studio 6.0 vs studio 2003 vs studio 2005

If your game runs on 400 MHz computers, then you're fine. Nobody whose system doesn't meet your requirements plays video games.

That said, avoid VS6 like the plague.

CM

VS2005 C++ Express is a free, fully-featured C++ IDE and will most likely be all you need. There are other free alternatives, of course, but thus far I haven't felt compelled to leave VS2005 for anything else.

I like everything about VS2005 except the fact that it feels a little sluggish on any computer which does not actually use jet engines. The only possible reason for anybody to use VS6 at this point is legacy build environments. Also, if you're thinking about C# (and I suggest you do) VS2005 is GREAT for it. Worlds beyond VS2003.

Now to your main question, though: From 2002 on, speed improvements are relatively minor (though interesting from a technical standpoint). If all you're thinking about is making a game which will run fast, your chosen IDE (as long as it isn't VS6) will really have little to do with the outcome. IDEs are for the programmer, not the user.

target is 486 computer users?...

my...

ok, thats what I figured. I will stick with 2005.

anyone know of any fast 2D engines?

Well you could use openGL or directX(directx as direct draw which is 2D but it is now pretty much obsolete). I have been using glOrtho2D with openGL to do 2D. This is not exactly an engine its more or less an API to access the video card.

If you want a good graphics engine, I would use Ogre. Ogre is 3D however since it used OpenGL there is also a 2D mode! I like Ogre a lot, but then again thats just my preference.

Hope this helped!

look into sdl, prolly equally used as directdraw (uses dd under some windows implementions) but is crossplatform + will soon support blending + rotation (things that dd doesnt do)

Your system requirements are ridiculously low to the point where you are backing yourself into a corner for no good reason. The way older 486 era games like id's Commander Keen achived good 2D performance is by relying on clever hardware tricks (eg. banging on the scrolling registers directly) that will outright fail if you attempt to do them on modern videocards without being in some sort of DOSBOXish emulation environment. Also you're making your job 1000 times harder for no real gain. Why do you need to support Windows 95? Nobody supports Windows 95 anymore. Hardly anyone supports Windows pre-Windows 2000s, because the amount of people who use such systems is so ridiculously small and of the small amount of people there are using them, the cross-section between that set and those who will download your game anyway is absolutely zero.

...and 'alot of AI'? On a 486? Are you sure your post isn't a troll? If it isn't, seriously reconsider your system requirements.

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Original post by luke101 ok, thats what I figured. I will stick with 2005. anyone know of any fast 2D engines?

Allegro and SDL are the ones most folk use including myself.

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Hardly anyone supports Windows pre-Windows 2000s, because the amount of people who use such systems is so ridiculously small and of the small amount of people there are using them, the cross-section between that set and those who will download your game anyway is absolutely zero.

looking at valves survey which gives a crosssection of a gamers pc we see
98 SE 0.30 %
Me 0.21 %
ie less than 1% (which is bugger all i admit but these are generally hardcore gamers) ie the figure amongst non-gamers is gonna be a lot higher, esp in some countries

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Original post by gmcbay Your system requirements are ridiculously low to the point where you are backing yourself into a corner for no good reason. The way older 486 era games like id's Commander Keen achived good 2D performance is by relying on clever hardware tricks (eg. banging on the scrolling registers directly) that will outright fail if you attempt to do them on modern videocards without being in some sort of DOSBOXish emulation environment. Also you're making your job 1000 times harder for no real gain. Why do you need to support Windows 95? Nobody supports Windows 95 anymore. Hardly anyone supports Windows pre-Windows 2000s, because the amount of people who use such systems is so ridiculously small and of the small amount of people there are using them, the cross-section between that set and those who will download your game anyway is absolutely zero. ...and 'alot of AI'? On a 486? Are you sure your post isn't a troll? If it isn't, seriously reconsider your system requirements.

OK, I understand. I downloaded some games similar to mine from the internet. They had no proglem running on my daughters pentium 233. When I installed my game on her computer it brought het system down to its knees. Max 5 FPS. It was soo slow i couldnt quit the game.

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Original post by daviangel Quote: Original post by luke101 ok, thats what I figured. I will stick with 2005. anyone know of any fast 2D engines? Allegro and SDL are the ones most folk use including myself.

What does SDL stand for.

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Original post by luke101 Quote: Original post by daviangel Quote: Original post by luke101 ok, thats what I figured. I will stick with 2005. anyone know of any fast 2D engines? Allegro and SDL are the ones most folk use including myself. What does SDL stand for.

Simple DirectMedia Layer

whoa...thank you very much.

Does anyone have a preference between allegro and SDL?

Back to studio 2003 vs studio 2005... I am currently using 2003 but recently received a copy of 2005. However I have not yet decided whether to use it due to the things I hear about 2005 being less friendly to "older" projects, such asthose using C++ and DirectX 9 (as opposed to C# and DirectX 10). And I wouldn't want my game to have weird DLL dependencies and wrappers just from using a newer IDE. Also, I keep hearing about projects (like HL2) that were written with studio 2003 and that don't work with studio 2005. Why would that be? Is studio 2005 really that big a change? Makes me a little nervous to migrate to it, despite the few nice improvements I've heard of as well.

2005 doesn’t have a single threaded runtime library. So any libs you are using that are single threaded would need to be recompiled, and if you don’t have the source for them your out of luck. I have both 2005 and 2003. I use 2005 simply for editing code. I compile with 2003 because I fined it less of a hassle to get things working properly.

See, that's what I'm afraid of, quirks like that in 2005 that make existing code harder to deal with. My own projects are fine with the multithreaded libraries, but it makes me worry about others. Is there anywhere a list of these changes (sacrafices) when moving from 2003 to 2005? Since you have both 2003 and 2005, I assume they both can be installed without interfering with each other at all?

Uhm... Are you sure VS2005 compiled applications run on a windows95 computer? I know that if you are using the .NET part of VS2005 it won't run on windows95..

Unless you explicitly use the .NET framework in your application (i.e., you write C# or C++/CLI code) your application will not depend on the .NET framework.