Hi everyone, it's been a while since I last visited the forums.

But thought I'd post a quick 'just for fun' question.

When developing your games, when is it you get to see the first visual signs of life?

I'm currently working on an engine, started a few days ago and I'm around 10'000 lines of code in and still have a blank window

In the past I'd have usually opted to rush to get the first triangle rendering, but I'm taking a different approach this time, working towards making it as flexible as possible as I fancied

supporting multiple graphics libraries. That beautiful first rendered object is so close, but there's always 'just one more thing' that needs implementing before I can hit F5 and reap the rewards.

It can take a while before getting a triangle on screen. @pheonix2468 if you're anything like me, then when you say you're writing the "engine", you're really saying you're writing your own math library, game object class hierarchy, maybe your own data structures like queues for events/messaging, stacks, etc. and then writing "manager" classes to manage all that stuff. And especially if you're trying to make your engine support various rendering libraries, you're probably doing A LOT of framework code.

I've done that before, but I never finished heh. These days, I still write most of the engine, but I pretty much stick with only one rendering engine, and I'll happily use someone else's math library and physics :-D

But in short, yeah, it can take a while. Like, weeks, if not months.

This is exactly why I keep coming back to using Unity. Someone else did all the hard, boring work for me and it takes about five minutes to see some visual results from my scripting after pressing the play button.

" started a few days ago and I'm around 10'000 lines of code in and still have a blank window "

I would definitely want to see something on the screen before then, it would give me a general sense terror otherwise. Plus I wouldn't manage 10000 lines in a few days, that is extremely fast coding ability! To me anyway, I don't know what someone else would say. Sounds like savant autistic ability to me, like Dustin Hoffman.

I did have a blank screen a one point, for a few months, before I found my level. I didn't like it!