Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by axotty 4237 days ago
Wow. I can't even begin to express how much the premise behind this series resonates with me. I've been looking for something just like this.

My only issue is that, although in C, the preview/introduction video seems pretty centered around visual studio[0]. In the FAQ you say that multi platform support for *nix systems will be added later.

How exactly will this work for those of us who want to follow along, but don't have Windows?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3ntGDm6hOs

4 comments

Judging by the initial video, you won't be able to follow this without a Windows machine. The author plans to implement a game from scratch (no third party library will be used) in C on Windows, which means he will use Win32 functions (OS specific code) for creating a window, reading/showing image files etc ...

If you want to follow along from day one I suggest you install Windows in a virtual machine (you can download a legal copy of Windows and use it for about a month, just make sure you regularly save the code on your main OS). Alternatively, you can wait until the author will present how to do the same thing (window creation etc ...) on a Unix like OS.

You can actually use an unactivated copy of Windows 7 for longer by using "slmgr /rearm" in cmd (which needs to be run by right clicking cmd.exe and choosing the "run as administrator" option). You can extend the license 3 times (leading to 120 total days). It should be noted that you can apply it after the temporary licensing has expired.

I'm not sure if this applies to Windows 8 or 8.1, however.

He'll probably use SDL for that kind of stuff.

P.S. EMACS!!!

I doubt he will use SDL, the author mentions in another video that he is interested in implementing his own render. Also, he claims he won't use DirectX or OpenGL.
He said he might you some OpenGL near the end. Hopefully, he does because using the GPU will allow for so much more performance. I guess he can make that a separate class.
Yeah, because SDL is not an engine, so he can still boast he made it from scratch.
Answered in the Q&A video that followed the one you linked to. The project will be avoiding OS specific code as much as possible so I can't see a there being a dependency on visual studio. http://youtu.be/I5fNrmQYeuI?t=11m21s
Good luck writing anything but C89 with visual studio. This project sounds amazing and I'm going to probably try it but Microsoft has abandoned C for a while now so visual studio is a complete turn off for this use case.
I'm reasonably certain that this has started to change in MSVC 2013. They have stated that they have improved the C99 library support and unless I'm mistaken they have finally permitted mixed code and declarations.
They have implemented the C99 parts required by C++14 standard, plus few extra parts required by some well known open source projects. It remains open if they will ever implement the rest in MSVC++.

However, VS 2015 will have clang integration.