Following an enquiry on the Dolphin newsgroup, Andy Bower takes a look at how to build an animated Air Traffic Control game in Dolphin. This is an extensive video that takes a stream of consciousness, barely rehearsed, approach to teaching you how to program in Dolphin. Because of this, it is long (coming in at around 50 mins) since no steps are missed out or skipped over.
Hopefully, the material should be of wider interest than just to those interested in programming games.
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You will need Quicktime to view these videos. Click on the image at left to view inside your browser or right click and choose Save As to download the file to play later. Viewing using QuickTime has the advantage that you can use chapter markers to quickly jump to different locations within the programme. |
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Amongst other things, the topics covered are:
- Creating Packages
- Using the Class Browser
- An overvew of MVP and how to build a GUI
- Flicker-free animation with a DoubleBufferedView
- Starting and stopping a background process
- Using a workspace to "converse" with an application's objects
- Programming in the Debugger
- Drawing on Canvas objects (Windows device contexts)
This is Part 1 and the next video in the series is here.
If you wish to peek ahead, the final Smalltalk code for the game is available in a Dolphin source package for you to load into a Community Edition or Professional image. The code supplied below is a slightly refined version of the game shown in video programme 4; the logic is the same but the appearence has been somewhat spiced up.