On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Casey Duncan <ca...@pandora.com> wrote: > On piece of advice I have is to create actual games with the system as early > as possible, especially before the apis and features have completely > solidified. It's very helpful to point out awkward or missing parts of the > system. > > -Casey
Seconded! You should develop 2 or 3 test games (each test game should have some variety to each other) as you develop the system. When you get stuck on a test game, you know what needs to be added, and because you have the other test games you have an idea of how to add the new feature without breaking them. Also, automated testing is really important when building a framework. I had to throw out my own framework and start over because the code was bad enough it would have taken too much time to fix all of the problems, and I had no tests to verify that my changes weren't breaking things. Every fix I did broke something else that I didn't know about. Now that I have a huge test suite, I am more flexible in adding new features or subtly changing the code. Your library sounds like a great idea, and seems fairly complete so far. The hard things are to come though. Editors and online especially are quite difficult if they haven't been a part of your design already. Editors tend to need the engine to be structured a certain way, unless you want to work hard at making the editor very smart. Although you might have already been structuring things with this in mind. The same goes for multiplayer. It's very difficult to convert a system where everything knows about everything and stays in sync for free, to a multiple machine syncronizable simulation. Come to think of it, that is difficult even if you start from there :) By the way: >> * Support for tracked music in formats like pygame already supports tracked formats. I can't remember which exactly, but I'm pretty sure xm, it, and mod work. >> * Implementation of critical modules in C to improve speed. Probably won't be necessary. Best way to speed up a pygame game is to use pyopengl, which kind of throws your design for a loop. No pygame.draw or surfaces for one thing. Good luck, I love projects like this. I'd help if I wasn't bogged down with my own :)
