This probably wont interest anyone else, but Im pretty proud
.
Over the last 2 weeks I have managed to simulate a lot of DBP's Basic3D and Basic2D commands in Visual Basic for Windows Mobile phones using the Windows Mobile Professional SDK and DirectX / Direct3D. Its been a complicated process as Ive never really programmed with DirectX before, other than using DBP (which really isnt programming with DX
). But anyways Ive managed to program an engine that currently supports:
- Creating all of the standard primitive meshes (box, sphere, cylinder, torus, polygon, etc. )
- Loading in .x files (this was really complicated, especially because the WMSDK doesnt directly support .x files, so I had to modify a custom class released by Microsoft for loading in md3dm files converted from .x files using one of Microsoft's converters, and then building the meshes up vert by vert)
- Texturing objects
- 3D Lights
- 2D Sprites
- Translating, Rotating, and Scaling sprites, 3D meshes, and the active camera
- An intersectObject command similar to DBP's intersect object command for raycasting and collision
Alongside all of this Ive learnt how to use the accelerometers built into the newer windows phones (like my new Omnia
) so I can get the phone's xyz angle in the real world.
Everything is written using a strong object-oriented system. Ive tried to simulate DBP's commands while improving them to suit the object oriented possiblities VB allows, eg:
MAKE OBJECT BOX objNum, width, height, depth in DBP converts to
objNum = makeObjectBox(width, height, depth) in my VB engine.
All of the meshes are stored in an object collection, and all of the sprites in another object collection. Both of these collections are automatically looped through and rendered / processed each loop.
My next goals are:
- Figure out how to get access to the phone's GPS (this is my biggest goal as my game idea that this all started from relies entirely on the GPS)
- Support animated 3D meshes
- Add in more collision features
- Add some helper commands like Move Object, Point Object, Move Camera, Point Camera, etc.
- Get D3DText working, havent tried it yet but I doubt itll be hard compared to what Ive gotten working so far
- Figure out how to use MySQL Databases (this ones going to be hard... but a necessity)
Anyways, just thought Id post up with what Ive been working on over the past couple of weeks. If anyone else is thinking about programming for phones I highly suggest it, its pretty cool being able to play your games on phones. Ive already made a few test games, nothing too big just throwing a ball around the screen using the touchscreen and using the accelerometer to cause the ball to fall to the physical bottom of the screen depending on what angle its being heald at. Possibly once I get the base engine complete, Ill consider releasing it or some sort of tutorial to the public, but we'll see as Ive put a lot of work into it. There really isnt much documentation for this stuff on the net, and the fact that out of the dozens of examples Ive tried, only 3 of them have actually compiled successfully.
Well, thats it. I expect Ill get a bunch of "good for you, who cares" posts, but so be it
.
