Creating a nicer Java GUI using Swing and RiverLayout

Nice Java GUI with RiverLayout

Some time ago I wrote an article about RiverLayout. RiverLayout is a LayoutManager for Java and is much nicer than all the other stuff, that is included in the J2SE.

It's good to see that some people do their best to create nice abstractions. Less code, nicer gui.

Writing a game engine

Writing a basic game engine

This is really strange. The idea of this article is about the same as an article I would like to write. The second I would like to write would be about the game loop of games. But I haven't yet finished it. And now it looks like I don't have to.

Perhaps I would have done some things a little different. I don't think I would use a singleton pattern for anything. Most of the time it's not useful. Singletons are difficult to use with destructors, especially if you need a special order in which the objects destruct themselves.

Two game programming articles

Not so long ago I wrote two articles about gameprogramming that I published on my website. These could be of some importance to starting game programmers. This stuff is pretty obvious to me now, but when I started I didn't know about it.

The first is about using a camera object to control scrolling in a game. The other is about time based movement.

Essential development practices

Ten Essential Development Practices

These are all pretty obvious practices, but not everyone including me, will even practice five of them. There is a lot to be done to become a better programmer and these are only one step in the right direction.

My new weblog

On this weblog I will post about programming perl, ruby, websites and games. Or something like that.

The first thing to notice is that I already have a few other blogs, these are all dutch. And are mainly about my social concert calender wij vervelen ons. translated 'we are bored'. It contains concerts in The Netherlands.

I wrote a few texts about game programming. Maybe these are interesting to some people.