@dknowles
Quote: "Having been doing games (and non-game apps using a 'game' approach) since the 6502 on the old commodores"
You have my admiration on that point. I was brought up on the 8080/Z80 processor and when I did take time to look at the 6502 for writing games for emulators I was frustrated by the register architecture and what I considered to be limitation by comparison. So I gave up on it
@EveryoneElse
As I said, I started with the Altair 8800 (hand built and soldered) using the 8080/Z80 CPU. I had a Cromemco color board in it for doing games but I never wrote one of my own for it even though that's what I wanted to do. However, the ColecoVision game unit used a Z80 processor and I found a board for the S-100 bus that used the same video chip as the ColecoVision. I wrote my first major game program that could conceivably run on a ColecoVision but it took a year of assembly code and was finished just in time to see the market for ColecoVision drop.
When I finally decided to get back into writing my game seriously my roommate suggested DarkBasic but by that time I was so immersed in C/C++ that I could no longer wrap my head around the syntax and structure of Basic. I began to study SDL but its dependence on third party APIs for sound was daunting. I moved on to SFML but it was still in somewhat developmental stages. Then I saw that Dark Basic was essentially available now for C++, complete with easy to use sound and input. The only thing that I didn't like was that it wasn't truly object oriented. So I wrote some classes to wrap DGDK. I actually have two programs under development, or at least the level design stage which I felt was necessary in order to build the game itself on.
Then along came Dark .NET and I bought it. Truth to tell, I haven't even looked at it yet for everything else going in in my world. But I assume that because it is .NET it's object oriented, that images and sprites and objects have instances rather than numbered existences. I'm tempted to port my in-progress development over to Dark .NET but despair of once more abandoning my current code in favor of a more desirable implementation platform, though the conversion would probably be easier to deal with. I'm just not fond of traversing that learning curve again.
And, truth to tell, I've been taking a heavy look at XNA for the last couple of years. The appeal of XNA is the potential for implementation on an X-Box. Mind you, I have no delusions that I'm able to write the next Pac-Man Ultra. But some of the concepts I have in mind may be sufficient to garner some interest and maybe a few bucks in the process. The main problem I had with XNA was that no matter what I read no author was approaching the learning experience properly.... until a couple of weeks ago when I stumbled on an XNA 3.0 book that told me what I needed to know and in what order. There are still some things I need to implement in XNA that aren't covered by the book but google has been a good resource in that regard.
So now I'm up in the air as to whether to pursue Dark .NET or XNA. I'm interested in what the perceived advantages would be as to one over the other. The one thing that's implemented in sprites in (at least) Dark GDk is the ability to define an offset and rotate the sprite around that point. I'm sure that can be done in XNA but not out of the box. I'd assume that it's available out of the box for Dark.NET but, as I've said, I've been unable to find the time to dedicate to the next learning curve.
Lilith, Night Butterfly
I'm not a programmer but I play one in the office
