engine choice

Hi, it's first because i was not able to do what i wanted with the existing tools in 2001-2002, i wanted to do special rendering like i did for the small game "Le jardin de mirabelle". I was first doing this tool for my personal projects, as a drawer an 3d artist.

It's true that today there is a lot more possibility and good open source engines. As game creation tool, there is not so much things user-oriented so i think it can be interesting to continue in this way.

cheers

I can't see any reason why you should need Assembly.
It definitely helps to understand C++ though, since the almost-low-level nature of C++.
But you have to know how GPU works, DirectX or OpenGL (or anything else you may use), and knowing C++ perfectly (which will takes some years of using it to master, at least IMHO).
Also having a good idea of how a rendering engine and a game engine works, and certainly Maratis source code can help with this.
It's a VERY hard and long task, BTW, and people who know the stuff generally say that it's better to make games than starting a vaporware-prone game engine, unleass you REALLY need it and can't get another one to do what you need. Which is also my opinion. Unless you are anael and have success!

??
They are graphic libraries. Which of course have an API, which is just the interface that you use to access the libraries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applicatio … _interface

Hi tutorial doctor,

there is different schools about learning, I learned by myself mainly because I was passionate about making an adventure game when I was 16. The first thing I played with was basic on Amstrad CPC some years before, I also liked to draw. Later I discovered a software called "Clic and Play" on PC to make small games without coding. After some time only I started learning C and made a small 3d engine for ms-dos. I learned a lot by looking at code from a library called Allegro, and by trial and error.

You don't specially need to know complex syntax and hardware code to make games or softwares today, but what you definitevely need to master is logic. I'm not a hard core programmer, there is a lot of concepts I don't know and I never touched assembly.

In 3d, you need some math basics, specially vectors, with your best friends (dot product, sqrt, cross product...). Alkso learn how to use matrices and what they do (even if you don't know how it works inside).

The way I work is to think about what I want to do on paper, the structure, the logic, before switching on any computer.

I do some research to find good libraries to not write something already existing, then I focus on the general design, trying to keep things as simple as possible. I optimize only the parts that needs it, by anticipation or after profiling.

After, it's passion, curiosity,
and of course time.

(to give you an idea, Maratis it's 10 years of work plus now all the contributors time)