First Entry

I have decided after being a long time lurker and short time poster to break down and start one of these journals to document my various meanderings in programming for fun. People who aren't programmers don't understand how we can sit and work all day programming, then come home and 'relax' by doing more of it. My response to that is always to point out that I never code at home in the same language I code in at work, that would just be weird.

Anyway my current project is putting together a basic 3d level editor which doesn't have a name yet. I'm using C#/Winforms (WPF would have been nice, but the issues I ran into there might be another post sometime.) The renderer, being very basic, is set up using OpenGL, which I'm not entirely certain will stay that way, and need to make up my mind on before I get too far into its implementation. Being that it is C# and Winforms, I'm accepting the fact that I'll be tied to the Windows platform. (I have recently bought a Macbook, and with that, thought maybe a cross platform, API independent project might be fun. After struggling for a few months, I likened it to mowing your lawn with scissors. It could be done, but only realistically if you were really passionate about cutting blades of grass.) So if I'm tied to the windows platform, and ok with that, I might as well go with DirectX for graphics. I've used both in the past, and generally prefer the DirectX API to OpenGL's. Being that C# is a managed language then, the choice seems clear to use XNA, which is sounding better and better the more I think about it.

To back up a little, I decided to undertake the level editor project when I was designing the part of my game framework that loads the levels. Rather than cobble together various importers, or hatch a chicken before an egg, I decided to take a break from C++ and start the level editor project. I call it a game framework in that I can't even conceive of its design resembling that of a game engine just yet. Many more posts in the future will probably be devoted to talking about that, but for now, I am using C++ and am considering DirectX as opposed to OpenGL. That brings me back to my reasoning for using XNA with the level editor project so that in at least some aspects it could function as a prototype for the framework.

Hopefully next time it won't get so late so quick and I'll document some of the design of the level editor and the current issues I'm trying to work through.