2009-10-06, 02:22 AM
Well the only games in town are really DirectX or OpenGL for what I know. Between the two, OpenGL is an easy side to take. So OpenGL is what I know... methodology wise at least. DX has a ton of problems. So if I'm programming something I want to use DX, I'll seek out a second party API that wraps around DX (and usually can work in OpenGL mode as well)
For a programmer like me, learning/using DX is basically a waste of time. Besides, it changes like every other year, so there is no real reason to learn it in the first place
Anyway, I just finished a round of this business. It turned out, even though I couldn't get SOM to cooperate much in window mode, being in window mode magically fixed all my debugging issues. Now I think I know why one of these DX7 books warned against fullscreen apps being impossible to debug. I don't know if this is a DX7 thing, or if it applies to all fullscreen apps. I find fullscreen apps always run much slower under XP and Vista, so if I want one I just make a window as large as the display mode and strip off all the "chrome". I would never make someone run an app in fullscreen mode anyway, what with the havoc it wreaks with your desktop (and I don't even keep icons visible on mine... but there are the Vista sidebar widgets)
I am making significant progress in just these couple of afternoons. Short of any hurdles out of left field, I think I will have some serious results soon that will really extend the event system just by dropping a dll into your output game folder (or your SOM program folder for developing projects)
After the basic system is in place, all we will need to do is map out the memory space (find out at what addresses different data is stored... not very hard but could use a collective effort) ...I'd rather spend my time programming a fancy configuration system and maybe some graphical tools to help people debug their games and find addresses they can use. The simplest promise I can make is for starters we will have access to any game parameter we want in an event, like what items are equipped, how much exp the player has, what is their bad statuses, and so on... anything really. And probably be able to change (write to) many of these values on the fly.
My immediate want is bad status detection.
For a programmer like me, learning/using DX is basically a waste of time. Besides, it changes like every other year, so there is no real reason to learn it in the first place
Anyway, I just finished a round of this business. It turned out, even though I couldn't get SOM to cooperate much in window mode, being in window mode magically fixed all my debugging issues. Now I think I know why one of these DX7 books warned against fullscreen apps being impossible to debug. I don't know if this is a DX7 thing, or if it applies to all fullscreen apps. I find fullscreen apps always run much slower under XP and Vista, so if I want one I just make a window as large as the display mode and strip off all the "chrome". I would never make someone run an app in fullscreen mode anyway, what with the havoc it wreaks with your desktop (and I don't even keep icons visible on mine... but there are the Vista sidebar widgets)
I am making significant progress in just these couple of afternoons. Short of any hurdles out of left field, I think I will have some serious results soon that will really extend the event system just by dropping a dll into your output game folder (or your SOM program folder for developing projects)
After the basic system is in place, all we will need to do is map out the memory space (find out at what addresses different data is stored... not very hard but could use a collective effort) ...I'd rather spend my time programming a fancy configuration system and maybe some graphical tools to help people debug their games and find addresses they can use. The simplest promise I can make is for starters we will have access to any game parameter we want in an event, like what items are equipped, how much exp the player has, what is their bad statuses, and so on... anything really. And probably be able to change (write to) many of these values on the fly.
My immediate want is bad status detection.