Hi,

First of all: Scribe. That is my new pet project. Actually, I don't know how serious it is yet. But I've made a Project out of it; maybe somebody else who is interested will come along and help. We'll see.

But what is it? Well, it's really just a demo so far. A demo of a "3D pixel engine". It started out as an experiment to see how the graphics from "The Legend of Zelda: Link's awakening" would look in 3D. So I took the Link sprites and some desert tiles and wrote a C++ program that used OpenGL to render it in perspective. And it looked quite good. Well, I must admit that I'm a huge fan of pixel art. It's just so incredible how much spirit and soul you can put into a 16x16 bitmap! And most 3D games out there use high-resolution textures with bilinear filtering and who knows what else to try to make it look halfway realistic...

I actually wrote this code around the end of October 2007 (just before I started working on kmemcheck), and it's been lying in my "programming" folder ever since. I recovered it the other day and thought that I should publish it as an open source/free software program, simply because I have no reason not to. I probably won't have that much time to develop this further, but maybe somebody else will find it interesting and pick it up. It's open source, these things do happen!

There was one major hitch, though. I can't distribute the Zelda graphics. And copyright law has to be upheld! (As an open source/free software programmer, what other position can I take?)

I decided to look around the net for some free graphics, and free graphics I found! In particular, I found bubble league, the website of Alan Trullinger. Apparently he had planned to make some RPG game and had spent a summer making the graphics for it. Apparently, the game was also never released, so he gave away all the graphics for free (distributed under the Creative Commons license). This is how my program looks using his files:

That's not too bad, is it? The little guy can walk around and jump. (The animation is an incredible piece of work, with 8 frames worth of animation in each direction!)

(Of course, nothing beats the Zelda graphics, but that's a different story.)

Are you interested in trying it out? Perhaps you are even interested in contributing something to it? In either case, I've created a git repository for the project at http://github.com/vegard/scribe/.

(Side note: GitHub is a really nice place. I haven't used it that much yet, but everything there is easy and pleasant and just works. It's really worth trying out if you're looking for git hosting. End of note.)

All right. On to the second part of this post: Cross-compiling programs for Windows on Linux. Did you ever try to build MinGW on Linux, only to discover after hours of compiling the compiler, that it doesn't really work? (I don't remember exactly what went wrong, maybe it was missing Windows headers, or missing Windows libraries, or something. I must have suppressed the memories.) Well, there is a solution to that problem too.

Use Wine! I installed Dev-C++ on my Fedora Linux using Wine. Then I created a project inside Dev-C++, imported my source code, installed a few Devpaks, and... it worked. A slight (but only slight) elaboration of this process can be found in the Win32 build instructions for "Scribe".

The only problem I had was that the program wouldn't link unless the linker directives were put in the right order. But that's shame on me for being spoiled with shared libraries (I built with -static to avoid DLL hell).