Now, after some delays and internet dropouts, this is finally in the correct section - enjoy

Now, roughly a week ago I wrote this: http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com...planning-stage and I got roughly a tonne and a half of feedback so I'll now write up a quick sequel based on feedback and for completions' sake.

Thats one of the reasons WHY you'll want to be doing some planning. Here HOW.

I am myself, a pen and paper person. So I'd grab a notebook, and start off with a list, in order, of what the program to do - it ...

First a little updated word that this is now OBSOLETE in the most part - prometheus has since been re-written to not use SDL at all as well as many architectural changes for better performance, this will be updated as soon as the rewrite is complete - the source for this in the SVN repository at sourceforge is under the GEN1/ Directory. Sorry for any inconvenience

A little while ...

Multi-threading Part 1

Welcome to another of my articles. This time its multithreading. A topic which seems to fill a lot of programmers with dread, but if used properly it can produce some great results. Traditionally it was the realm of high end servers with multiple CPU's, but with the big two now producing multicore chips that are accessible to gamers, this is a topic which will soon become something every games developer should be considering.
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As of version 0.2, there are two twins of each release of prometheus: a stable sdl based branch and its counterpart - the unstable but high performance twin written in OpenGl. I have adopted this practice to better suit the needs of users of Prometheus. If your code is slow, try the OpenGl version. If it crashes, try the Sdl version.

Of course, if I am to release Prometheus successfully, I will need a wealth of documentation and tutorials. That is work; almost as much as thinking up what prometheus should do and what beginners would want to do along with how to achieve it. Thus development is slow. However, I hope to enlighten the community to the current progress of the Video unit that has been my main focus so ...

Welcome to Tripping The Class Fantastic

Welcome to the first of what I'm hoping will be a fairly regular programming column. I'm not going to stick with one subject, I'm going to try and cover a variety of topics, some will be more detailed than others but they will all be based on my personal experiences.

So who am I and what qualifies me to write about software engineering? I guess a lot of that is answered by the interview Eriken did with my partner in crime and I. In terms of employment, at the moment, by day my official job title is 'Research and Development Engineer'... sounds good, but translated... I write software to control and manage cash handling/ticketing machines (Tools- Delphi 7, MySQL and others), I assist with the development of prototype machines (Tools- soldering iron, screwdrivers, nut runners, crimp guns and a bag full of other bits and pieces) and most enjoyable of all, I get to go out on site and repair/upgrade machines (Tools- patience, mobile phone, and a nice fast company car). By night however, I work on The Outer Reaches. A multiplayer browser based space strategy game that runs entirely on our own web server platform.

I've been a software engineer full time since 1995, prior to that I was doing contract work whilst studying Computer Science. I don't consider myself to be a guru, so I may make mistakes. If you spot one, please let me know and lets have a chat about it. Only by realising your weak points can you fully understand what you need to learn.

If you have any questions or comments (or, heaven forbid, you find an error) you can drop me a mail at athena at outer hyphen reaches dot com.

So, introductions over, I'm going to start off with a short ...

Introduction

As promised I will now show you how we place our tanks on our battlefield. However, to do this nicely there are a few things we should consider.
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