For the past couple of weeks I’ve been removing our graphics engine Irrlicht and replacing it with DirectX 9. Well actually for the past week I’ve been too sick to really code, but nevermind that, I’m back in the wheel!
Here’s a shot of the menu, it’s the part I’ve been working on most and it looks pretty much the same as before.
The difficult part is coming next, replacing the text edit box. These are a notorious bane of all programmers who cannot use the default operating system edit boxes. A simple multiline box where you can write can be suprisingly complex to program. Most users have already used some windows text editor, so they’re expecting the same functionality. If any of you know of a good edit box I can drop into Driftmoon, do tell.
I would be interested to know why you’re doing this?
Yes do tell. What was wroung with the old engine?
Irrlicht is very very basic and even more so when it comes to 2D. Having written a 2D game with it before I can say I understand why.
Surprised you’re going with DX9 and not OpenGL or an established 2D library like SFML, but whatever you’re familiar with works I guess
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Have you thought about using a UI toolkit? You don’t -have- to use it for everything but it might make things like this a little easier. I don’t know of any specific DX9 ones (only ever just touched on DX programming) apart from CEGUI which is, well, bloated. Atleast that way it’s already done and you can probably implement the interface faster as well if there’s skin support.
For anyone wondering why Ville is replacing whole swaths of the Driftmoon code, I suggest you re-read this news item: http://www.monkkonen.net/2010/03/reinvent-the-wheel/
That looks like a complicated task. If the edit boxes were to have monospaced fonts, I’d probably think of doing it “hardcore”, if you know what I mean.
Why I’m doing removing Irrlicht? Because I’m tired of looking for bugs I didn’t create. As Driftmoon seems to push the old graphics engine to it’s limits I’m constantly faced with difficult and weird bugs, which I usually trace to somewhere in Irrlicht code. I doubt I can make any better code than the people who made it, it’s just that I’d like to fix my own bugs instead of other people’s bugs.
Why I’m going with DirectX? I guess I have the most experience with it. It’s also well supported on Windows platforms and well documented with plenty of examples.
Too bad, irrlicht would have allowed OSX and Linux users (I’m one of the latter) to enjoy your game.
I visited this site to show Notrium to somebody and when seeing the screens remembered that I recently found out about a 2D in development, which already has fancy lighting and might interest you: Ethanon.
Yes, it’s a shame that the chance for cross-platform couldn’t survive the process. I think it’ll still be playable on a windows emulator, I’m using pretty standard DirectX 9 stuff.
Ethanon looks pretty spiffy, especially the shadow effects. Ever tried it?
Nah, it doesn’t run on Linux (what I run), although it seems to be the current main task. There are a few people waiting for it to test it.