Hi everyone
As most of you know by now I am a very controverisal person on this group. My ideas are far from radical but they might seem a little hard to bear.
Anyway, I have come up with a solution to all my problems as I go along developing a game.
One of the problems that I have run into is re-writing code for the same thing over and over again. Take a game for instance. What if I wanted to reuse stuff over in different games? This has forced me to come up with a solution.
This solution is not radical in any shape or form, but it's any idea I share.
One of the things I see with DB/DBPro/BB is that people tend to develop the entire game right on the spot in the code. They only seperate few things from the game code itself, but not the core components. While this is not a problem if you are only developing a single game, what if you wanted to make multiple games with the same core components. So what I have decided to do is develop an engine. While it might not be a true engine, it will still handle the common stuff for me. Basically what I am doing is creating a seperate dba file, including functions for anything and everything that needs to be handle for the game. Then when you make the game, all you do is include the engine file into the main game project and use the functions within the game project.
Now, that sounds a little complex for some people. You will say, well your game is going to run slower with a lot of function calls. That might be true, but I think with future updates to Dark Basic Pro, it should be faster. By the way, this is going to take some time for me to do this, but when complete it should be able to handle a couple of games until it needs an update to the code to handle different things.
Another point I would like to make to this is that it would add organization. I wouldn't want to make an entire DBA file unorganized. So what I am planning to do is to organize it into the parts that make an engine important.
Now what those parts are shouldn't be hard to figure out. I have already done so.
Some of you may follow my lead and do what I do. Most of you probably won't. It doesn't bother me if you don't, but I would like you to think about doing something similar.
The one thing I like the most about this approach is organization. The con to this is that it will take some time to do all of this. For some, the level that I want get to might be too much. For them, I would suggest ether doing it their way or try getting to a level that is just right for what they are doing. The engine approach isn't for everyone.
Just an idea to consider.
SoulMan
I am my own and own my am I
