Hi Munawar,
Thanks for the advice. Yeah, i know a conversion from C# .NET to C++
isn't quite as easy as I made it sound in my e-mail, but I've got a
fairly good idea of what needs to be done to speed up that conversion
process. Once I take care of the C++ specific stuff like the sound
manager, input, timers, threads, etc converting the rest of the stuff
should be fairly easy to convert. Most of my function calls in the .NET
engine are abstract interfaces for speech, sound, input, whatever so
the key here is to write those abstract interfaces in C++ and the rest
of the code should be a sinch to convert with only miner changes here
and there as needed.
As it happens I did port the Genesis Engine to Java last year, and it
took me about four months to create a working version in Java with a
very early prototype of Mysteries of the Ancients. I'm going to assume I
can make this conversion in more or less the same time window give or
take a month for debugging and possably some extra research for this or
that. It is always possible I might fall flat on my face here, but I
think letting go of .NET is the best long term solution available to me.
Like you said Microsoft seams to have distanced themselves from .NET of
late. Releasing Managed DirectX and dumping it for the XNA Framework was
not only bad form, but some developers like me are concerned how much
long term support Microsoft is going to lend for their .NET APIs. Every
time I turn around they are releasing a new and improved .NET Framework
with updated classes, methods, and so on which sounds good, but in
actuality just ends up being bloatware. I remember once upon a time the
first .NET framework was something around 99 MB, and now 4.0 is three
times the size. I don't even use half of it, and that's a lot to
download if you are someone over seas who has dialup or certain
bandwidth restrictions. Not to mention a bit confusing for some end users.
For example, I recently took care of a technical support problem where
the person has Windows Vista, he knew Vista came with the .NET
Framework, but he was running 3.0. However, MOTA was written using the
3.5 version of the framework which meant he needed to update .NET. It
was an easy problem to fix, but still are we as developers suppose to
expect our customers to know the difference between .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0,
3.5, or 4.0 and figure out which version they have?
As a developer I love .NET because of it's ease of use. It has very high
level wrappers for the win32, API, and so on. Plus handling things like
arrays, strings, etc are so much nicer in .NET. However, .NET certainly
has its down side which isn't quite so nice. Which is why I'd just
assume part ways with it for my games.
*Smile*
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