I decided that I want to make a game for the iphone I was thinking of using oolong or sio2 any recommendations?
Both have the problem of lack of tutorials, is it possible to somehow use a normal C++ game tutorial and integreate the engines rather than the one used in the tutorials? So if the C++ tutorial talks of creating an engine I can skip it and use sio2 or oolong?
Thanks
You're making a game, not a game engine. The short answer is, yes, you can just use those engines to make the game.
The long answer is that you should probably go through the tutorials doing it the way that they do it just to get a feeling for C++/OpenGL/whatever. Then, using the knowledge that you have gained, make your own game using oolong or SIO. Trust me, you are not going to want to use the code you wrote when you were learning C++ to make an actual game, unless you can read something and immediately master it.
Look into Unity. Not C++ for the scripting, but it's a very popular engine.
How about cocos2d? It's BSD license, has docs and tutorials, and I've seen many people use it to create a game in a day.
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I am looking to implement an extremely rudimentary FPS game with extremely rudimentary 3D graphics using C++ .NET and DirectX.
I'm not interested in any third party libraries or anything special like that.
Having never done graphics based programming besides 2D stuff I don't really know where to get started or even how to find the right resources online.
I have a few weeks to build this game so im trying to keep it simple.
Can anyone give me a little guidance on how to get started?
This looks as though it may give you a push in the right direction:
http://zophusx.byethost11.com/tutorial.php?lan=dx9&num=0
I always found that OpenGL was easier to learn though. So unless it's necessary for you to use DirectX, I'd suggest you have a quick look at GL and see what you think.
If you download DirectX SDK you can find plenty of samples there in C++ and C#.
May I recommend "Introduction to Game Programming in DirectX 9" by "Wordware" Publishing. I know you just want something very simple like the rotating cube classic, so do not be put off by the 'game' element. I got 3/4 the way through and wrote a screen saver! DX10 is now available but I stick to 9 - card backward compatibility.
The maths can get silly in 3D, but if you can get the basics, the rest will follow very quickly.
If you haven't done so already the "DirectX SDK" download is also a must - it contains (most important) the help files for the methods, functions etc. and a few not so helpful getting started stuff.
You might want to have a look at SlimDX, even if you're not interested in third-party libraries.
Although I don't have Visual C++ 2008/2010 Express installed, you could add SlimDX as a reference to your project. Be sure you check out the tutorial section, even though it's in C#, but if you know C++/CLI pretty well, you should be able to convert the code to C++/CLI.
Is anyone here able to point me to a simple and well designed C++ 2D open source game engine? The genre is less important, I wish to learn by example. I wouldn't want anything particularly complex as I'm interested in learning general concepts, rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of the engine implementation.
If I were you I'd look into ClanLib - it is open source, cross platform, and the source packages contain 50 or so easy-to-follow examples, from simple image rendering, to a fully working server-client dice wars implementation.
And if you're eager to get started it's easy to set up with Visual Express, so you can play with in in no time.
Also: here are some others if you want to give them a try.
Personally I learned a lot, looking through the source code of Frogatto, even the source code can be viewed only here.
It is of course a more complex game, but there is much to learn regarding software/game architecture and design.
Have a look at SuperTux, it's a nice little platformer game inspired by Mario, written in C++.
There is a builtin level editor, too.
This is my first time asking here but I've been a reader for ages! A fantastic place to learn!
I was asked to design a simple board game as a programming project this semester (using C++) and to implement GUI for a bonus mark. I was rather lost reading through tens of possible GUI toolkits and not knowing which one to use. I'm rather a beginner and this is my first big project!
My requirements for GUI are very very basic. All I want is to allow the user to pick from between two options at the start of the game. Those options determine which character the user will pick in the game to play with. This is the only input I want from the user. The console program would receive this input, interpret it and do all the logic of the game in the console window.
Currently, the console window displays a numbered list of options for the user who then picks a number and based off that character input, the console knows what to do through some if-statements.
Up till now, I've been told that GTK+ is a good option and I've been advised to check out wxWidgets and QT4. I'm confused on which one to use since I want something fast to learn and simple to implement because the purpose I want it for is also simple. I was also rather reluctant to start learning a GUI toolkit from its basics then realizing it might not have my simple requirement.
Thank you in advance fellas and sorry for the rather long post!
If you want something pretty basic as far as a GUI goes, it might be worth looking into some sample applications from any of the named projects. See what you can find in a sample application that is most similar to what you have, and try to get that working. Then once you have it working, and tweaked to your liking, maybe play around with things a bit more then for a further/better understanding.
My previous experience is with WxWidgets and Qt. My advice would be to check out Qt because of the great documentation for the project as well as the QAssistant.
Good Luck, GUIs can be really fun to incrementally learn!
Hi I am working in VC++ and I am quite interested in game programming and I have few queries.
1).What one must know before starting game programming ?
2).Can anybody give me info # resources like tutorial ,links ,etc. which would help me to start as fast as possible ?
3).Also give me info # some good books on game programming ?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Before you start programming you must have a good understanding of the language, how to program and how to structure and test your code. Oh, and a huge amount of either patience or free time. On the maths front, Vectors, Matrices and Quaternions are the main things I found I needed.
The other thing that often goes overlooked when I programmer starts writing a game is someone to create the assets. Preferably someone specialized in it.
You mention DirectX, which is not actually a fast way to go as you have to build everything from square one, which means a lot more maths, performance testing and overall handwork. I would suggest at least a rendering engine like Ogre3D. There are plenty of tutorials and a very good community.
There is a good post here on why you should write games not engines.
The main reason you would want to use DirectX is to enhance your understanding of the lower levels, all the things an engine is abstracting for you. While I think this is a good thing to do, I wouldn't want to do it for a major or first project.
The main site I used for help was gamedev.net, although I also found some intresting articles on gamesutra
It takes time and requires a lot of patience. And playable game is more than just working C++ code.
gamedev.net.
First, download Visual C# Express Edition, and then download XNA Game Studio 3.1.
After that, check out the XNA Creators Club - that has lots of help to get you up and running quickly.
Are you 100% dedicated to C++? If not, I would recommend starting with XNA/C# instead. DirectX will force you to spend a lot of time up front learning API calls before you ever get something on the screen. XNA will allow you to start coding your game very quickly while getting immediate feedback while you program.
If you are committed to C++, I would recommend Beginning Game Programming by Jonathan Harbour. He starts with an easy to understand framework that won't take long to pick up. Remember that to use DirectX you will have to learn win32, and low level DirectX code.
For tutorials, try googling "c++ beginning game programming tutorial". Gamedev.net will be another invaluable resource. Go to the "For Beginners" forum and look through the stickies.
As for what you must know, it depends on your aspirations and your choice of tools. As a beginner, you will want to start small and in 2D or text games. To get a Pong game going in XNA, you only need to have basic C# skills and basic collision detection. To get a Pong game going in DirectX, you will need to understand win32 code, and a ton of device calls. To do a console text game, you only need to know basic C++ and maybe some basic gameflow techniques.
If using DirectX is not a fixed requirement, you should consider OpenGL, and use a library like SFML or Allegro to handle all the basic stuff.
http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro/
http://www.sfml-dev.org/
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I want to start this as a hobby in developing a desktop game. I have found several engines, but I am not sure whether it does the initial job I am looking at.
Initially I want to do the following:
Create a figure (avatar), and let the user dress the avatar
Load the avatar in the game
In later stages, I want to develop this as a multi-player game.
What should I do?
I also recommend Ogre. Ogre can do this, it provides everything needed in regards of mesh and animation support, but not as a drop-in solution. You have to write lots of code for this to be done.
For our project we implemented something like you do. The main character and any other character can be dressed with different weapons and armor and the visuals of the character avatar change accordingly.
As a start hint for how to go about this: In your modeling tool (Blender, Maya, 3ds max, etc.) you model your avatar and all its clothes you need and rig them to the same skeleton. Then export everything individually to Ogre's mesh format.
At runtime you can then attach the clothing meshes the user chooses to the skeleton instance so that they together form the avatar. This is not hard to do via Ogre-API, but for even easier access to this you can use MeshMagick Ogre extension's meshmerge tool. It has been developed for exactly this purpose.
If you want to change other characteristics like facial features, this is possible too, as Ogre supports vertex pose animations out of the box, so you can prepare pathes for certain characteristics of the face and let the user change the face by sliders or somthing like this. (e.g like in Oblivion)
One thing to be aware regarding Ogre: It is a 3d graphics engine, not a game engine. So you can draw stuff to the screen with it and animate and light and in any way change the visuals, but it doesn't do input or physics or sound. For this you have to use other libs and integrate them. Several pre-bundled game engines based on Ogre are available though.
If you are good with C++ you should use Ogre, it's the best open-source engine, continuously been updated by it's creators, with a lot of tutorials and a very helpful community.
http://www.ogre3d.org/
It's more of a GFX engine, but it has all the prerequisites you desire.
Good luck!
No engine is likely to do this for you. What they do is generally allow you to load and render 3d models. But combining them, the way you'd need to do to "dress them" is up to you. And creating them, or letting the user do so, is ultimately up to you. The engine might offer a number of tools to make the task easier (for example, rendering the model while the user is designing it), but a game engine is not a magic "make a game" box where you just have to press a button, and your custom game comes out.
A couple of people have said Ogre3D, I'll offer up Irrlicht as an alternative.
You might want to take a look at http://www.crystalspace3d.org/ - I have to admit it was more of an exploratory matter for me, but it seemed like a pretty nice engine - with physics and scripting included. They have an project which shows the avatar walking in the spacestation-like building with very smooth camera effects.
OTOH: depending on how far you want to push this, you might find yourself recreating the SecondLife(tm)-like kind of environment. If that's a fair assumption, then you might take a look at OpenSimulator and the associated opensource viewer projects and see if this may be of interest to you - and work there with the existing team to develop the code further, rather than working on your own.
If you good with C++, I suggest the C4 Engine. From my experiences, existing game engines are either too rigid or just nothing more than a collection of libraries.
Ogre is a good way to go if you are just interested in getting something to show. As some have already stated here, Ogre is a rendering engine. There are lots of add-ons and functions to complete common tasks like Audio, Input and whatnot. This is perfectly fine if your just aiming at playing around or creating a prototype.
Should you want to start a long-term project that will be developed over a longer period of time (which would be pretty likely considering you probably being the only developer and games being complex applications), you should really start thinking about what it is that you want to do. Then, based on you're goals, look for several engines that can tackle your needs (there's always some API to accomplish XYZ). Then it's up to you how you manage your game and where you use existing libraries - you'd basically tie up your own engine according to your needs.
It get's a bit more difficult if you start looking for a real game engine in terms of "engine for all my game-dev needs". Check out the nice list of 3d game engines at devmasters (http://www.devmaster.net/engines/), you'll find lots of alpha status game engines trying to accomplish this, although you should keep in mind that support and documentation usually isn't first class in those cases.
I personally never used it, but I evaluated the open source engine Delta3D (delta3d.org) for my project and was impressed by it's cool architecture. It encapsulates a whole bunch of other quality open source frameworks for stuff like graphics (OpenSceneGraph: openscenegraph.org) or physics (ODE: ode.org). That's probably as close as you'll get to a free and flexible game engine as far as I know. It was developed at an air force university, and due to it's academic background comes with lots of detailed documentation.
If you're good with C++ you can write your own engine :P
Ogre is the best of Irrlicht and Crystalspace, and the reasoning behind that is simple - Ogre has actually been used in a production pipeline by the game industry. It actually has a lot of weight behind it, whereas Irrlicht and Crystalspace are more or less applications that don't do a lot out of the box. Crystalspace however has a branch project that implements a game engine right into Blender 3d allowing the artist to play the role of programmer without leaving the actual software.
I'm not very big on Irrlicht - there is a lot of sneakiness behind its motives. For an open source project it branches out into many different derivatives that are either complete game engines or WYSWYG editors and they find ways to lock you into paying somehow.
Ogre excels at being a graphics engine rather than a library, and it has to be compiled to individual needs. The tradeoff is you can implement Ogre into any design work flow or even create a new one. Where it takes the load off your shoulders is having to write graphics code of any kind thus making it a very slick rapid prototyping engine in its basic form.
One engine that you could try is the Torque 3D game engine www.garagegames.com which, although not being freeware, allows for out of the box usability. While the functionality that you seek in terms of being able to fully customise the character is not instantly available within the engine, if you are willing to create the models yourself it should not be too hard to add them into the game and the utilise the game engine to change the 'skins' of the avatar. One thing that I feel will set this apart from the other engines is the fact that it comes with networking functionality pre-installed (from what you have described in your question I am guessing that you are attempting to either make an RTS or MMO, and if so I wish you good luck).
While it may seem strange that the engine is based around a shooting game, there are guides witin the Torque forums that allow you to add the coding for sword based combat and other things associated with a fantasy based game (if, that is, what you are planing on making).
But anyway... good luck with your project. If you are attempting what I think you are attempting it is no easy feat. But I'm sure you know what you are doing =)
Hope this helped
If you are interested in using the Irrlicht 3D engine, you can find a number of tutorials that step you through the process of creating simple 3D applications here.
I also suggest Irrlicht. It's easier to begin with, but it does not have half of the Ogre3D support though.