Category Archives: Open Source

Snowball now using SharpDX

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For a little while, I was thinking about giving up on Snowball. When you’re one guy working on a project that gets to a certain size, it can start to feel a little daunting. You find a bug, and you feel like you need to fix it asap. I don’t know if anyone reading this has actually tried Snowball, but if you have, please comment to let me know. It would encourage me.

I decided to switch Snowball over to SharpDX. It’s not that I was unhappy with SlimDX, it just seems like there is a lot more innovation happening on the SharpDX side. I also like the fact that I can include the DLLs in the repository so end users don’t have to download another dependency in order to compile it. The Win8 stuff is also quite interesting, although the SlimDX guys say they are working on that.

I plan to set a road map soon for what I want to include the first release of Snowball. Music and Pixel Shaders are high the list. I’ve experimented with implementing a UI library but I think I want to push that back for a later release.

Of Broken Repositories and Grief

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Sometime at the beginning of this week my Codeplex repository for Snowball busted. I wrote them and hoped they would fix it asap. As of this writing it is still not fixed and I have not had any response from them.

So I then decided to try and pump my source code up to github. Although I was successful with the help of hg-git, eventually my local repository became corrupt. All the code in the working directory was ok of course, but I was unable to make any commits to the repo. I pulled the latest backup I had locally of the repository and decided just to fork off from there.

I then decided to give Bitbucket a try. I figure the more options the better. I still really like the way Codeplex is set up. I like the social aspect of github but codeplex seems more structured to me.

Going forward I’ll try to keep the code updated in all 3 places. Pushing to github is not a huge priority to me as it can be a little tricky pushing from mercurial to git, but I will try my best.

I’ve added a Samples folder to the repo now which I hope will help provide some kind of how to get started. The Walking Wizard sample shows the basics of getting a sprite of the screen and making it move with the keyboard.