Done Pondering, Shifting Gears

As my last post detailed (a couple of months ago), I came to a crossroads and have figured out a direction to go.  The games I hope to make in the near future are not very complex and do not require amazing graphics capabilities.  So, I will take this blog down a more generic path in 2D game programming.

Although I plan to use VB.Net and the .Net framework's built-in 2D Graphics capabilities, I hope to keep things at a more drawing-system-agnostic level.  This can't be done completely, because your choice drawing system determines a lot of the detailed options available for drawing things ... and that will determine how to track and organize some data.

My rate of posting will not be very fast either.  If I can average a post or two per month, then I'll be a happy guy.  If I get some games completed, I'll be even happier! ;-)

So, keep an eye out and see what I have to offer here.

Thanks for reading!

Published Monday, September 22, 2008 10:24 PM by MattWorden
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Comments

# re: Done Pondering, Shifting Gears

Good luck. The graphics drawing in .NET is terribly slow. You should really continue with SlimDX. Or any other graphics library for that matter, because they all are better than the graphics in the .NET framework.

Saturday, September 27, 2008 7:02 AM by codeimp

# re: Done Pondering, Shifting Gears

Thanks for checking in, Pascal.

Yep -- they are slow ... but the games I will be doing won't need too much along that line.  During the pondering, I played around quite a bit with SDLdotNet as well -- but I didn't want to have to lock-in to its event-triggering system, plus the drawing routine slows down siginificantly when it involves alpha-blending.

Doing this will free me up from any external compatibility issues (if you can run .Net, you'll be able to run this) or framework, and I'll be able to just concentrate on getting the organizational pieces in place.

Later on, I'll just have to adapt the drawing code to match a new drawing system.  My guess is that I will return to SlimDX (or something along those lines) at that point.

-Matt

Saturday, September 27, 2008 1:13 PM by MattWorden