Carcode 3.0 Alpha1

Carcode is an experiment in programming education. The idea is to give beginning programmers carcode, which provides an animated car they can drive around the screen either using the keyboard, or programmatically through a simple API. By working on a series of problems (such as "park the car in parking space A"), beginners learn to program in an engaging, and goal-driven environment they already have much familiarity with.

The first version derived from GSOC 2008 code has been released, is an alpha release with a good and working code base but it is still not feature complete, you can however try it out and experiment with it.

Major features in this release:

• Level scripting capabilities
• Car scripting capabilities
• Car sensors
• Widgets for in game UI and dialogs
• Few examples of scripting in demos directory

Downloads:
http://code.google.com/p/carcode/downloads/list

Issue Tracker:
http://code.google.com/p/carcode/issues/list

Don't forget to send feedback!, use the tag Milestone-Alpha1 when sending a new issue in the tracker.

This release has been out for a few days however there has been some heavy rain and electric storms in my area which delayed my work a few days, but I'm in working shape again (I hope there is no more storms for now).

Next thing to do is to add the event tracking system, add support for adding conditions and goals to the level and refine scripting in general, a few UI enhancements and I'll do another release.

GUI branch

After working a few days on my GUI branch of carcode, I got some interesting results, I completed a basic set of widgets that integrates well with carcode, I did a main menu and a file dialog to open script files:

It was interesting to work on this, I wanted once to create my own toolkit, based on SDL and C, but it ended up being a bit time consuming, this time was very simple and fast, using python + pygame + OpenGL to do all.

OpenGL has many useful features, for example Stencil buffers, I make use of them for clipping widgets inside windows or other widgets, even having multiple widgets that make use of it inside other widgets works fine, you just need to take care of how many times the buffer has been written.

Well, midterms are approaching but the project is on schedule, even better than I expected.