This is my software page. Up till recently, it was mostly just for me to share stuff with a few friends, but it's getting so some other people might want to look at the stuff here too. Still, much of it is only going to be of interest to other nerds and programmers. You may find the odd bit of interest, but don't come crying if you don't like it or it doesn't work on your machine.

OK, it's probably not as bad as all that.

NB: These projects are aimed at Linux and similar OSs (and unless a project says otherwise, is unlikely to work under Dos or Windows). But if you're somebody from the Linux Game Tome or Freshmeat.net, don't submit these projects for me, I have accounts with both sites and am perfectly capable of doing the job myself (I'm the user "Tomble" on both sites; on freshmeat.net that's #273914) when I feel they're ready for lots of people to look at.

(...I've found this notice coming back to haunt me when I went to make such submissions, as site editors didn't realise I was the same person... doh! I hadn't meant don't accept submissions, I just didn't want others submitting it for me...)

• IWR: Imperfect World Renderer, a very small, simple, minimalistic renderer I'm designing for use with the game Palito.
• SDL-Toms, a free clone of the rather old game "Atoms" that me and my friends liked about a decade ago.
• OK, that's it so far. There shall be other stuff when I feel like/ don't feel ashamed of putting it up.

Notice that this page has been adapted from the original unformatted page- it used to look much uglier! But point is, there may be little glitches in the HTML where I've converted things wrongly. I'll be on the lookout for these, but if you have any problems, then sorry.

The framework I created to build and maintain this site is also in this section, see the MMSS page if you're interested. Note that thanks to this, I'm finding it a good deal easier to keep the site updated, encouraging me to produce more stuff to go on it, so I'm grinning like an idiot :)

Porrog is a roguelike game I've been writing since the start of 2003. It used to be located right here on this page, but heavy development meant its news entries ended up taking a lot of space here.

So in early 2004, having set up my new site management framework I figured it was a good time to move it to a page of its own. Besides, I wanted to submit it to freshmeat.net and didn't want to go changing the address afterwards, however easy it'd be to do so.

Anyways, if you're still confused, looking for Porrog and are wondering "has it gone?", no it hasn't, it is simply here instead. Got it? Go then!

IWR: Imperfect World Renderer: A small, simplistic render I'm working on for use with the game Palito (a free strategy game in development, inspired by Total Annihilation). It's nothing to get excited about, and likely never will be. But it is quite fast (blindingly fast compared to raytracers and other proper renderers).

July 2006: Funnily, I still keep getting the odd hit here from the Palito site, so presumably someone is still interested in the project. Unless they're all the same person, maybe quite a few people. Investigating further in the past week or so, having previously been in 2 (or 3 or 4) minds about what my attitude was now to the Palito project, I noticed that also the Wiki has been getting maintained a bit lately. Even if it isn't programming, it's still work, still people expending some effort for the project, and I think that counts for something; so does the fact it's helpful! So amongst other things, I ended up joining in again on cleaning up the wiki, and today also created an account there and added a bit more content.

I also still suspect that one reason there's not much going on, is that people don't feel very motivated when they see nothing's hapenning, and a lot of people who would contribute maybe don't feel able to for various reasons. Both of these largely apply to me, at least (plus I have a ton of projects of my own!!). I think that could be dealt with, especially if some of us start the ball rolling again and help organise things. I may also have another poke at the mailing list soon.

March 2005: After a long time I tried giving the Palito mailing list a poke, to see what the situation was there after the looong time without updates. Although I took a break from working on IWR in mid August of '03 (partly from needing to figure out/discuss certain issues with it, partly to do other stuff), not very long after, it sounded like they wouldn't need IWR, and then after about a month or 2 after that, work on Palito itself seemed to grind to a halt (no, I'm not claiming that had anything to do with me not working on IWR!!), and news kind of dried up.

The situation now seems to be, that the dev team seems to have shrunk a lot, and few if any people seem motivated to do anything. To reiterate what I said on the list, I'd be willing to start work on IWR again, or even on Palito itself, if things start up again in some way; but I will not be the only person to be doing any work on somebody else's project, as I have plenty stuff of my own to be working on! If Barrett doesn't want to do anything for the moment but 1 or 2 others on the list say what they'd be willing to do, I'd probably consider that enough to make a start- there's things other than coding that can be done. A description of the code would be a start, and wouldn't need that much programming ability...

July 06 2003: Version 0.01 is out! You might (maybe) like it! Changes in this version include:

• Some bugfixes and tweaks
• The procedural textures (previously hardcoded in C) are now user-defined with Lua scripts! Woohoo!
• Now renders water, based on a simple preliminary representation (for demonstrations).
• Added pseudo-specular highlights (not great)
• Did a couple more example heightmaps (nothing amazing, sorry), and adjusted the old ones to keep up with changes in the program

July 04 2003: Produced a version 0.0 after a couple of hours work writing it. It compiles, and "works", after a fashion, but much functionality is missing, and there's quite a few things to be done to it. This is mainly just a proof-of-concept release.

SDL-Toms: A clone of the game Atoms, using SDL. Works on Linux, and now has Windows binaries, but the Windows version hasn't been heavily tested. Linux users will need a C compiler and the SDL and SDL-Image libraries from libsdl.org (which are included with the Windows version). Please note that though this game is playable, it isn't finished yet (so check back later for newer versions).

Download the latest Windows Binary version (0.2) of SDL-Toms here!

Download the latest Source-Only version (0.2) of SDL-Toms here! (Good for Linux users)

Little screenshot of the game:

May 7 2005: After the site's page counter got nuked a week or so ago, I noticed I was getting a lot of hits in the past couple of days. Looking at the referer logs, it seems someone else now has ported SDL-Toms to a console- this time the Dreamcast. Seems like the author made the source available for their port of it, so I'm quite happy.

Seems funny that one of the things I spent least time coding might be the most popular thing I made, maybe it's just that it's small enough to be hacked with easily. Considering all this, I might do some more work on it some time to iron out the various problems it has.

[Update]: I finally found a page that had source for the X-Box version after all; I can't extract it because it's a RAR file and rar files aren't very well supported outside of Windows, but I can read the file list and it looks like the source files are those for the changed version, which makes it kosher in my book :) I probably should have looked harder, but all the pages I'd seen before had either binaries only, or just a link here and a reference to the X-box version. Well, at least I know what's going on now. Sort of :D

July 6 2004: Had a few more glances at the X-Box sites that have the port of the game on them. Emailed an X-Box owning friend to ask him if he'd be able to try the thing out somehow. According to some of the info at the SDLx site, the port's been done by somebody called "Reaper527", but the only links shown there are to this page and the original page of one of the other games he's ported! If he's made the source available, I'd like to know where. If he has nowhere to host it, I'd be more than happy to do so here. I'd be willing to host the X-Box specific code as its own download, and if I rolled any of his changes back into the original version, I'd be happy to give him credit for them. As yet, I don't even know how much credit he gives me for the original... (Later edit: Not 100% sure why I said that last bit, he seems to have credited me in various places; very sorry if I made it sound like he was ripping me off)

July 5 2004: Having not looked at the site in a while (MMSS is making updating it pretty hard ATM) I just had a glance and noticed my hit count had almost doubled. Checking out the stats for who's been linking to me, it seems that people are making some sort of port to the X-Box?!

[NB: by that, I mean that though I wrote the version that the X-Box port is apparently based on, I did not make the X-Box port! I do not even have the X-Box port, if you're looking for it! But as that version appears to be somewhat different (I had a glance in the .rar archive stored on the sites), the author is required to make the modified source publicly available, due to the terms of the GPL]

Well I just want to say that I don't mind that (as long as they stick to the GPL license the game's under), but I hope people realise that this game took only 2 days to write, was only designed to run on PCs (I don't even know what sort of input devices an X-Box has!!!), was very incomplete, and hasn't really had anything done to it in almost a year.

I might add more to it some time to make it more complete, and it'd be nice to eventually add networking code to it... but don't expect any of that for a while. I've got other things to do ATM. I just thought I should say what the state of it all is, before people got upset or anything funny like that.

August 15 2003, somewhat later: Submitted SDL-Toms to Linux Game Tome. Would have done so earlier, but didn't want to do so without a screenshot for it.

August 15 2003: I actually had most of V0.2 out yesterday, but then wanted to make a windows version, and it all fell apart (Windows, that is). So today, I got a cross-compiler (MinGW32) to make Windows programs from Linux. And after a bit of wrangling, got something that seems to work (but not on the Windows emulator, oddly). Oh, and remember that's a Windows version of 0.2, not 0.1.

Important changes in V0.2 include:

• A Windows binary version in addition to the Linux version!
• Nicer graphics!
• It realises when the game ends now
• User-settable gamma correction
• Menus

August 13 2003: Got an email from old mate John, asking "Tom, do you remember Atoms? Do you know of a version for Windows?" (I'm paraphrasing). I didn't, couldn't find one, and I couldn't find the QuickBasic version I wrote for DOS about 8 years ago. So I tried to work out how hard it would be to write another one, and after a couple hours, I'd produced version 0.1. Rubbish graphics, No Windows binaries (rather missing the point, but I don't know if John has a C compiler handy. Doing CS, he prolly ought to!), and it doesn't check for game completion.

A simple Perl script to find where the percentiles of disk usage lie in a given directory. Vaguely useful if you've got lots of files in a directory and you want to know what's taking up space. Obviously you can sort your directory listings by size, but that only tells you how much each file takes individually, and this deals with the collective amounts.

Might work on Windows if you have Perl installed (but I don't know how easily you'd see the output).

Download Percentiles V0.1 here.