[gameprogrammer] Re: Order of operations

My advice is to follow the rules of modularity, which is basically that you design each chunk (world loading, UI, rendering, input, etc...) so that you can remove it and plug it into another area or project with little to no modification. You should sit down and (I know everyone hates this, much as I do) design/decide what parts you can break your project into. Figure out what pieces you can build separately, and then how they need to be able to communicate with each other.

For instance, the file-format parser needs to communicate with the file-reader, and also with the rendering engine, so it can send the data from the file to be rendered. There probably should be an overall governing controller, which controls what "mode" you're in and maybe have running on pause in the background, like running a menu system, playing the game, or loading a segment, etc... This needs to have access to the GUI data, and the loading segments, and the game-rendering engine, etc...

It's all about making little modules for each part, and that'll take WORK in the beginning to design it, but in the end, it'll save you time on future projects, and probably headache on THIS project.

BTW, starting with the GUI is almost CERTAINLY a great idea, because that's the part hobbyist developers ALWAYS get to last, when they've got the gameplay running, and it always suffers... or they just don't do it, and move on to their next project, because the GUI just isn't interesting for them.

My $.02.

--Scott

On 08 Dec, 2003, at 7:16 PM, Simon wrote:

Hello, I've just started on a gaming project which(for my knowledge at least) is rather big(intended for learning). It's going to be 3d game, controlling a hellicopter(partly realistic) with big outdoor scenes. The game will consist of a series of missions(similar to flashpoint, commandos etc.). I'm having problem deciding where to start. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be done and I don't know where to begin and in what order so
the problems later on won't result in big changes on what I've done earlier on... Any suggestion on what to start with and what to leave for later(GUI, AI, world loader, world editor, sound, physics, ...)?



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