I've decided on how I'm going to proceed with the coding of the engine. I'm not going to code each class individually any more. I'm going to get the declaration for every class in the entire engine done and then I'm going to go back and fill everything in. This means I'll be able to get large chunks of the engine designed without stopping to fill them in as I go along. I should also be able to spot potential problems earlier. Once all the declarations are in I'll go over the whole thing and fill in the actual code.

I'm also trying to cut down on my use of smart pointers. In general they are fairly nice but I really have to avoid using them for passing parameters to functions and just use naked pointers instead.

Anyway, I have the the graphics classes defined, I'll probably get the timing \ animation classes done now.

Game Scripting Mastery arrived the other day. I've been reading it whenever I'm not coding or in school. I love this book. Apparently some of the sample code is dodgy but I don't copy/paste code anyway so thats not an issue. I'm not very far into it but already I have a much better idea of how scripting systems work. I'm pretty sure I could write a simple basic interpreter very quickly now from the techniques shown in the first few chapters of the book. Infact I might mess around with that tomorrow to get used to scripting because I'll be basing alot on scripts in this game.

EDIT: Thinking over it I won't implement BASIC - I don't have the time to get all the functionality working. I will make some kind of compiler/interpretter though. I'm not sure what yet - maybe a stripped down basic. I'll see tomorrow.