Dune Shepherd said:
> Okay so I'm sure lots of these posts get posted,
Actually, this group seems pretty dead nowadays.
> I see alot of stuff about silly c++ tutorials and simple stuff, fine
> and dandy for people who don't know all that I suppose, but I'd really
> like to know in essence how to create a full game. Is there a basic
> terminology book somewhere? I know a little bit of visual and java
> etc. but I can pick up just about any language rather quickly, I'm not
> looking to learn in a day, 5 years is perfectly fine, however I'd like
> a good idea of direction
The first thing you need to know is that, if you want to write a game
that will sweep the nation and make you a zillionaire, either it'll
take you several lifetimes to write or you're going to need some help.
But if you're just after having a bit of fun by writing something /you/
think is cool (because you know what's going on underneath), then it's
surprising just how much you /can/ do on your own. If you're old enough
to remember the days of Manic Miner, Mercenary, and the like, most of
those were written by individuals rather than a whole team.
> How, for example, was Oblivion of Morrowing (Elder Scrolls by
> Bethesda) created?
No idea. You'll have to ask dem wot dun it.
> I know programming, but most languages do not
> provide a built in graphics thingy.
Right, but most companies' games don't have to work on every platform in
the world (or, if they do, their graphics programming whizzes have
already written an abstraction layer for image processing - and
probably for sound, too). So that's your first choice - pick a
platform. Or perhaps pick a graphics library that you like, and let
that decide your platform for you. Because you'll be working with that
library a *lot*.
> Obviously such games are not a
> very large compilation of jpegs. Wikipedia is no help.
Firstly, jpegs are a pig to work with. Secondly, they're lossy. Bitmaps
are far more reliable, and have a very simple format. Animating bitmaps
is a cinch. Well, okay, it's actually quite fiddly, but it's easy
fiddly rather than hard fiddly.
Secondly, actually in a way such games /are/ a very large collection of
images - but not /only/ that. For example, let's take Space Invaders.
You have a ****p. One image. Maybe you want to give it one sort of
pulsing effect when it moves, another sort when it fires. Now we might
be up to ten or twenty images already. Two or three for a simple
missile. Six for a simple player-****p explosion effect. Then maybe five
or so for each type of enemy, plus another five for their explosion
effects, and perhaps four kinds of enemy. You're already looking at
fifty images, and that's just for a tiny little Space Invaders game.
But yes, there's a lot more to it than that. Almost certainly, you'll
find yourself favouring a language (or an implementation, rather) that
lets you write event-driven programs. "If the user presses THIS key, do
THAT, depending on whether such-and-such is true, or perhaps THE
OTHER". "If the timer just went TICK, do such and such". And so on.
Whilst I'm hardly the world's biggest Microsoft fan, I have to say that
the Win32 API lends itself very nicely to writing games. (That's what
Windows is /for/ - mainframes for bean-counters, Linux for worker bees,
and Windows for Minesweeper.)
Personally, on the rare occasions when I do this kind of thing, I tend
to use the C language, writing on Visual Studio 6 under Windows XP, and
I avoid COM like a road accident.
> Any help appreciated, critisize if you must but I'll probably just
> ignore you.
If you ignore criticism, you won't learn much.
> And if I'm completely lost in asking this question here,
> perhaps help on pointing me in the right direction? Much obliged.
I don't know of any decent books on games programming that don't assume
a platform, although there are some quite good books out there on how
to write 2D and 3D graphics engines (which aren't as hairy as they
sound, although they're still pretty hairy).
--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -www. +rjh@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
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