Well, after having a bit of spare time, and a decent computer in front of me, I got around to releasing a new version of this old friend. :-)

For the uninitiated, C-Dogs is an arcade/action shoot-em-up, supporting solo, cooperative and death-match play. Originally for coded for real-mode DOS by Ronny Wester, Jeremy Chin and I ported it to SDL in 2003, and these days I maintain it.

Most visible is the faster scaler, and multiple resolution support. Previously C-Dogs SDL could only run at 320×200, and could be scaled up with a significant performance hit. Now we can scale 2x, 3x and 4x and support resolutions of up to 800×600 (before scaling is applied).

There is now a windows binary, as I sat down and got it compiling and running using Visual C++ Express (which I found to be a very capable IDE).

Interested? Head to the download page. There are Linux and Windows binaries, and older ones for DOS and Mac OS X, as well as links to ports to other platforms (DS, GP2X, Amiga, etc). And of course the source is there, too!

PS: If you’re a Mac developer, and feel generous, feel free to create and send me an OS X package and disk image.

UPDATE: Oops! The version of C-Dogs is 0.4!

Well I’m most definitely chuffed: C-Dogs SDL has finally made its way into the Gentoo Portage tree!

Which is cool after waiting 8 months… hehe…

So if you’re using Gentoo, and wish to test it out, simply:

$ echo "games-arcade/cdogs-sdl *-" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
$ emerge games-arcade/cdogs-sdl
$ cdogs

For more details, check out the Gentoo Online Package Database Page for cdogs-sdl.

Now I really should get around to releasing 0.4 while I’m at it… ;-)

This one is just a quick status update!

China

Well, I’m heading off on the 13th! The flight is to Beijing via Singapore. I’ve decided I shall try and visit Tibet at some point during my travels, which should be very rewarding.

The general travel plan is to follow the east coast, around to the south, and around; then enter Tibet, leave tibet; then follow the silk road route into China; then perhaps back to Beijing, Shanghai or Hong Kong… However, it’s still up in the air as yet.

In the more immediate future, I’m doing a “teaching conversational english” [introductory] course next week. I wonder how useful it will be!

C-Dogs SDL

I’m hopefully going to do another release before I head off to China. Things to look forward to are:

• A Windows binary! It seems to work on XP…
• Fast scaling and multiple resolution support — you can now use C-Dogs on a variety of monitors/resolutions with ease
• Smarter timing, which doesn’t require threads
• And lots of cleanups and small bug-fixes

The first point will be of interest to most! :)

I’m not sure what will happen with C-Dogs SDL while I’m away… I’ll probably have to put things on hold for a while. Feel free to submit patches, however. :-D