On Sunday, 15 March 2020 at 17:58:58 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
I want to try and learn how to write 2d games. I'd prefer to do
it with D.
I've found a ton of tutorials on learning 2d gaming with other
languages. Is there a place to look that uses D for learning?
Should I just start with another language and then migrate to D
later? Anyone recommend any specific tutorial/book?
-Steve
I'm on a similar journey myself, I'll list my findings, maybe it
could be useful for you.
I decided on a game programming library. I mostly looked at SFML
and Allegro, and found both to have good bindings available in D,
and good documentation, and got minimal examples working with
both. I went with SFML, simply because there was a book written
specifically about writing a game in SFML. I didn't see any such
books for Allegro (although there are plenty of
tutorials/articles).
I learnt about the "game loop". Bauss touched on it in his post,
and I'm sure there are a lot of tutorials on it. I specifically
learnt about it from the first few chapters of the SFML Game
Development book.
I learnt about game design. In doing so, I came across
Entity-Component-System design pattern. I decided to use this
pattern, for no other reason than to try something other than OOP.
I found these links useful:
https://medium.com/ingeniouslysimple/entities-components-and-systems-89c31464240d
https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/component.html
https://www.richardlord.net/blog/ecs/what-is-an-entity-framework.html
I started writing a game, using the derelict-sfml2 as my game
library (again, I found the allegro library to be good too), and
entitysysd to provide the ECS framework (there are a few ECS
written in D available). Are they the best choices? Is SFML
technically limited? Will I cope with ECS beyound the toy game
example? No idea. But I'm having a lot of fun, which I think for
a hobby project, is a fairly good measure of success ;-)
Jordan
