Hi Dark, Well, that's true to a point. The fact of the matter is most software for Windows now days is being developed around the new Microsoft .Net technologies so .Net is an essential dependency for a lot of new software anyway. That's why Vista ships with .Net Framework 3.0 and Windows 7 now ships with .Net 4.0 out of the box. It is now a preinstalled core component of the operating system. So that in and of itself doesn't bother me. In say three to five years most of the Windows XP systems will be most likely beginning to be updated./replaced by newer, faster, and better 64bit systems running Windows 7 with at least .Net 4.0. So in the long term sticking with .Net is on a developers side as the extra dependencies that were such a pain three or four years ago are going to no longer be an issue since Microsoft has already made them core components for every Windows Vista and Windows 7 system built over the last three years or so.
The real big issue I have with the current STFC and Montezuma's Revenge is the DirectX components I used. Early in 2004 as part of their DirectX 9 marketing campaign Microsoft unvailed there Managed DirectX components all designed for .Net 1.1. I like a number of independant software developers using C# .Net and Visual Basic .Net migrated quickly to the new API. In 20006 Microsoft was hinting at Managed DirectX 2.0 to ship with .Net Framework 2.0. It never appeared. Instead a few days after Windows Vista was released Microsoft pulled a double wammy on the game developers. They announced that as of August 2008 Managed DirectX was going to be deprecated and that there were beginning an all new API called the XNA Framework that was suppose to work hand in hand with the cross-platform API they were developing for the XBox 360. Well, when XNA 1.0 hit the scene I downloaded it expecting to switch games like Monte over to it right away only to discover it wasn't accessible to a blind developer. You have to use a program called XAct to create pack files containing soundbanks which then are loaded into XAudio and played based on the settings stored in the Soundbank. So if you couldn't see to check the boxes to loop sounds, to enable 3d positioning, etc you were pretty much screwed. Which I royally was. Microsoft had dropped the technology I was using and gave me one that was far less accessible and I was stuck. At that time SlimDX didn't exist and I wasn't about to fork over hundreds of dollars to Firelight for FMOD Ex. I might have been satisfied with Managed DirectX as is, but it turned out it has a few nasty bugs that Microsoft hadn't fixed and never were going to fix. So you see in that way my games like STFC and Montezuma's Revenge were no better off than those being written in VB 6 all because Microsoft had pulled the rug out from under me by promising one API and delivering a different one I couldn't use. That's what prompted my switch to C++. Of course, things with .Net game development is a bit different now. Microsoft's idea to cancel Managed DirectX and replace it with XNA didn't go over with everyone. I can say there were a number of people on the DirectX mailing list, most of them mainstream companies, who were up in arms about the surprise API change. All of us were expecting the release ofMDX 2.0 and Microsoft happily announces XNA 1.0 which meant everybody had to rewrite substantial amount of code to use it. People were pretty steamed over it. Out of that outrage began an open source project called SlimDX. It is essentially Managed DirectX under a new name and written by a core group of open source developers who wanted to maintain a .Net implamentation of DirectX that supported DirectSound, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectInput, etc. In other words everything Microsoft was trashing like yesterdays garbage in favor of the XNA libraries. Then, about that time were other open source developers who wanted to replace MDX with LibSDL. SDL has long been favored as the open source answer to DirectX on Mac and Linux, and so SDL .Net began. At the time I looked at it SDL .net wasn't that good. However, now days it is maturing into a very nice cross-platform API for game developers. Had I the the source code for Monte or STFC I might well just yank out the MS garbage, replace it with SDL .Net, and release it as open source. Indeed, I'm highly thinking of SDL more and more for my games since it is A, very small, B, they have no problems with redistributing it, and C, it is cross-platform. I think the only hang up is I have to put some sort of notice in my licensing info that SDL is free and open source, but in the main that's not a huge issue considering SDL would solve a lot of problems with companies like Microsoft changing technologies as quickly as they change their underware. I'd at least have a stable API/platform to build my games upon. Cheers! --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
