And The Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By

The annoying thing about the Internet is that whenever you try and do something, a quick Google search shows that you might as well not bother, as it's already been done.

The great thing about the Internet is that whenever you want to do something, a quick Google search shows that you don't need to worry, as someone's already done it for you.

I've been practicing the great art of achieving lots while doing nothing. If you remember, I can't write any code until some contractual issues are resolved, but that doesn't stop me making progress.

I've sorted out the map editor, and all my developmental foundations: the low-level graphics and sprite system, the memory and string handling, and a maths library, and all without doing a single thing. These are all things I've had to write from scratch in the past, often slowly and painfully, but which can now be had for the price of a little research due to the generosity of programmers, and easy communication over the Internet.

First off, I've downloaded and compiled the Allegro SDK. This provides all the basic functions I should need, and being a venerable framework will have many years of nice bug testing behind it. It's free and it has no restrictive licence at all. As there's source code, if I find any problems I can fix them and pass the fix back to the main development community too. Although it supports 3D, it was originally 2D based which will be perfect. 2D is very much the poor cousin to 3D these days. DirectX 8 for example did away with it almost completely, making you use a sort of odd, flat 3D, but the outcry was so bad (and people stuck to DirectX 7) that they had to bring it back for DX9. Nobody, of course, will touch DX10 unless forced, as you can merrily wave good bye to any customers using Windows XP or earlier. A quick glance at the Steam hardware survey shows that as of today less than 30% of systems can run DX10, and that's gamers not just general users. Still, looks like it's up 4% since last August, so it'll be viable real soon now! Honest!

Anyway, backing me up in the tools department is respected tile map editor Mappy. There are several tile map editing programs around, but at a quick glance it looks like is the one for me. It covers both top-down and isometric views, as I haven't decided which to use yet, and joy-of-joys it even has source code for integrating it with Allegro applications. Ace.

All this means that I don't have to faff around builing the structure to let me make a game, and that I can get on to actually making one.