On 4/14/2011 11:15, nemesis wrote:
> have you looked into trying to use a ready-made engine instead of rolling
> your own without extensive knowledge and optimizations? Try some demo
> version of Unreal or something, though I don't know if they're compatible
> with XNA.

They're not compatible with XNA, because XNA is *only* C# because it is 
sandboxed. There are a variety of small game engines for XNA that I haven't 
really looked into. (Partly because they actually cost money, and while the 
amounts they cost are trivial (like $100 is not uncommon), it's more than 
I'm actually likely to make on the game. ;-) (Partly because I'm doing this 
more to learn than I am to write games per se.)

I've read the Unreal documentation. Looks very cool. Way beyond what's 
useful for a one-player simple game.

I'm thinking of trying out some of the Bryce stuff if I do a game after this 
and need some animations that are too messy to do in raw code. (So far, 
opening doors and stuff I have managed to do with math.)

> There must be a reason why game engines are highly sought and valuable assets.

No doubt. One thing Unreal does that from a programming point of view seems 
to be really helpful is that it turns the event loop inside out. So you can 
do something like "when you bump the wall, play the rub-head animation. Then 
get back to me when that finishes." That's a whole ton of bookkeeping that 
you have to do manually if your base library is "update all your objects for 
this frame" followed by "draw all your objects for this frame" 60x a second. 
  It also has logic for path finding and stuff like that, at least in the 
version I read about a couple years ago.

And of course all the level building and art sorts of things.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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