AC2011 draws closer

Not long now (April 16th – 17th) and I will be elbows deep in a 24 hour coding competition at AC2011 🙂  I am actually really looking forward to the challenge!  Creating something from scratch in such a limited time frame, whilst enjoying the event and socialising should be an interesting challenge, something I have always wanted to do since I was a kid.

This years theme is ‘Tetris’ but not just writing another Tetris clone, that’s the theme.. I have a plan and thankfully the backing of a skilled code party veteran pixel painter.  So I am sure whatever abomination I code, it will look pretty 🙂

Only a couple of weeks to get my laptop ready for the event too, and my libraries ready.. that in itself is a challenge, one that is absorbing all of my free time 🙂  having far too much fun with all this 🙂

C++ argv just getting first character

Plugging away at a untility to help with my Jag dev stuff and hit upon a snag.  Using what looked like pretty standard argc, argv processing code all I could get would be the ‘-‘ preceeding the command, or the 1st character if there was no -.  It turns out that this is due to Visual Studio 2008/2010 defaulting to Unicode with projects, so if you are trying to work with them as standard chars you are not going to have much luck due to the endianness terminating the 1st character effectively.

Simplest fix.. Bring up the project properties, select Configuration > General and on the right hand side under “Project Defaults” change “Character Set” to “Not Set”, bye bye unicode.

That has been doing my head in all night, hope its of help to someone else.