Starting a project is brutally fun -- First post

Yesterday was an exciting day, getting back into it with all of the game ideas racing through my head it was almost hard to concentrate at first.  It's actually been a long time since I buckled down and wrote some code. Once the initial jitters wore off though it felt like it was back to business as usual.

The first day involved setting up some basics.  I'm going to work with SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) as a base.  If you don't know what that means it's basically a wrapper around Direct3D/OpenGL which allows me to do some very basic functions without having to write very low level code.  The SDL Library can compile on Windows, Linux, and MacOS which is very nice if and when it comes time to do some porting. I'm still very much in the planning and prototyping phase of the engine development so decisions about possibly utilizing plug-ins for things like collision/search algorithms will be made in the next few days & weeks.

On to what I've actually done...





I've completed preliminary work on the skeleton of an Application class which includes the capability to log directly into a timestamped text file format.  This is going to be very helpful in debugging and especially figuring out why things do or (usually) do not work on computers other than mine.  I completed the very basics of a Window Manager and a Window class which will eventually be the very core of the UI system.  So far the windowing system supports dragging (moving the windows), collapse (minimize), maximize (restoring the collapse), z-ordering (windows on top of windows, windowception!), On top of that I've completed two widgets which can be placed inside of the windows, a simple text label for displaying information, and the all important button, you know for pushing, and gettin stuff done.  Getting stuff done is fun!


I'm a noob at this blogging thing but I will try to keep this up to date as I work and eventually of course reveal some more information about what it is I am actually working on.