Yes I do care about comunity greatly. Why? As a self taught Delphi programmer I know how hard it can be when you don't know where to turn to get help. When I started learning to program in Delphi its popularity was already in slow decline (that was short before Borland gave up on Delphi). And the only comunity that I was present at the time was Delphi-si comunity which was mostly populated by expirienced busniess programmer who had verry litle intention to try and understand what wild ideas I was trying to do and then help me out.
And boy did I had some wild ideas then (making shell replacment for windows, creating my own drivers for a custom controller - steering wheel that I made, DJ mixing software, etc). When I think about theese ideas now they don't seem so crazy becouse my programming knowledge is probably good enoigh to finish athleast some of them but then my programming knowledge was still far to weak to do anything like that.
So yes becouse I know how hard it can be at start I try to help whenever I can even to total newbies.
This is also one of the planned feature of my UI.
Don't say that! While you are probably not aware of it I'm willing to bet that doing both at the same time actually lead your into making both UI and game engine better as you would do it othervise. Why? Becouse by doing it so you ran to various quirks and difficulties that are specific either for UI or for graphical engine and adjust the designs of both JUI and your game engine to either avoid them or solve them.
Why I think like this? When I started working on my UI library I thought that all I will have to do is write a few methods which will fire several combinations od draw procedures and that is it. But soon I realized that for making of a UI library much more is required like:
1. Input handling: Without ability to handle user input your UI is not Ui but jst a graphical interface
2. Rendering loops: In order fto render you UI in proper way you need to learn about rendering loops
3. Sceene managment: While this might seem unimportant at first look it is quite important especially if you don't want to draw your whole UI right from scratch every rendering cycle. Reusing of already rendered or should I say composed scenes that hasn't changed from previous rendering cycle is the main way of optimizing your rendering cycles.
4. Resource managment: Again at first this might even seem as not neede at all but you quickly realize that it isn't so. When I'm saying resource here I don't only have graphical resources in mind (texutres) but also any other data that you require for your UI like controll positions, controll states, etc.
Anywhay we are getting a bit off topic here. I just hope that we haven't scared Anton with to much information here
@Anton
How ever you decide I'm sure you can count on the help from more knowlegable pepole here on PGD when you will need it.
Unfortuantely I can't count myself into that group but if you will need any help in working with classes I belive I could be usefull as I belive I have pretty god knowlege about them. Not so much about interfaces but that is mostly becouse I myself don't see the need to use them. So far I have always managed to solve everything with classes alone.
Bookmarks