The Dragon Blog

After seeing a post on SFGHQ about a new Sonic fangame for GBA I wanted to know more about developing for GBA. I know from before of the Sonic fangame for GBA called Sonic Epoch which uses the SV4 engine made by Rob Showalter who also is making Sonic Epoch. I didn’t realise until earlier today that the engine was released to the public.

So I received a copy from USC from the SFGHQ forum since the official site is down. Apparently it is a set of tools and a pre-compiled runtime. So it will let you make the game much easier than programming it all. From what I know it makes all the project files into a object which is then combined with the pre-compiled runtime. This seams like a good and easy way to make a game for GBA.

But I also want to try a C / C++ devkit first for comparison. So I found a lib called HAMlib. I downloaded it and installed it.

So I will know create a small game and see whether HAMlib or SV4 is the better. It’s pretty obvious that HAMlib is the more powerful , but if SV4 can speed up development time and also have the necessery features to make a great game I don’t see why not to use it over HAMlib.
As it is stupid to use a lib just because of its features if you dont use it.

And I thought about creating a review of them. I will update this entry with my experiences along the way. Also I will start with HAMlib since I haven’t got a hold of some documentation for SV4 .

These are the criteria’s I will look at : Features , development time , memory handling , speed , sprite and general graphics handling, and a overall rating.

Just got started with HAMlib and I must say I like it already. It’s easy to use and powerful at the same time. SV4 will have a hard time matching it. The handling of graphics are great and it supports rotation of both bg’s and sprites.

Update: Haven’t done anything on the review today as I have been busy with real life stuff. If I have time tomorrow I will try to finish the HAMlib version.

I have done some work and created a menu system. This is for the main menu at the moment but I will make it appliable to a ingame menu too. Also I have never seen a menu system in a engine before so it’s quite unique. To all you programmers out there who wonder how it works I will post the prototype functions and how to use them here:

void CreateMenu(int colR, int colG ,int ColB,int cellSizeX,int cellSizeY,int screenPosX,int screenPosY);

int CreateMenuCell(char* cellCaption,FONT cellFont);

CreateMenu(128,128,128,152,32.472,196);
CreateMenuCell(”NEW GAME”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”LOAD GAME”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”SAVE”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”OPTIONS”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”INTRO”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”EXIT GAME”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”UPDATE”,menufont);

This should all be pretty self explanatory. And to the result. This is the menu for a game in progress which I’m making alongside the Ogtrax engine.

You can probably see that the image is resized which is why the image doesn’t fit the code above. If you double the size of the image you will see it. Link to bigger image