Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/01/15/13:37:16
yorka AT dlc DOT fi wrote:
> Yeah right, that's all most DJGPP "game programmers" seem to do
> nowadays. Looks like nobody can even find their socks without Allegro.
> I suggest learning everything "the hard way" (a lot of
> experimenting/practicing) and using fancy-pants libs ONLY AFTER you
> would be quite capable of writing similar libs by yourself.
So you've written your own compiler and operating system as well?
Congratulations! I hope you've tested it (and your video functions)
on all the possible hardware combinations, all the video cards etc.
Or do you perhaps depend on "prior art" like compilers and libraries?
> I'm
> getting really sick'n'tired of people asking for stuff such as Allegro
> tutorials. God dammit, there's a complete function list in the zip
> which is quite enough if you've picked up the very elementary basics
> of game progging. Sure you could/would get quick results by starting
> out with a lib but then you wouldn't really learn anything. Besides,
> the wonderful little example programs only introduce you to the
> Allegro lib, they won't teach you shit.
They show you how to use the functions. Sure, you could spend a few
years re-inventing the wheel (and by now Allegro must have quite
a few person-years spent on it), but why?
Games are more than cool graphics. There's supposed to be something
else happening as well, otherwise it's just a demo of your graphics
prowess.
> Well to start out with, if you're serious about game programming and
> ready to accept challenges, you should be quite capable of coding all
> the lineto/moveto stuff yourself, it's quite simple really.
Well, to start out with, if you're serious about any programming and
ready to accept challenges you should be quite capable of coding all
the Standard C Library yourself, it's quite simple really.
Well, to start out with, if you're serious about any computing and
ready to accept challenges you should be quite capable of building
all the hardware yourself, it's quite simple really.
> But if
> you're just too lazy or impatient to code something yourself, then I
> can only say that you will never get beyond the basics in game
> programming.
If you're too lazy to write the compiler yourself then you'll never get
beyond the basics in any programming. I mean, if you don't know how
the compiler works you can't do anything useful with it, can you?
> Game programming is _hard_
Only if you choose to make it so. Compiler writing used to be very
hard and tedious as well, but then people came up with standardised
tools to make it easier, and without them you wouldn't have DJGPP
to play with.
For that matter programming at all used to be hard - ever tried
wiring a diode matrix 'program'? Or even writing 64K of octal code?
People wrote assemblers and compilers to make it easier. Since you're
on this newsgroup I assume that you use DJGPP. Why? Because it's
easier. Only a few years ago game programmers were saying that all
games had to be (and always would be) programmed in assembler. The
standard C library makes things faster to write, easier to understand
(because you don't have to try to work out what a particular function
does) and portable. Allegro is going the same way, with some people
looking at porting it to Unix.
If you want to do everything the hard way then fine. It's your life.
But don't criticise those who want to program games their own way.
If the results of their programming don't stand up to commercial games,
they'll find out, the same as you will with yours.
(And Allegro is useful for a lot more than just games...)
Chris C
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