CrazyCdn

He's been working on one game or another for well over a decade. I think this is the furthest he has ever gotten with any game and he has been given pretty much all the advice you've provided many times over. He never takes it or listens. Quite a few of us are convinced he is a troll to be honest. Just a heads up

Well then Direct X is not the right choice. Vulkan would be far more cross platform and supporting Direct X 9 is absolutely pointless. Nothing of value from DX9 will transfer to any modern API, honestly. Go over the whole tutorial then. Should not be difficult at all to go from OpenGL to Direct X if you absolutely must support a 14+ (just checked, first released 2004) year old dead API. The code worked for me about a year ago so I know it's functionally correct. Maybe see where yours and theirs differs.

I'm on a 2k and 4k monitor setup so your images were tiny. I zoomed in as much as I could and circled what I believe you're talking about, I hope? As @Septopus mentioned, can we see your sprite sheet? I've never used Unity as I work with my own engine, but with more information others here might be able to assist you better. Anyway, for myself and others I circled what I believe you're talking about (I hope) if not can you point them out?

First off, I'm with @ROGRat, unless you have a very good reason for using DX9 I would switch to at least DX10 as you're gaining no real useful knowledge at this point as DX9 is something like 15+ years old. As for your question, this is OpenGL code but what you want is identical: https://learnopengl.com/In-Practice/Text-Rendering Look for the function: void RenderText(Shader &s, std::string text, GLfloat x, GLfloat y, GLfloat scale, glm::vec3 color) and you'll see the UV coordinates you'll want to use.

Inquire on their forums or post questions here about your "issues". I doubt Unity has problems rendering 2D tiles. I also doubt you need a hack to "fix" it. I suspect it's a lack of experience more than anything. Games like Pillars of Eternity and Wasteland 2 were made using Unity. Wasteland uses 2D tiles for the ground and it's a AAA game. I would stop listening to rumors to be honest. They're typically started by inexperienced people or trolls. If there are actual problem, people will post evidence and the Unity or even Epic's teams are fairly quick to jump on any real bugs. Unity is 100% capable of making a Stardew Valley clone. Just like Unreal Engine is. Game Maker is rather amateur-ish at this point though could likely also do a Stardew Valley clone as it's not a very taxing game (could likely easily run on older mobile platforms to be honest) since it was used to make Crashlands which works on mobile too. But I'm not sure if it's free either. Again, you asked for advise, we gave it. It's for you to ignore or accept. If you have technical issues with using any of the mentioned engines, make a new post.

Look into instancing: https://learnopengl.com/Advanced-OpenGL/Instancing

A game like Stardew Valley would be quite do-able in Unity. As for performance, you just need a semi-competent programmer and you should be fine. Unity has been used to make hundreds of 2D and 3D games, much like the Unreal Engine. Honestly take your pick, either will do fine. As for others, I'm sure there are a lot of other engines, but what is your or your programmers language of choice? Unity uses C# and Unreal uses C/C++ and Blue Prints.

I would highly recommend learning how to use the debugger correctly, instead of random prints, etc. You can inspect the same variable(s) in the debugger and it's a lot faster than playing the "I think it crashes here, lets put in another print statement and recompile".

Also writing dev blogs before hand. Making YouTube developer updates or demo updates help gain exposure. Leading them from either of those to a website where they can put in their email for more information (weekly or monthly update summaries) is a good way to gain more emails for when your IndieGoGo goes live. Though it's a bit late to garner much attention from either avenue it cannot hurt to try either. A 5-10 minute YouTube done weekly wouldn't be all that difficult. Show some coding/artwork being made in time lapse and discuss what has been done that week seem to be fairly popular in that niche crowd. Good luck!

There are plenty of good DirectX 10-11 tutorials out there, or OpenGL. It's quite the adventure and worth the effort IMHO. Who knows, you might even develop a completely different game in the learning process you love even more

Basically a complete re-write. Almost nothing will transfer over and you might as well go to 11 at this point. edit: typo

Sublime 3, there, I picked a pseudo random program for you. I have a fresh Windows install so not a lot of programs to pick from. Gimp was a close second though!

First off, you seem to have a bounding volume named AABB. But an AABB typically has a XMFLOAT3 min, max; aka a bounding box. No radius involved. Why are you using XMFLOAT3 but also not using it at the same time? Clearly Center and Radius should just be XMFLOAT3's. In your constructor, it should just be Center = c; Radius = r; as both Center and Radius should be XMFLOAT3's (you don't provide the code so they might be, just don't seem it). Also, get rid of GetCenter() and GetRadius and just leave the variables exposed as public. This should honestly be struct not a class to begin with anyway (again assuming since you didn't provide all the code). Also, since you're already using the Direct X math library... why are you not actually using it? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/directxmath/ns-directxmath-xmmatrix It has matrix/vector functions for this very reason.

Space Empires 5 ran perfectly using direct x 8 on windows 7 actually. I swear on windows 10 they emulate direct x 8 through 9 through 10 through 11. I think it's a dice roll if it works ok or not. As with a lot of tweaking people apparently can get SE5 to run decently (30fps) on Windows 10. I just don't see the point as, Direct X 9 is over 13 years old at this point, as not just restarting with a modern renderer. Direct X 7 didn't support shaders. Direct X 8 supported 1.0-1.4 depending on the version of Direct X 8 though. God, that brings back nightmares... SM1.0...

Yes, it's because DirectX8 is being emulated on anything newer then Windows XP/Vista. Heck, I wanted to play Space Empires 5 but it uses DirectX8 and I cannot get it to run at over 2 frames per second on Windows 10 even with online guides. DirectX9 at this point is over 13 years old, I suspect 8 is like 15-16 years old.