It’s a new year and time to start blogging once again. Today’s topic is about computer backup. If you’re a digital creator, I can’t stress how important data backup is. There are primarily two parts of data backup that will keep you up and running with minimal downtime. The first part is a cloned/bootable hard drive to keep your machine running. The second part is your data; and that’s what I’m going to talk about today.

There are two kinds of data backup: local and remote. Both Mac and Windows have built-in applications that work with “local” external USB, firewire, and eSATA drives. There are also a bunch of “free” back-up software packages that run from your computer. However, in the past couple years, the cost of remote/cloud-based backup has incredibly declined. For instance, CrashPlan+ which support file versioning, unlimited data, access to restore your data from any web-enabled computer, and next day delivery of your data (if you have a catastrophic crash) is around $50/year.

Most importantly, a very high percentage of designers and artists are primarily moving to working on laptops and from multiple locations. This growing laptop trend changes the dynamic of backup and what the user has access to when working from different locations. They may also not have room to attach external drives. I’ve been personally using CrashPlan+ for over a year and it’s been great! Now there are other web services out there (such as mozy.com) that offer low-cost, cloud-based backup to check out.

The key thing is to seriously start thinking about remote/cloud-based backup as part of your strategy to safeguard your creative data.

One major challenge I have encountered in this foray into cross-platform development has been getting consistent debugging and analysis information. Doing this on one platform can be tough enough, but when doing it across different platforms, there aren’t many consistent tools or standards.

Summarizing my needs:
1) I need consistent, fast text output for debugging.
2) I need clear messages from my program which indicate what went wrong.
3) I would like some kind of performance profiling tool, to measure what parts are too slow, so I can optimize them.
4) I would like to have some idea about what my RAM usage is, to help spot memory leaks.

Just thought I’d share some silly fun stuff. The Angry Video Game Nerd (James Rolfe) and Mike Matei of cinemassacre.com signed a promo card of our retro Mac game El Ballo! Retro gamers…UNITE!!

- Casey

As expected, delving deeper into SDL yielded the next step. I present to you, a white square bouncing off of a white line! Behold the cross-platform compatible miracle:

Actually, I’m pretty excited about this, since it is the first time I’ve ever made a cross-platform game demo, even though it’s a tiny one. It works! Woohoo! As planned for the main recipe, this uses OpenGL, GNU make, and SDL on all three platforms. Additionally, on Windows, I use MinGW to provide a common Unix-like build environment, to help match what I use on OS X and Linux. Seems to be working out pretty well so far!

Now that we have basic windowing and graphics up on all platforms, it’s time to get to work on the engine, 3QuadX, so we can do something a little more sophisticated.

- Jake