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More UI work and little things

Yesterday was a down right beating and tonight is pretty much just simple recovery.

I got some basic Tool Tips in place for the various pc heroes health bars ,functions to manage and intialize them  and some general cleanup and organization of the whole game and level initialization process.

You know, it is kinda odd how many game tutorials, engine demos, books on programming etc etc that totally ignore the fundamental importance of getting the foundation right.  The basic core logic, update loop, memory management, debugging, maintaining player data integrity and all those un-glorious details even though utterly essential get just a few words here or there.   The best book I’ve found that goes into all those nitty gritty details is this Game Coding Complete,  By Mike McShaffry.. some of the content is out of date ,but oh my god .. it covers all the icky dull essential things that you NEED to know. [edit.. I only have the 1st edition.. he’s now on the 3rd]

Now a Lot of us are using 3rd party engines these days… (‘Im using TGB, Slick and flash mainly) .. and it’s easy to shrug it off thinking that it’s ok to rely on the engine to make the decisions about all the nitty gritty and dull as hell details.. and for the most part you’d be right.  However….  When it breaks, or you push it too far, or you try and do something ‘not according to best practices’  and you’re lucky enough to have access to the source (thanks GarageGames and Coke&Code!) you can understand HOW it works and how you want it to work and arrive at a functional compromise.

Anyway I’m straying from the topic at hand and I’m still trying to formulate the whole ‘Why you should build your own engine and never use it’, blog post.

So consider that a preview of sorts.

Oh yeah and I knocked out another GUI mockup.