Part 1 of Many

Welcome

Hi everyone. I've created this blog to accompany my @UridiumAuthor  twitter account. This will allow me to talk in more depth about issues, and also my escapades while learning to use DirectX 11 to write some new games on my PC. These games may well be in a Retro style because that is what I am: Retro.

I may also head off into a rant about something or other every now and again, because other people's software can really irritate me at times. The less of it I have to use; the better. If you're one of the people writing the software I have to use: apologies... and buckle up!

I may, from time to time, talk about such items as Japan, gardening, guitars, bass guitars, drums, Lewis Hamilton, telescopes, and certainly Babymetal (Su-Metal, YuiMetal and MoaMetal).

I've also been inspired to write this alongside Steve Turner's blog at http://graftgold.blogspot.co.uk/ about his first game for a while: Deepest Blue.

It Starts Here

Right now I have 2 DirectX 11 books to read, to get to grips with building a display system. I have the basis of a game engine to drive objects independently, what I used to call my AMP system. That stands for Alien Manoeuvre Programs. This handles movement, animation, collisions, plotting, everything that goes on in the game really. It allows me to write each game element as if it is the only one there, so I can write the code linearly rather than 'inverted'. This avoids the need to save out what a game element is doing from frame to frame in one or more mode variables.

  The AMP system I have can log one or more game elements for information and/or errors in real time so I can see if something goes wrong. We never had that on the Amiga. Thing is that in the 16-bit and 8-bit days we were writing in assembler, and that is very unforgiving. It would crash if we made the slightest mistake. Having been working with C for the last 20 years things have become more ordered, and we code with some degree of contingency in mind nowadays to enable bugs to be identified and fixed without crashing the computer.

Currently I've been writing in 32-bit mode. I see no way that I can spill out of a 2GB working space. All the maths is done with 32-bit floats. Should it become necessary to go to 64-bit to comply with the OS then I'm trying to use as few data types as possible, and all the same size, so that everything fits together nicely, and can be expanded if need be.