On 3/15/20 4:12 PM, Jordan Wilson wrote:
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?
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 ;-)
OK, I will take a look there. I am running through some basic SDL game
video tutorials right now.
Thanks everyone for the pointers.
-Steve