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Announcing The Inaugural OLC Relay Race 2020

On 20th June 2020, the One Lone Coder community will host its first ever coding relay race.

Edit [14th June 2020]: There have been some minor changes to the way in which teams will be set up.

A relay race, you say?

Yes. Teams of between three and six coders will be given a coding task and an hour each to work towards completing the task. The first team to meet the challenge criteria will be crowned the winners and awarded a special role and colour on the Discord server.

Okay, so how’s this going to work?

Officially register by DMing your interest to @SaladinAkara. Then, on the 20th June, log in to the OLC Discord server for 5pm BST, where teams will be drawn at random. At 5:30pm BST details of the task will be announced. We’ll give you 30 minutes to chat with your team and come up with a plan before the race officially begins at 6pm.

Discord’s live streaming means we can all see the code progress for each team and allow referees to ensure that there’s no cheating.

Each member of the team must code for an hour, before passing their code on to the next member of their team. This will go on until either the task is complete, or the time limit of 6 hours is completed.

Can I join?

Yes! The relay race is open to all, regardless of experience. At One Lone Coder we encourage making code fun, and this is just a new way of doing that. A bit of friendly competition could also help you take your code skills to the next level.

Are there any limitations or restrictions?

In the interest of fairness, all entrants should use the OLC Pixel Game Engine to develop their solution to the challenge.

To help refereeing, all solutions should use a public git repository – this makes life easier not only for sharing code, but for making sure all competitors only use the hour given to them.

Sounds great. Sign me up!

Now you know how it’s going to work, here are the full list of rules:

  1. Teams must be between 3 and six people.
  2. Entrants must be registered by the end of Friday 19th June 2020 by sending a DM to @SaladinAkara on the Discord server.
  3. Teams will be drawn at random an hour before the race begins.
  4. Teams must declare the order of participants 15 minutes before the race starts. Changes to order will only be permitted in exceptional circumstances.
  5. Should a team member need to drop out for IRL reasons, they can be replaced. If a team drops below 3 members they will be disqualified.
  6. The task of the race will be announced 30 minutes before the race officially starts. This gives you time to discuss a plan with your team and set up a git repository for your code.
  7. The active coder must stream their code on Discord
  8. Only the team member whose turn it is may code. Other team members may watch and discuss with each other (including with the currently active member) but should not continue coding additional features in the background. This includes providing code to the currently active member.
  9. Handovers must occur within 5 minutes of the scheduled hour and will be verified by commit timestamps
  10. If all members of a team have completed their hour and the task hasn’t been completed, then they can continue from the first member again, continuing with the order defined before the race.
  11. The first team to complete the task will be the winner.
  12. If no team has completed the task by the 6-hour time limit, the winner will be the team who has completed the most criteria from the task.
  13. The race will be monitored by referees, and their decision is final.

We look foward to seeing you on 20th June!

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PGE Driver – upcoming olc::PixelGameEngine game

PGE Driver is an arcade style racing / death-match game where the aim is to win – by any means necessary! With nitro boost and heavy machine guns at your disposal, along side pre-race upgrades such as engine power, tyres, and armour – the choice really is yours… Win by being the fastest, or the deadliest, it’s your call.

What started as merely a theme to accompany an exercise in code discipline, ended up blowing out to a fully featured game which so far has spawned 3 olcPGEX extensions for sprite handling, camera tracking, and sprite animation. Not to mention a fully customisable menu system with panel transitions and overlays.

The cars in this game are fun to drive and easy to do burnouts in, which shows off the PGEv2.xx’s ability to render many 10’s of thousands of decals on the screen at any given time and still maintain a satisfactory frame rate. By the end of a race there might be 40,000 or so skid decals on the track! This was not possible until PGE v2.0 so well done Javidx9, you’ve made the PGE a viable game engine for those of us who like the simplicity, but still need some power under the hood 😉

A playable demo is not available as of time of writing, however you can check out a short demo clip of a couple of levels and vehicles to see how the game is progressing so far…

If you are interested in the extensions of mine that were used to create this game you can check them out in the contributions folder in the github here:

https://github.com/OneLoneCoder/olcPixelGameEngine/tree/master/Contributions

Author: Justin Richards

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How to attribute/credit/cite the olc::PixelGameEngine

Hello! Firstly a big thank you, the fact that you are reading this means you actually care about doing the right thing, and want to acknowledge the software you have used from other developers.

The olc::PixelGameEngine is open source and is released under the OLC-3 licence. This means you can use it freely, even for commercial projects. However, the licence requires that appropriate attribution is required.

Releasing Software in Executable Binary Form

Your olc::PixelGameEngine application needs to display to the user the following message:

Copyright 2018 – 2020 OneLoneCoder.com

Most people prefer to do this by either:

  • Keeping the application in window mode, and not changing the text displayed in the window’s title bar. By default, olc::PixelGameEngine applications are out-of-the-box compliant.
  • A splash screen along the lines of “Made using olc::PixelGameEngine” and including the above notice.
  • Full attribution in a “Credits” or “Licences” menu available without special requirements of the user (such as completing the game for example)

Releasing Software in Source Code Form

If your project is distributed via source code, and you use either part, or all of the olc::PixelGameEngine, the full text of the OLC-3 licence needs to be included in the source code distribution. By default, an unchanged olcPixelGameEngine.h file will satisfy the licence requirements. If you maintain an external catalogue of licences, you should include OLC-3 in that too.

Releasing Derivative Works

Since the olc::PixelGameEngine is open source, you are allowed to modify it. This could be in the form of adding additional features, wrapping it into an alternative framework, cloning the features, or using parts of the code. In this instance, the full OLC-3 licence text needs to be included, and if your derivative work is in binary form, it must display to the user the above copyright notice.

Citation in Academic Works

If you use olc::PixelGameEngine for school, research, academic pursuit, you can reference/cite it properly in the following way:

olc::PixelGameEngine, v2.05, OneLoneCoder.com, 2020

The version number and year are of course flexible and should be changed as required.

Referencing in Digital Media

If you write blogs, make videos, create content and want to reference the olc::PixelGameEngine,, or indeed the OneLoneCoder website or javidx9 youtube channel, then the correct links are:

https://github.com/OneLoneCoder/olcPixelGameEngine

https://OneLoneCoder.com

https://youtube.com/javidx9

Finally, again a big thank you for taking this seriously. Software development is a hard and time consuming task, in the hope that it makes someone else’s software easier and quicker to produce. It is important that the hard work of others is given the credit it deserves – javidx9.

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New PixelGameEngine Extension for Animating 2D Sprites

One of the things I struggled with when using the PixelGameEngine was using animated sprites. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to get it to work, so over the Christmas break I decided to make a concerted effort to figure it all out.

The end result was a brand new extension for Javidx9’s PixelGameEngine. So, I would like to present the olcPGEX_AnimatedSprite with a small tutorial on how to use it.

Continue reading “New PixelGameEngine Extension for Animating 2D Sprites”
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Hello World!

Welcome to OneLoneCoder Community!

This is clearly a brand new site, and has very little content right now. But I hope that community members will start creating articles for this site. It’s going to be mostly about programming, but anything technology related or just generally interesting will be accepted. Here are some ideas to get you started:

  • Programming articles
  • Algorithms
  • Project development logs
  • Showcases
  • Technology reviews
  • Game reviews
  • Scientific Opinions
  • Electronics
  • Editorials

Articles can include images, video links and of course Source Code!

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::cout << "Hello!" << std::endl;
    return 0;
}