I'm a newbie to game development, so please bare with me.
Is a Wrapper in IT and more specifically game development basically a type of adapter? How common are wrappers in games in general and more specifically in the more common languages for GD? Are there any AAA games with wrappers? Is there a system which is easiest to make or use wrappers?
I noticed some game engines and render engines have wrappers available to bridge the gap between the native game language and another one. Is there always a significant performance hit in using such a wrapper? Are such wrappers basically connecting the engine available with a framework or is this not always the case?
Game engine examples with wrappers and a brief explanation would help me a lot.
I suppose that it is possible to create a wrapper for any program - is this true? Is this best done with an IDE, such as MonoDevelop or Visual Studio which I am considering for long term?
Any and all help and criticism is much appreciated.
Clinton
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More or less yea. It is very common to use wrappers internally to support different video modes (DX / OpenGL / Software), audio (OpenAL, XAudio, EAX etc.). Good example is Quake/Quake2/Half-Life/Unreal or any similar engines from back in the day. But that's not as common anymore on the PC. In my own game I've also used wrappers for physics (so I upgraded my initial rudimentary physics with Bullet later on).
Triple-A, cross-platform engines (Unreal, Crysis, Source, Skyrim etc.) also rely heavily on wrappers for graphis (DX on 360, PSGL on PS3, wtf on Wii), audio, and additionally input, so you can map between different controllers, keyboards, touch screens etc. On small indie projects that will probably never use any other tech in the near future, using the different APIs/libraries directly is probably far more efficient, development-time wise.
But then you also have stuff like SMD and SFML which, being 3rd party libraries, are technically just really powerful wrappers with extra bells and whistles. Heck, even the whole .Net framework is in a away just a wrapper for good old Win32 (may not be true anymore with newer windows tho).
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