Wow, time for another blog update. Not doing this as often as I thought I would, but then I’ve been pretty busy.
Building a game engine from scratch is HARD. It’s mostly already solved problems – I know how all the parts fit together – but actually building it is very tedious, and you find there are gaps in your knowledge that you have to research to figure out. How many game programmers have actually written direct Winsock applications? Not that many I would wager.
You also get to find out exactly how bad some of the microsoft documentation is, and how ropey some of the implementations of their API’s are. For instance, the UDPClient implementation in C# has some particular startup issues that you only find out about when you actually try to use it. I spent 3 days just figuring out that initialization order really does matter with the C# UDP implementation.
A friend of mine said to me that this kind of stuff is the kind of stuff you do once, then once it’s there you forget it. Wise words. I can’t wait to forget some of the stuff I’ve been dealing with.
So anyway, I’ve been in touch with MS, and they haven’t said no to the idea of me building an XLA game. Following advice from other people I’m also going to produce a PC version of the game too, since what I’m developing so far is a PC demo anyway (albeit using PS2 / XBox Windows controllers). It only makes sense.
So far I’ve got a good friend who’s a contract artist doing some stuff on spec for me, I’ve got a sound guy from an old company who’s now footloose doing some sound work on spec for me, plus an old graphics guru friend doing the OpenGL to DirectX / 360 DirectX conversion for me. When he gets around to it:)
I wish I could names names, but that’s not appropriate at this time.
However, interviews are starting to pop up, and as such I won’t have much time to work on this stuff in the coming couple of weeks, since I’ll be travelling all over the place.
We shall see what develops.
-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Brad Cantrell on Pointers
- Brad Cantrell on About Jake Simpson
- James on Windows 8
- James on Windows 8
- nevena ivanova on About Jake Simpson
Archives
- February 2015
- January 2015
- August 2014
- July 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- March 2010
- February 2010
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
Categories
Meta