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xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
I'm late to the party but the following is an excellent article covering all of the problems with the various timing methods.

http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/FAQS/timing.html

xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Jul 11, 2008

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xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
I used XAudio in XNA when it first came out and it was a horrible horrible experience. Unless XAudio2 is completely different or the C++ API is vastly superior to the XNA one then I will not touch it with a ten foot poll.

I deal with FMOD mostly these days. Can't really beat its cross platform capabilities.

xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Jul 24, 2009

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

UberJumper posted:

For any windows based games, that use encryption. What is the defacto standard for C++ encryption? Please tell me nobody used CryptoAPI.

libtomcrypt

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

PnP Bios posted:

The only problem I can see is that it's creating a lot of objects so the garbage collector is going to be working overtime.

But I figure anybody who is worrying about cache misses would be writing their game in C already.

I would definitely appreciate a second set of eyes to see if I'm missing anything obvious.


Garbage collection issues and cache misses are completely different set of performance issues. Just because someone is using C# doesn't mean they aren't concerned with performance. Especially where the garbage collector is concerned.

I would not use a library, especially one designed to be used in a tight drawing loop, that is willy nilly creating tons of garbage. I would find a way to either not create the garbage in the first place, or find a way to recycle it so the gc doesn't kick in.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

poemdexter posted:

Money.

That's just the sort of thing I was looking for. I guess we needed to dip a little deeper into exactly what goes into networking games. This stuff is pretty complicated! You've been a tremendous help 1 800.

It's GPL code, but may give you some ideas.
https://github.com/nardo/tnl2

This is basically a rewrite of the first open source version which was called OpenTNL, which has a long standing history in the Starsiege/Tribes series of games. And is to this day, in my opinion, one of the most capable game networking systems in existence. I think the only company competing in this area is Valve with all of the stuff they've done for Counterstrike, etc. Every one else seems to have gone rather lazy in the networking area, with id games and Unreal games being the worst offenders of poor networking.

Old Paper about TNL before it was TNL:
http://www.pingz.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/tribes_networking_model.pdf

Valve has some information about their stuff:
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Category:Networking
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensating_Methods_in_Client/Server_In-game_Protocol_Design_and_Optimization

xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 20:34 on May 27, 2011

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

PDP-1 posted:

Doubleposting with a question of my own -

I'm starting to look into AI systems, are there any particularly good websites/books/tutorials out there that you'd recommend? I realize that AI is a very broad topic, I'm just looking for a good overview of common techniques for pathfinding, decision making, etc. to get a feel for what's out there.

http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Games-Second-Millington/dp/0123747317/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1307128154&sr=8-9

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

RoboCicero posted:

What's the best way to develop for an iPhone on a windows machine? I know that eventually I need a Mac to publish it to the device, but I'd like to put that step off until I actually have to deal with it.

I'm also looking at some networking (like Hero Academy-esque PvP) and I'm not sure if some of the middleware libraries handle that well / at all. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I know I asked last time but I don't think I got any responses :shobon:

You can setup VMware with OSX and run simulator on that.
Kind of slow though unless you have a decent computer.

I did this for awhile before I caved and got a macmini.
Now I just wish synergy wasn't a piece of poo poo.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

Hughlander posted:

Just to derail some more, problems I've had with synergy:

- Vista/Win7 client, no way to unlock computer
- Any program that uses relative mouse locations on the client doesn't work out of the box
- Clipboard would occasionally become 'stuck' between client and server and not update

Any idea if those are fixed? I just left Synergy in the last month due to #1


#1 - Yea this isn't fixed. I think it requires a signed executable.
#2 - Not fixed.
#3 - Not fixed.

On top of your complaints I also have this issue where modifier keys get stuck, eg it will act like ctrl is held down when it isn't. Very aggravating.

That sharemouse program prolecat suggested earlier looks promising. But it's $50/computer.
So really its $100+ because you wouldn't be using the software in the first place if you had just one computer.

xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Apr 4, 2012

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

SupSuper posted:

Ok, I'll clarify some things. Software development isn't new to me. I'm a Comp Sci masters student, I've been through all the theory and OO and pattern stuff, and if you ask me about Singletons I'll punch you in the face. It's making the leap from that to game development that gets to me. Because while most things apply to both, there's still gaps that I hit and I'm left stumped with nothing but Google to help me out. Because in games you often want to do most things yourself, so you gotta worry about rendering, event handling, state management, resource loading, etc. Your typical application will just let Windows Forms or whatever do most of the work and only worry about the specific business logic.

And I get that most things just come from experience, programming is problem solving and you only learn that by doing it until you're good at it. I've been programming for a few years now so I know the feeling of things that didn't make any sense before simply snapping into place some time later. But games have been around for a while now so I just figured there'd be good references for the common pitfalls you're bound to run into, so everyone isn't out there reinventing the wheel.

But I guess I'll just start over with some concrete examples of problems I've been living with and maybe that'll move things along.


Hello, I'm the lead developer of OpenXcom, it's open-source if you ever wanna dive into it, and now I'm gonna tell you about all the horrible little secrets that lurk within so you'll never look at it the same way again. :v:

- 100% CPU

Every SDL tutorial starts you off with the "game loop", something like this:
code:
while (true)
{
  SDL_WaitEvent();
  logic();
  SDL_Blit();
}
Great, it works! :D Oh no, it uses up all my precious CPU! :(
The popular solution seems to be to just throw a SDL_Delay(1) on the end, but that's more of a hack than a solution. Surely there must be a better way...

- Loading...

I need my resources in memory. What do I do? Just load everything at startup and never worry about it again! Sure it works but it's really sloppy. There must be a smarter way of handling them without coming down to writing my own memory manager or something.

I don't get the CPU thing.
A game, by it's very nature, is a tight loop.
It's supposed to use 100% CPU.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
Every professional game engine I've worked with has utilized 100% CPU.
There were only very rare cases where you were intentionally sleeping the main thread.

xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Apr 5, 2012

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
For clarification. If the game isn't threaded or whatever, then obviously you would only be utilizing that one core. So on a dual core, for example this would show up as 50% CPU usage. And then, if you are using multiple cores, then how effectively you are distributing work load across them will determine whatever spikes and slumps in CPU percent utilized.

I guess I just don't see a compelling reason to purposely sleep the main thread, especially when sleep, on windows in particular, is notoriously inaccurate and is not guaranteed to sleep for the length requested -- usually it takes longer. So when you have very specific Hz budgets for rendering, physics, etc, relying on sleep is a very bad idea.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
Quake, doom, etc. cap simulation at 60hz.
Theyre still running the main loop.

Just because you're capping at whatever Hz doesn't mean you stop looping, ever.
And drat straight they're trying to render as fast as possible.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

Unormal posted:

It is pretty typical, even for games that are balls-out when running, to watch window state and yield a bunch of CPU when minimized.

Yes, exactly. Nothing wrong with that, and pretty common.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

Hughlander posted:

Are there any papers or GDC talks on security in a Freemium game? I'm starting to think about ways of authenticating/validating unlocks/purchases but would like to read/watch anything that's already public...

Its highly platform specific question too =)
For iOS as an example, a common mistake is to store unlocks/puchases/etc in UserDefaults. This is bad, because its essentially a plain text file. Store that stuff in the keychain!

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

crazylakerfan posted:

Special sidenote: Why doesn't UDK have the built feature to make a look at matrix? Their matrix implementation is lovely as hell, and once I got past that part the ordering of the various columns didn't match anything I had ever used. Eventually got it, but that should have been a 15 minute thing, not a 2 hour ordeal.

I'm not familiar with udk, so I don't know exactly.
But don't they do all of their rotations via quaternions.
Which would explain why their matrix functionality lacks in that area.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
If you are interested in procedural stuff you guys really need to follow this blog:
http://procworld.blogspot.com

This guy does some amazing poo poo.
He uses l-systems a lot and wrote an editor around it.

Anyway, he had a blog entry about creating procedural countries and provinces and cities, etc:
http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/political-landscape.html
http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/city-lots.html

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
You could try squirrel, lua, or if you don't care about licensing issues on embedded systems, you could embed Mono C#. Mono is actually very simple to embed and get going. Last time I looked at embedding Javascript I wanted to vomit.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

OneEightHundred posted:

If you want to go balls-out and ignore feedback and trust that your vision will find success, then great, but I think the skill that people need to learn more is the opposite: To absorb criticism, recognize the faults in what they've made, and use that to make it better.

You have to be careful with this though.
You don't want to just blindly accept criticism at face value.
Often times what people complain about and what is actually the problem are two different things.

You have to recognize what is the true core of an issue and what is just a symptom.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

TJChap2840 posted:

Along that topic, what are some good game development blogs and/or websites?

Not really for beginner game development. Just some good reads you can learn from.

http://gafferongames.com/
http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/
http://msinilo.pl/blog/
http://flohofwoe.blogspot.com/

http://procworld.blogspot.com/ <- favorite to watch

Those are some of the ones I know of.
Most are not really kept up to date or anything. Seems most people have taken to twitter. So I follow a bunch of people on there.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
How are they doing the C++ edit / compile without reload?
I imagine you can't do that with the base engine, so it must only be supported with the game dll. So I guess it must go something like:

1. compile new game dll
2. when finished pause and save game state
3. unload old dll, load new dll
4. restore game state, unpause

Except he was moving the entire time without any noticeable hiccup or anything.

EDIT: Actually there was a noticeable hiccup when looking at it a second time. I imagine if you aren't running on a beastly machine its even more noticeable.

xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jun 8, 2012

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

PDP-1 posted:

Does anyone have experience handling mouse inputs using SlimDX, or DirectX's DirectInput?

I'm polling a SlimDX Mouse class which is a C# wrapper around the DirectX DirectInput type once per game frame. The problem I'm running into is that the class only provides the delta mouse movement from the last frame, with no way to easily determine the absolute position of the cursor within the active window. Things get complicated quickly when you start to think about the mouse moving outside the window, window resizing, etc.

The second missing feature is the ability to control the mouse position, e.g. locking it to the center of the screen for an FPS type control system. There does seem to be a mouse.SendData(ObjectData[] data, bool overlay) method but no documentation on what it does. The SlimDX world does not like documenting things at all, and this is one of those cases.

Any suggestions or links to open source projects that handle this kind of thing would be greatly appreciated.

DirectInput is kind of crap.
I wouldn't use DirectInput for keyboard/mouse inputs honestly.
Just use the standard Win32 API's (specifically RawInput) for that and XInput for joysticks/controllers.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms632585(v=vs.85).aspx
http://bobobobo.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/rawinput/

And I realize not everyone will agree with the above opinion and is rather unhelpful, so with that in mind...

With SharpDX / SlimDX they map pretty closely to the C/C++ version of DirectX so you should be able to take any tutorial on the subject written in C/C++ and map it fairly well to SharpDX / SlimDX. Just ignore the language specific stuff and pay attention to the API calls - because those won't be different.

Also DirectInput is old and hasn't been updated in a long while now, so don't worry about trying to find 'current' tutorials. Pretty much any surviving tutorial on the subject should be relevant.

http://www.directxtutorial.com/tutorial9/e-directinput/dx9E.aspx
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/directinput

xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Jun 24, 2012

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

xzzy posted:

WoW eventually eliminated percentage effects because it got so hard to balance. Their biggest issue was with people not discarding old gear because the percentage values scaled so dramatically when the level cap increased. But they also stated that percentage interactions were confusing players and they wanted to make it easier to understand.

I'm sure they still design item stats on percentages, but when the stuff gets put into game it gets translated into a fixed value that add up with bonuses of similar type.

It works well (or did once upon a time, I haven't played it in years) and I think is a valuable lesson: don't use percent based bonuses.

Well, maybe that's true for WoW but you don't have to look very far to see that they do something completely different for Diablo 3 which has tons of examples of percentage based bonuses.

I think you should do what makes sense for your game.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

Mata posted:

Should I convert my XNA game to Silverlight+XNA?
I'm not at all interested in porting my game to mobile platforms, (windows only) but I haven't really gotten started with a menu system yet. If I continue with default XNA I'm going to have to reinvent the GUI wheel with windows, buttons, animations, etc - But I've never used silverlight, does it add any extra dependencies? Is the performance good?

Yes Silverlight adds extra dependencies.
First off its a web player, not just a set of API's, so people have to install it.

You would be better off finding an XNA GUI Library, which I'm sure there are some out there.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
This is my opinion, of course, but I think if you are getting into programming, and games programming specifically, then C# is one of the better languages to start off from.

If you are concerned about cross-platform, with Mono, it pretty much runs on every desktop platform and some mobile ones. I believe OSX and some *nix distros have the Mono framework installed by default now.

Pickup Visual Studio Express or MonoDevelop. There are a bunch of game related libraries, whole engines, etc for C#.


Some keywords for you to look into:
xna
monogame
axiom 3d
monotouch
slimdx
sharpdx
opentk

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

mmm11105 posted:

What would you guys recommend for representing a Final Fantasy Tactics (specifically the GBA version in looks) style isometric map (pretty much looks like a square map rotated ~45 degrees)?

No matter which way I represent it, the math always seems way to complicated for taking a tile and mapping it to a co-ord to draw it to. There is probably some super simple way and I just can't find it.


This is C#/XNA based but it was a quick way for me to whip something up for you, as an example.

code:
using Microsoft.Xna.Framework;
using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics;


namespace SomethingAwful.Example
{
   public class Tile
   {
      public static Vector2 Size = new Vector2(128, 64);
      public static Vector2 SizeHalf = Size / 2;

      public static Texture2D TextureOne;
      public static Texture2D TextureTwo;
      public static Texture2D TextureThree;

      public static int OffsetX
      {
         get { return (int) (Size.X / 2); }
      }

      public static int OffsetY
      {
         get { return (int) (Size.Y); }
      }
   }

   public class Tilemap
   {
      private int[,] _tiles;

      public Tilemap()
      {
         _LoadTiles("blah");
      }

      public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch)
      {
         for (int x = 0; x < 10; x++)
         {
            for (int y = 0; y < 10; y++)
            {
               int tile = this._tiles[x, y];

               var position = new Vector2((y-x) * Tile.SizeHalf.X, (x+y) * Tile.SizeHalf.Y);
               position += new Vector2(Tile.SizeHalf.X * 10, 0.0f); // replaceme with world x,y translation

               var texture = tile == 0 ? Tile.TextureOne : (tile == 1 ? Tile.TextureTwo : Tile.TextureThree);
               position.Y -= texture.Height / 2;

               //spriteBatch.Draw(texture, position, Color.White);
               spriteBatch.Draw(texture, position, null, Color.White, 0.0f, Vector2.Zero, 0.5f, SpriteEffects.None, 0.0f);
            }
         }
      }

      private void _LoadTiles(string path)
      {
         // for now just fake it.
         this._tiles = new int[10,10]
                       {
                          { 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 },
                          { 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 },
                          { 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 },
                          { 1, 0, 0, 2, 1, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1 },
                          { 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1 },
                          { 1, 0, 0, 2, 1, 2, 2, 0, 0, 1 },
                          { 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 0, 0, 1 },
                          { 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 },
                          { 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1 },
                          { 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 },
                       };
      }
   }
}
And here is what the tiles would look like:

xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Jul 1, 2012

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
Just a wild shot in the dark, but, main is missing [STAThread].
This can cause problems if using Windows.Form... But I'm not familiar enough with libtcod to say if that is the case here.

Also another thing it could be is you may not have the appropriate visual studio c++ runtime version installed. Make sure you have the same c++ runtime the library was compiled with.

xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Jul 5, 2012

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

Deki posted:

I've been learning a shitload while working on my game, which is great, but on the same token, I now know that a lot of code that I wrote earlier in the project works really should have be handled differently, as this was my first major game project in c++ and Allegro 5. I want to go back and rewrite a lot of it, like how I parse in game data/map information, but at the same time, I don't want to spend a lot of time working on something that later on, I'll have to redo anyway when I discover an even better way of doing it.
:negative:

Edit: To rephrase this better, would it be better for me to go back and change non optimal, but working, code. Or would it be better to keep on working on new sections and optimize everything once it is all functionally complete.

Keep moving.
There is always something that can be done better.
If you get stuck on trying to 'do it right' you will never get anything done.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
So, I tried to watch indie game the movie but it only has two audio channels...?
This is unwatchable for me because the sound is so quiet on my speaker setup.

Is there a different version somewhere?

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
For games dev you can do 99% of the project in C/C++ on both iOS and Android. And with the WinRT stuff on the new Microsoft devices they accept C/C++ as well now too albeit using DirectX though.

The rest is just platform specific boiler plate which quite frankly requires very little code to get working, and once it is, very reuseble across projects.

With WinRT, the hard part is going to be porting / abstracting your graphics layer to work with both OpenGL (for iOS and Android) and DirectX (WinRT). This can be difficult but it isn't impossible.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
You don't want to use Dx10 anyway.
If you are gonna make the leap past Dx9 go to Dx11.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
When debugging UTF8 (which is multibyte) in Visual Studio you can put ",s8" in the watch window and it will display correctly.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
With clang, verbose template errors are non-existent.
God I love clang...

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

Suspicious Dish posted:

Torque 2D or Torque 3D? They're entirely different beasts.

Well, for both, GarageGames seems to have stopped development on it. They've also changed business models several times, and most of the people who worked on the Tribes engine and went to GarageGames now work at other places.

I worked at GarageGames for a better part of a decade so I feel I'm uniquely qualified to answer any questions about Torque or GarageGames.

I wouldn't use Torque these days. I don't think I could even recommend it back when I was working at GarageGames either.

Don't get me wrong. Torque wasn't necessarily a bad engine. it is just an entirely different beast to what Unity and UDK provide. Torque is not user friendly, and it isn't really ashamed of that fact either. It was an engine born from a number of professionally produced AAA games made by Dynamix and Sierra Online in the early 90's to early 00's, from Earthsiege to Starsiege and Tribes, and even a Trophy Bass game or two.

GarageGames spent years adding to it, ripping parts out, bringing parts up to date, and so on. Part of the problem was GarageGames grew too fast and Torque development often lacked direction, had poor quality assurance and poor developer discipline. Another part of it was that GarageGames was bought out, and the people that took over or oversaw certain aspects of the company were loving clueless.

Certain parts of Torque are amazing. For instance, the networking systems are still, in my opinion, the best in the industry. It has been co-opted by a number of professional studios by now, including Bungie for Halo for example.

Other parts suffer from developers making changes when they didn't fully understand what they were doing and how it effected other parts of the code base. And later version of Torque often had newer systems that were over engineered and under performing.

Everyone either left GarageGames or were eventually laid off by the parent company. Some people managed to get the GarageGames brand back, and license to the engine. These people are the GarageGames that stands today. But no one who had any major role in the development of Torque works there now.

The sad thing about all of this is the parent company had to write GarageGames off at a loss, and couldn't take profits from any of its products anymore if they wanted to get the tax incentives of recording that loss. So products like Marble Blast Ultra for Xbox Live Arcade were taken off the XBLA store and are gone forever.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

Suspicious Dish posted:

Oh hey! If you worked on Marble Blast Gold at all, you are awesome. I still play through that game every so often.

So, a question about the management side of it: was it the new management that turned GarageGames from a game development studio to "Torque Development and Contracting", and then turned it into "Online Game Shop InstantAction"? That always seemed like a giant disaster.

Also, if you know, what was "Monster Games"?

Well GarageGames was started as primarily a game engine technology provider first. That was the primary goal, at least at first. Eventually games such as Marble Blast and all it's varients and sequels were made in house, as were a number of other games throughout the years.

Torque2D was made somewhere in the middle of all of that and it did really well.

At some point shortly after this we were approached by Microsoft about developing a game engine for this new technology platform they were working on using C# that was to eventually become the first version of XNA. It was around this point where we started to heavily outsource development of various parts of Torque.

Shortly after this period we were bought and the whole InstantAction thing started which I would rather forget about entirely.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

The Gripper posted:

Does Microsoft have any plans to update XNA for VS2012/Windows 8, or is XNA pretty much dead in the water until they release a new console? Their site is incomprehensible and almost impossible to navigate, and they shoehorned XNA into the Windows Phone Kit years ago so it's feeling like they just want it to disappear as soon as possible.

I ask because I want to ditch VS2010 entirely but I'm keeping it around in case there are any teething issues with hacking XNA into 2012's IDE, so it'd be nice to have something with official support (though XNA's current support is pretty lovely anyway) plus having helpers for the Windows 8 sensors like accelerometer and touch baked-in would be a bonus.

Copying the extensions into VS2012 hasn't caused any problems yet, but the last thing I want is some obscure content pipeline issue popping up and forcing me to dick around in 2010, which could even be catastrophic if the project I'm working on at the time is making use of Win8 features that VS2010 doesn't support.

I'm not doing Xbox development anymore, so I've been considering just switching to Unity since that has better mobile support, but I'm completely unsure of how well the development environment and tools would run on a crappy netbook (VS2010/2012 were slow, but passable).

XNA is dead. Microsoft doesn't have anyone working on it anymore. All the team members that were on it have been moved onto other projects, mostly related to Win8, WinRT, C++ CX and the new API's therein.

My understanding is that there are C++ / C++ CX libraries written that mimick alot of XNA features but these are not really official libraries per say, just hobby projects of former XNA dev members.

Microsoft probably will never directly come out and say XNA is dead.
I don't think you will ever see XNA again, even after they release a new console, etc.

xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Oct 22, 2012

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code

Sagacity posted:

What's a good base library to start out with? I'd ideally like my code to be cross-platform (Windows/Mac mostly) and potentially be portable to iOS/Android, so that would mean having some kind of abstraction layer for OpenGL / OpenGL ES. I don't require state-of-the-art graphics, but I'd like to be able to write at least a bit of shader code. My current bet is SDL2, which is not officially out yet, but I was wondering if there any enticing alternatives.

SFML is apparently the hot new thing these days.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
There is some kind of XNA like thing being created on top of SharpDX.
I think it's called Anx. Might want to look at that.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
To be fair, rust is a pretty cool language.
I think its chances are better than GO at becoming a good language that people use. Though those chances are still pretty drat slim.

xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
A lot of people I know in various circles have soured on Unity after their initial honeymoon phase with it.
To the point where they don't ever want to work on a Unity project again.

My impression of it, based on just hobby experiments, is that it's a great engine if you are trying to learn or want to quickly prototype - but plan on moving to something else later.

It's better than Torque ever was though you got a lot more out of Torque if you actually know what you are doing and have the time to do it.

xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Oct 24, 2012

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xgalaxy
Jan 27, 2004
i write code
Not really gamedev related but just got back from Wreck-It Ralph and it was really good.
Can't beleive they got video game characters from real games in it. Didn't expect that.

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