Delta Engine Blog

AI, Robotics, multiplatform game development and Strict programming language

Lost Squadron, Day 4: Why can't I just press start and play?

Today there was a lot going on, but I managed to finish up some things. First of all I finished all my UI classes and got finally rid of the DirectX Utility Toolkit classes. Not that they are bad or anything, but they are total overkill for me right now, around 15000 lines are in this utility classes and there is not much fun going on when you want to customize anything there.

Ok, so I just wrote my own UI classes, I only need a very simple support for buttons, textboxes and listboxes, thats it. But I definatly encourage you to take a look at the utility toolkit and use some nice functions there, which help you to initialize DirectX and find the correct Device configuration programmatically, thats good stuff and saves you a lot of testing time :)

Instead of starting with the game engine and rushing into creating some incomplete code for today and leaving the menu unfinished as well, I decided to finish up all the menu stuff. Some base classes were improved, like sound and music playback, and I wrote the complete concept for the editor. I got also another new intern helping me a bit with the editor, thank for your support Fabian.


Day 4:
Another menu screen, graphics are also improved a little, but not finished yet. But why not show them off? :) Also all sub menus are working now, maybe some tweaking here and there, but the menu stuff is now kinda complete.