02.02 - Game Development Tools
Regarding graphics-editing, JASC PaintShop Pro retails at $99 US, but you can download a 30-day trial for free here. At the end of the 30-day trial, the software will stop working.
Now, for sound-editing, Sound Foundry''s SoundForge retails at $350 US. You can download a limited function demo (no time limit, though), here.
For MIDI creators, Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 is expensive (couldn''t actually find a price on the website...strange), but a trial version is available here.
Steinberg''s Cubase has a demo which you can download here
Not sure about any good shareware/freeware products, but the trials of PaintShop, SoundForge, and Pro Audio 9 should be good for a start.
Disclaimer
This is the first of a series of comments intended to "port" this tutorial to another platform: SDL on Linux, instead of DirectX on Windows. I'll try to mirror every information provided by Teej, topic by topic. This sure will be a challenge, as I'm just learning game programming, and I'll need lots of help. Please send me a message if you're willing to help.
This comment is intentionally written to look like the main article written by Teej, with the relevant portions changed to fit a new development platform. It's not like I'm in anyway affiliated with gamedev.net or have any leading role in writing this Interactive Tutorial. I just thought it would be fun write the comment this way.
Game Development Tools
If you want to write games, you’re going to need more than vi (vim is alright). In this article I quickly run through some of the tools you should have at your disposal, and mention some other considerations as well.
The Operating System
What is the target platform for our games? As GNU/Linux is gaining popularity by leaps and bounds of late, we'll be targeting it. Of course, GNU/Linux comes in many flavors, and people call these flavors distributions. I won't delve into this as this forum is about gaming and not Linux. I want just to let you know that all distributions are perfectly compatible if you do the right job.
GNU/Linux is a operational system full of choices, and we should make one right now: What library we'll use for gaming development? It should by a free library, as most people here are hobbists and don't have the money to buy expensive libraries. Source code should be provided, as it is a powerful way to learn programming. Also, it should target more than one platform. While we'll be developing on a GNU/Linux system, maybe later you'll want to port your games to other platforms, like Windows or MacOS. All these considerations led me to choose SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer). Quoting from the SDL documentation:
Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power." Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Win32, BeOS, MacOS, Solaris, IRIX, and FreeBSD.
Well, what about all the other libraries out there? You can use then if you wish. The API will sure be different, but the concepts should be the same. If you do, please contribute comments and examples here.
The C Compiler
It probaly won't come as a surprise to you that I use GNU C Compiler (gcc) for all my C/C++ programming -- it's easily the most popular compiler out there. It is also THE standard compiler on GNU systems, and the very foundation of it.
What about the others compilers out there? Any C compiler should be fine. We'll write portable code, and there is no compilation caveat to SDL or any other library that we'll be using. If you find any problems compiling the code presented here, post a comment describing your problems, so we can try to help and other people can avoid the problem.
You'll also need a good programmer text editor. What I call a "programmer text editor" is any text editing software with features suitable for editing source code, like syntax highliting, function name completion, tag jumping, bookmarks, etc. I use vim for all my source editing, but there are many others out there (FTE is one of the best). If you don't have a favorite editor already, experiment with some of them.
Graphics-Editing Software
Since you're on GNU/Linux you should've heard about a great graphics-editing software: The Gimp. Quoting from the documentation:
The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
That said, go get it if you don't have it already. You'll never have need for anything else when it comes to bitmaps. Of course, if already have another software to deal with pixels, you can keep it.
Sound Editing Software
I'm still doing some research on sound editing software, so I'll skip this for now.
Feel free to reply to this topic with your questions, comments or suggestions.
Edited by - pazu on April 9, 2001 1:35:39 PM
Doing research on sound editors right now, hope to get back with something by the end of the day.
As long as you run with a 24 or 32bit desktop it is very stable.
To program DirectX applications you must have the DirectX SDK, which includes the files you must have to program and much more (samples, documentation, etc.)
You can download it from microsoft''s DirectX site (www.microsoft.com/directx), it''s a 144 MB file.
Addendum: Forgot to mention that you should probably get the 8.0a developer runtime as well (55 MB download). Yeah, it's big, but it's not 144 MB big. Of course, you could just go for the DX 7 SDK, and get to use DirectDraw, and have a fully stable and reliable SDK, but I am not sure you can get that anymore, since MS has upgraded to 8.
Edited by - Piotyr on April 10, 2001 9:48:33 AM
You didn''t think I was going to leave you stranded without the necessary DirectX files, did you?
I''m currently finishing one of the Ladder series articles which introduces DirectX, and there will be instructions on getting yourself set up. As well, I''ll provide most (if not all) of the components on my webpage, so you don''t necessarily have to grab such a large file from Microsoft.
Check back soon for the article in question.
Teej
