Updates Once Again

I should first clear things up by saying I've read all the cautionary tales about 'make games not engines' and all that, and that would be well and good if my intentions were to make a game. I suppose my intentions are totally the opposite of those I have at work. At work I code, but I use the language and tools they decide we should use, we code what they decide we should code, and we have to be done coding it by a date and time they say we should be done coding it.

When I'm coding for fun, I seek to balance all that out, to make it fun again. I replace the rigid guidelines and schedules with just letting my creativity sort of meander. Lately I have been trying to guide these meanderings into eventually producing something by focusing efforts on a game framework and accompanying editor. I won't go so far as to call it an engine yet because I don't feel its grown into that level of organization; its more of a bunch of helper classes that I continually refine.

Over the past however long its been, I've been slowly trying to realistically incorporate meanderings into programming a gui into this project. Where I last left off with my journal I was looking at I think WinForms with XNA. I've since decided to abandon coding with managed languages for my coding for fun since it always seem to remind me too closely of programming with java at work. I really only have the attention span to master one VM's intricacies, and as a result of my job, that VM is java's.

Where I left off with my journal, Xna's content pipeline was annoying me. I was having a hard time being able to have my graphics framework take advantage of using it, and still have the editor be able to load and compile resources at runtime in a sane manner. All of the problems I was dealing with reinforced the realization that this wasn't was Xna was designed for. It felt to me anyway that its strength lied in putting together small prepackaged games that could be easily run on the Xbox, and not so much in it being a graphics API that happened to be implemented in .net.

I decided to abandon Xna in favor of pure DirectX, and was soon overcome by the difficulties involved in managed/native interoperability. I experimented quite a bit with Qt, but ultimately decided I didn't really need a cross platform gui library when I was only targeting Windows.

I have been recently looking into MFC. I may end up liking it, or it may not be at all what I'm looking for, but at the very least I'll have a little experience with another gui toolkit.

Hopefully more regular updates soon.