks pretty solid already.

The current state of artwork tells me that you guys aren't spending enough time on project management. I honestly haven't been following the videos so I don't know if you're already doing these things, but you should get a design document and a CMS together. If you're working with more than a couple of people it should be one person's entire job to maintain documentation and crack the whip - as in, they shouldn't be allowed to work on anything else.

Trust me on this one. Seriously.



There are two reasons to use C strings:

The main reason to still use C-style strings is localization. The total absence of localization support is probably the biggest short-sighted misfeature in all of C++. You have STL locales, sure, but those only cover built-in cases (like making std::bool output "oui" instead of "true" or whatever).

The second reason is to avoid excessive copies. It's perfectly safe and fast to return a preallocated const char* string from a function as long as you remember to free the memory later.
Returning a STL string involves creating many duplicates of the object: the initial temporary object, allocating a new string in memory and assigning the temporary string to it, and then once again the string you returned is a temporary object that has to be assigned or else it will disappear.

This debate is a classic example of a situation where, if someone knew enough to choose C strings over STL strings, they would never need to be told this information.

Another example of this would be the thread "A useful hint (sleep(0))." The person describes, within, a situation where their game is using up 100% of his CPU time. He correctly guesses that Sleep(0) will stop his game from using 100% of his CPU time but he doesn't understand why.
Fun exercise for the reader: try calling timeBeginPeriod(1) before you enter your game loop. Does Sleep(0) still work as intended? Why not? If your CPU usage is reduced to 25%, what is your CPU doing for the remaining 75% of the time?

This implies a fairly limited perspective of 'powerful.'

A lathe is described as the most useful tool you can ever own. As long as you have all of the necessary materials you can make anything using a lathe, including any other tool. The problem is that, if all you have is a lathe, you're about 300 tools away from being able to make a table saw.

C++ is a lathe. C# is a table saw.

I would estimate that about 20% of the time on any non-trivial C++ project is spent implementing a subset of Objective C.

Talking about C/C++ as a single programming language is a pretty sure sign that the person knows neither C nor C++. C++ isn't a superset of C, it's a fork.

These same people are under the impression that C# is somehow related to C++ and not just an attempt to hijack the name.

The coding structures are similar IIRC because it's a lot like java, so the connection could be made if you hadn't really taken the time to educate yourself (this is a vague recollection of past conversations on the subject so feel free to let me know if I'm wrong on this score). And realize a good majority of these people are, or have the general intelligence of 16 year olds.

EDIT: And Joncy, yeah, I know we need a director for the artwork at least, but it's hard explaining that to these kids. They wanted the actual game design portion to be a collaborative effort from everyone, but the way it's beginning to look that just doesn't seem like it's gonna work.

I'd like to get you together with our main programmer sometime and let you two talk for a bit. I think you'd end up getting along rather well--he's extremely intelligent and you've had some experience in indie development. If you're at all interested swing by the IRC channel we set up (irc.freenode.net #elysian_shadows) and hit up GyroVorbis, or email him or something. Maybe you could give him some pointers about how to organize everything so we could get a better setup where more work is getting done (at least in the art portion).

Agreed. Localization in C++ is pretty crummy. You could return a const std::string & to prevent excessive copying in some cases, but it is not always safe. I suppose this is just one more reason why the move semantics in C++0X are more than welcome. I still prefer to use std::string in C++ whenever possible, but I can understand the need to use C strings (a video game is probably a good example as to when this is warranted, since performance is paramount).



Probably a whole lot of context switches.