Old Post

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.