I did some more work on the 2d engine for Managed World. I've decided to step back and revise my plans. I was taking a pretty abstract approach to the engine, to the point where I could plug in an OpenGL renderer if I wished to. Well, in order to be able to abstract the renderer, you need to abstract almost any feature of DirectX or OpenGL that you wish to use so that the end-user (the actual game code) can use the abstractions and not care how they operate under the hood.

All in all, this isn't the real problem. Really, there is no problem. I've been doing find abstracting the details when I need to. It's definitely a fun exercise in software design. However, I stepped back and asked myself what the true audience is for the articles that I will be writing, and for Managed World in general.

Well, the audience I'm targeting is Managed DirectX developers. So, in that case, I don't think it is a problem if I expect the users to be using DirectX. I don't want to make it too complicated, unnecessarily. So, time to pull out the abstractions tonight and get a straight forward, DirectX-specific, engine running.

The good part is that I can simply tag this source release in source control and then go to town chopping stuff out. If I find myself up poopy creek, I can simply check out the tagged release and consider myself good again.