F13.net interview #3

 Posted by (Visited 4337 times)  Game talk
May 222007
 

In which I talk about prototyping processes and stuff.

  4 Responses to “F13.net interview #3”

  1. Ola Fosheim Grøstad says:
    May 23, 2007 at 2:57 am

    The F13-guy comment on libraries was interesting, but is it true? I have only limited experience with C++ programming in Direct-X and OpenGL, but it didn’t take all that much time to learn if you know the theory behind 3D. A CS-major should be up to speed within a week. (graphic-driver bug work-arounds and low-latency sound programming is another issue though).

    It is nice to see you are doing prototyping. Reminds me of the Lazzaro(sp?) article in Game Developer on prototyping Myst. Fun reading. I’m personally looking at Flash9 for prototyping purposes (Action Script 3). It has changed quite a bit, and is probably more suitable for prototyping now than it has been. The compiler will also be open-sourced during 2007, so I expect to see more tools for that platform in the coming years…

  2. Raph says:
    May 23, 2007 at 7:25 am

    I’m not a CS major. I am self-taught starting in 1984.

    So what I mean is opening up Visual Studio and trying to get a basic window up with a canvas on which I can draw, maybe a menu bar on it. These days, that’s getting tough to do. 🙂 Especially for someone who started out in the days of 10 GRAPHICS 8 20 PLOT 0, 0.

  3. Ola Fosheim Grøstad says:
    May 23, 2007 at 7:54 am

    Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything about you, Raph. I was merely curious about the interviewer’s general statement.

    The Win-API isn’t great for prototyping,agreed. Just slightly better than plain X-Windows (800 lines to open a window?). C# is better, but still not great. Some higher level language + OpenGL is a possibility for advanced 2D/3D prototyping, though (most free languages have OpenGL bindings, even Erlang and Haskell?). OpenGL is also a more stable API and easier to get into than Direct-X. In the end: whatever works… or more likely: whatever you already know :-).

    (I started with BASIC in the 80s too. I still feel sorry for the shopkeepers who’s computers displayed my erratic colour bands… 10 poke 53280,0; poke 543280,1; goto 10)

  4. Raph says:
    May 23, 2007 at 8:42 am

    Oh, no offense taken. I was just trying to get across that there’s this body of knowledge that has crept up in there while I wasn’t paying attention, all of which is beside the point in terms of what I want to actually accomplish.

    BMax has full access to OpenGL, btw. Plus a bunch of higher-level stuff aimed at 2d drawing. And my prototypes all tend to be 2d anyway. So for those purposes it’s a great solution for me. But it coulda been PyGame, or SDL, or something else.

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