MS Visual Studio 2005 - personal projects?

Penguin · Post by **Penguin** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 8:12 pm 0

Hey, sorry immediately - this might be below the level of this forum.

Haven't done any games programming since the early 80s in Commodore's 6502 assembly lang.. which was fine when you knew the hardware spec and all the tricks to get what you wanted out of it (inspired by Yak) .. hey I was 13!

Anyway, purely for personal fun rather than anything remotely commercial, any Windows programmers out there who can advise whether it's worth using MS VB/C# 2005 w/DirectX to knock up some silly 2D game for fun or is it a bag of shite and not worth putting the effort in?

thanks

Post by **Snakey** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 11:28 pm 0

Absolutely. It's the best / easiest to use thing on the planet.

Flabio · Post by **Flabio** » Sat Jun 10, 2006 12:40 am 0

You might find something like Dark basic or Blitz max a bit more immediate, depends on your coding level really.

moobaa · Post by **moobaa** » Sat Jun 10, 2006 1:15 am 0

Make sure you checck out the free Express Editions...

Penguin · Post by **Penguin** » Sat Jun 10, 2006 11:38 am 0

thanks folks

WiredWorm · Post by **WiredWorm** » Sat Jun 10, 2006 5:25 pm 0

There's nothing stopping you from coding the framework of the game in VB and then using C# for the stuff which needs to be quick (graphics routines and the like).

I've a background in programming VB and C++ but to be honest i've started tinkering with BlitzMax now because it's relatively powerful and you can quickly get some good results using it.

moobaa · Post by **moobaa** » Sun Jun 11, 2006 1:11 am 0

WiredWorm wrote:There's nothing stopping you from coding the framework of the game in VB and then using C# for the stuff which needs to be quick (graphics routines and the like).

You wouldn't necessarily see any speed improvement, since I think the two compilers are around about equivelant in terms of the speed of output code.

Writing the arse end in C++, OTOH, and accessing it via COM (with interop overheads) or directly (via the DLL interface - unmanaged code ahoy!) may yield swifter code.

dreadster · Post by **dreadster** » Sun Jun 11, 2006 4:21 pm 0

moobaa wrote:
WiredWorm wrote:There's nothing stopping you from coding the framework of the game in VB and then using C# for the stuff which needs to be quick (graphics routines and the like).
You wouldn't necessarily see any speed improvement, since I think the two compilers are around about equivelant in terms of the speed of output code.

Writing the arse end in C++, OTOH, and accessing it via COM (with interop overheads) or directly (via the DLL interface - unmanaged code ahoy!) may yield swifter code.

It's easier to write the arse end in C++/CLI and define the API to the arse end as managed classes. That way the compiler does the interop for you and you only have to link the C# (or VB) code of your main application against a managed assembly.