i am noky these are my random musings…

It’s Not So Simple After All

So I was digging around the interweb looking for info on game development as I often do and looked into the SDL stuff. During my search, I found this supposedly awesome new library called SFML. It's supposedly a lot more efficient than SDL and just as, if not more so, simple as SDL.

Of course, I was determined to give it a shot. I have this horrible habit of being really indecisive before I start a project as to how I should go about doing it. I was committed to Irrlicht for about a month and then I decided to change the project entirely and go 2D. Now I find myself with this SFML foolishness.

Anyway, after about a week of messing around with this bloody library I finally got it compiled and installed. At first I installed the pre-compiled binaries and they were of course, only for 32-bit machines. I then tried to compile the source for 64-bit only to find only one part successfully compiled. The rest had external dependencies not noted anywhere on the site/instructions/read-me. I guess they just expected all Linux developers to already have these libs installed. Not the case.

I admit, I should have a lot of these libraries installed: libsndfile, x11, etc. if I was in fact developing games for Linux. However, the last time I worked on game development was in Windows under WinAPI so I had no idea what I was getting in to.

Well, now the easy part is over and I can get started running through examples and tutorials as I prepare a technical design for my upcoming game.

Is this a formal announcement of a project? I guess so: I aim to have a fully-functional game completed over the course of this summer break. It will be a stripped down version of the complete vision but seeing as this is my first "real" project (aside from book demos), I think I should take it easy. Of course, no details until I actually have some work done on it.

Should I start a new blog to chronicle the progress or should I just post updates here on n4AEGIS?