Documentation on object properties

Hi,

I'm just begining to try the engine, and to love all the work you have done.
The config file system is really powerfull.
We can see in Creation/Setting Templates all the differents possible behavior of objects.
It would be so cool to have a comment on how they interact with the game.

Some are okay to understand wereas other are a bit mysterious.


Keep on this nice work.
Mout

Comments

  • edited March 2009
    Hello!

    I'm glad you like the config system and if you have any idea on how to improve things, please tell us!

    As for commenting the templates, it's a really good idea, I'll write some doc about it with examples for the v1.0 release.

    Till then, if you have any question regarding specifics properties, feel free to ask! :)

    Thanks again for your appreciation!
  • edited March 2009
    Nice ! thanks for your answer.

    That's the first day of use of your engine.
    I had good time just putting 2 sections on the .ini and see a new GFX display with collisions, speed vectors ...
    That's so good.

    The best way to amaze us with all the possibilities of Orx is to have more docs !!
    I'm impatient to see them, as for now I miss the overview of the engine and feel only magic in my tests B) .. I'd like to understand a bit also.

    I hope Loops and I will make some good work with Arsx. I'm thinking of making some little doc also while using Orx. To have some kind of personnal FAQ in the point of view of a newbie ;)

    Asteroid powa !

    Mout
  • edited March 2009
    I'm glad you enjoyed your first contact!

    I really need to write some doc/wiki, but I'm terrible at it!
    I should also write an overview, that's a really good idea, thanks. If you have any question for now, I can answer them here.

    But basically orx is a real game engine, not a game library (some project sounds like they mistake both concepts). That means everything you'd need for your game development will be provided by orx (it's a theory of course, there'll always be things missing! :) ).
    Also, you don't need to init things yourself, you call a single function that executes the engine, and you don't have to care about what happens under the hood. When calling this do-all function, you provide it with 3 callbacks: Init, Run and Exit. They're self explanatory I think, but here are some precisions:
    - Init: You create whatever you need (like registering your update function, creating objects, etc...)
    - Run: Better to leave this one as empty as possible as it's not time consistent. I usually use this one for quiting purpose (if it returns orxSTATUS_FAILURE, engine will shut down).
    - Exit: You clean up everything you created. If they are orx resources, you don't have to bother if you want as everything will be cleaned up by the engine itself. So basically you clean stuff that you created on an outside scope and that orx doesn't know.

    Almost all functions that can fail in orx will return a orxSTATUS type. Orx will also communicate with itself, plugins and your code using events. Events are not queued, they're handled immediately and you can register to events based on their types. You can also add your own event types to communicate between parts of your project.

    You can also use the config system as a save manager: everything you'll store in the config memory can be serialized on disk, in the files you want, and you can provide a filter to only save relevant data. You can also ask for the data to be encrypted on disk, using a pass phrase. It's a very simple encryption, it's just so as to keep people from hacking your savegame or level data easily. In the future (post v.1.0), I'll add a binarization support so as to have smaller config files.

    Whenever you want to create orx objects, see if you have a *_CreateFromConfig() method, as those will use properties defined in config files and make orx data driven.

    That's pretty much it for the basics, I think! ;)

    If you feel like writing some start of a FAQ when developping ASRX, please let me know as everyone could then benefit from your experience. I've been in orx for so long that I can't see what's obvious and what looks mysterious, unfortunately, so a fresh vision of it might be better for a FAQ! :)

    I'm really looking forward to what you'll do with ASRX! :D

    - iarwain
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