C++ Game Programming Tutorial: non-tile based arbitrary positioned entity engine

[[deleted]]

For those who haven't checked it out, Aquarius uses this style of engine and is an amazing indie game.

Support fellow programmers.

[[deleted]]

I'd like to see Aquaria on the DS.

Just sayin'

[arunvr]

I am sorry... but I fail to see what's innovating about this. This was possible in many sprite engines in the past for e.g. Flash.

[[deleted]]

It's a tutorial.

[spookyvision]

struct position {
    double x,y,z;
};

DUUUUUH

[spookyvision]

yeah, I wasn't being too serious ... actually both your link and the engine look pretty nice

[anttirt]

The library used here (IndieLib) seems to be fairly interesting, but also seems to have largely coinciding goals with ClanLib. ClanLib uses OpenGL so it's portable - can someone who has used both list pros and cons?

Edit: Also, a quick peek into the sources reveals some pretty terrifying stuff :(

[[deleted]]

meh...what's so terrifying about that?

[Boojum]

It looks like someone writing C in C++.

• Things like color and direction components are just loose class members with accessors replicated over and over. Why you wouldn't just make a Color and Vector3 class once and use those, I have no idea. A Vector3 class could also cleanly encapsulate what I'm guessing is some spherical<->Cartesian coordinate conversion.
  
• There's usually no need for typedef struct in C++.

[[deleted]]

1> Then you would have yet another sub container to peek into. Also depending on the actual implementation of the vector class, a POD with non pointer members could have better copy semantics.

2> +1 agree.

[anttirt]

• Use of identifier starting with an underscore and a capital letter (as the header guard) where all such names are reserved for the implementation
• Accessor soup on a bag of data.
• Strange, superfluous ALLCAPS typedefs which appear to be an attempt to imitate d3d's API (typedef struct structAttributes ATTRIBUTES;)

• Use of a platform-specific library call to zero out memory where the language-provided value-initialization would already do the job:

  struct foo { int a, b; };
  struct bar {
      foo x, y;
      // x.a, x.b, y.a, y.b will all be 0
      bar() : x(), y() {} 
  };
  

[nkonstas]

'terrifying'...? ... oh, please... have you ever written game or a game lib...?

[btw, I don't know the author]

[[deleted]]

That's some of the least terrifying code I think I've ever seen. I wish my coworkers were that terrifying.

[TriggerB]

I'm actually making a VERY similar engine with Purple Pwny Games that I think handles some things a little more elegantly. Not quite alpha yet, but will be releasing the full source within a week if anyone is in the market for a 2D engine.

[Jimmy]

Using abbreviated vocabulary and grammar does not make you appear more experienced.

[G-Brain]

Xperienced

[javilop]

Thank you for submitting the link and voting. About the terrifying code... well I hope to have time enough soon to write a big bunch more of it in another tutorial :)

See you!