Ok, mainly all my game programming has been done with engines that have everything taken care of for you, so that all you have to do is basically create your art and sounds, use the engine's loader and tell it what to do with what's been loaded. However, it's my belief, as is with the rest of the community(I think), that one should have an understanding of the lower level stuff that goes into an engine to effectively use it. This is what I have set out to do, but I am hitting a major snag. I am currently learning DirectX and I go through all these tutorials, and I understand the concepts presented very well. I can go through the code and understand everything that's going on. But whenever I try to implement the techniques into my own projects, I really have trouble applying what I've learned. Now I may be wrong here, but I think it just looks more difficult than it actually is. This is because everything done in a tutorial is presented as engine code rather as game code and makes things seem more difficult that it actually is because you only have to write, for example, object loading code once then you can just use that code for any object.
int main() {
//init
engineObject.load("world.x");
engineObject.render();
//clean up
}
The above would be using an engine. Now if you were to do the same thing, except using your own code to load the file, it would look more like this:
int main() {
//init
struct engineObject {
//properties
//vertices
//other stuff
};
//A cubic ass ton of code to load and render the world.
//clean up
}
Now my question is this: Once I have a loader, a renderer, an animator etc. done I can go back to where I started and treat my code just like an engine, right? I mean, obviously even after all that is done there will still be a great deal of work, but it won't seem AS insurmountable. Is this a correct assumtion or am I missing something? Thanks for reading and I look forward to the replies.
-AJ
V/R,-AJThere are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't...
