[Topgun]

well if you read the other topic, you will know some Friends and I are making a 2d game.
seeing as how their seams to be no good engines to work with we were wondering how hard (how long it takes) to make a engine?
I am the only one that knows how to code (c++, and not to well I should say. I am out of practice) so how long would it take them (and me) to  learn enough c++ to make an engine?

[Ghostavo]

A game engine coding dificulty depends on what features you want it to have. Since I haven't played neither games you compare your enterprise with, I can't say for certain.

As for coding expertise, it's a matter of skill rather then knowledge. I'd wager one year (unless you're really into it, or have previous experience programming, in which case depending on which language you've used before would take from anywhere from a month to 6) is enough to learn what you need, but you'd still need some experience messing with the language. Try making simple games first like snake or even tetris before trying more complicated things.

[Topgun]

basically it's turn based strategy similar to advanced wars, with some adventure rpg thrown in.

EDIT: as for the simple games first thing, that is something we would definitely do before we make this game.  maybe we will make a pac man clone with are characters

[Polpolion]

Just start making it and by the time you realize how hard it will be, it will be too late to back out.

[fener]

You could try the FIFE engine.

[Topgun]

I looked at it but it didn't fit our game.

[Colonol Dekker]

What about dark basic or one of those retail game creation engines :huh:

[Topgun]

well we were thinking about darkbasic. but, what exactly is it? sdl? api? can I make a game engine in darkbasic and in c++?

[Colonol Dekker]

I actually don't know but the name came to mind when i read your post. I'm pretty sure it's derived from C and / or basic. Have a google 2D should be no problem, who created the 2D FreeSpace game posted here a while back?

[Topgun]

looks like we are going to make it from c++. are their any good free ide and compliers?

[blackhole]

I've built a 2D graphics engine. While I'm currently fixing the tileset editor, the engine itself has been functional since last summer. The engine was coded from the ground up in C++, and has been optimized to such a degree that I've been able to batchrender 10000 50x50 images on the screen at once at 640x480 resolution with 64 FPS - that was with LDR postprocessing and a motionblur shader applied. You do not get more efficient that this.



I've set up an animation engine and a GUI (admittedly most of the code should probably be overhauled, but it works), so you can quickly and easiely have the engine roll through multiple images as an animation, or have it use UV coords and stick the animation in a single texture, oldschool style; its also got position, color, scaling, rotation, and flash animations. The engine is designed to accomadate an image based game (like sidescrolling), and also includes a stupidly fast tileset rendering object. The tileset has a built in format letting you instantly save or load a tileset to a file. The tileset can use UV coordinates on an arbitrary number of textures, allowing you to combine multiple tilesets. Every single image in the game also has a custom stateblock option, which lets you do practically anything to the rendering states before a given image is rendered. Not only that but I let you do HDR (or LDR) postprocessing using your own shader code which basically lets you do anything.

In other words, this thing is powerful, even if it might not be the easiest thing on the planet to use.

</shameless self promotion>

This wasn't easy, by the way

[Topgun]

I was already thinking of using your engine.
but we still need to make a game engine and we need an ide.

[blackhole]

Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition. Best free IDE out there for C++, and its what I use. Give me a holler and I'll throw you the SDK for my engine, whenever you happen to need it.

[Topgun]

ok, thanks.

[Aardwolf]

I made a Java 2D FreeSpace once.