Could someone (with a PC) do me a HUGE favor? I'm trying to see if my opengl game will run on a computer without GLUT installed.

What you have to do:
- Go here
- Download both files to the same location
- Try to run the .exe
- Let me know what happens

It shouldn't take too long to do...and I'd really appreciate it.

You should seriously check out a virtual machine program. It allows you to run other operating systems (or even the same one) in a virtual machine, which means it has its own installation and everything. It makes testing software really nice. Most people at my work use VMWare, but it costs money, so you could try VirtualBox, which is free.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Sorry I can't test your program, I'm at work and we use Linux here.

Well, I tried it. I have windows XP Professional installed in a Virtual Machine inside VMWare. It's a basic install of Windows and Office, I haven't done anything other than that. I downloaded both files to my desktop and ran them, and it was sort of like a game thing where I could control a moving green thing.

I got to 192 and it froze right in the middle of one of the eating explosion effects.

It'll work as long as the GLUT runtime is present, which in this case, it is.

Why are you using GLUT anyway? SDL is like, better.

I can only get one before I die each time. The thing moves so stinking fast. I wonder if it's a problem with vmware or something.

Maybe you just suck.

It's possible.

It does seem to move ridiculously fast.

Sounds more like framerate-based game logic.

Thanks to everyone who replied here. I know very little about all of this stuff and this kind of feedback helps a lot.

I'm guessing that the problem is something in my frame rate logic. I'll look a bit more into it. Does it run at normal speeds for everyone else?

I think the usual way of doing it is to track time between frame renderings and adjust the animations/movements according to the amount of time that has passed. That way, it doesn't matter how fast/slow the computer is, the movement is the same no matter what (and if you have a slow computer, you get "jumpy" movement).

I though had a system that would a) render frames whenever the computer was able to and b) update elements' positions, etc. at a set interval. Apparently that's not working as expected.

Again, thanks for everyone's help. I always feel bad making others do this kind of testing for me...

But if not mess around with silly stuff, what else would we do with our time? I did it because I was curious if anything opengl would even run on windows inside vmware on linux.

crashed for me at 192 also..

other than that, awesome. Very fun. (might be nice to have different difficulty settings though)

And sometimes the dots or bigger.. Is that intentional?

That crash is because of my array size...it tries to assign values outside of the current array's bounds. It should be an easy fix, I just have to get around to doing it.

The bigger dots are intentional. I thought it would be nice to change things up once in a while, so dots will randomly be larger/easier to get.

Worked fine for me, I like the fast pace. From a gameplay perspective, you should have a slight delay before touching a wall kills you, otherwise it's impossible to get squares that are created near a wall.

For those of you willing/wanting to try it out again, here's an updated version:
https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/vandeweghe/web/snake

(I kept the old .exe there, the new one is SnakeWalls.exe)

Things I changed:
- MUCH better algorithm for moving the snake. This one runs faster and takes up less memory
- Added 5 or so different levels to keep things interesting
- I looked into the timing issues Brian was having. Everything is written correctly, it's updating frames based on the system time, so I'm not sure what could be causing the problem (it seems to work fine on all the computers I've tested it on)