Thread: Advice

Hello,

I've decided to make my first game. I've chosen to do a remake of RecWar, using SDL instead of GDI. However, being my first game it's all new.

I was planning on supporting all OSes that support SDL and SDLNet. So here are my questions:

* What's the best way to maintain cross-platform compiling? makefiles?
* Should I keep the game source in a SVN repo?, I plan on it being opensource, sourceforge is a good idea?

I've almost finished planning everything by hand in full. A network based top-down sort of shooter with basic AI. Internally I plan on creating:

* A player manager (to manage the states, etc of each player including the player who is playing, ie heading, speed, direction of gun, if they're shooting etc)
* A tile manager, to manage loaded tiles and tiles which aren't loaded yet.
* A map manager, to create, edit and maintain maps (in memory and on disk).
* Other auxiliary stuff like SDLFonts, particles etc.

The tile manager and map manager are 'shared' between the game, server, and map editor (3 different binaries).

So basically what I'm asking, does this seem okay? I'd hate to dive right in and my design turns out to be my downfall. I've read various programming books but nothing directly game related. I appreciate any input.

Makefiles is almost certainly the most flexible solution to support multiple platforms - they don't require much from the target system. If you use some sort of IDE solution, then obviously, the IDE solution would have to be present for the platform before you can use that.

A public version control system is a good idea to allow for others to check out your code and possibly also submit changes (but you probably want to be gate-keeper for any changes - if you have LOTS of people supporting the product, this can become a full-time task). Whether you use subversion, CVS or perhaps mercurial is up to you - I have no direct view of which is best.

I believe sourceforge is free and reliable, so seems like a good idea.

--
Mats

Hmm, thanks
I'll see how I go.

I'd use bjam (see the Boost website) as the compile script. I think it's considerably easier to maintain than cross-platform makefiles. Especially for libraries.

For the VCS, don't use CVS. Subversion is OK. Haven't used Mercurial. GIT is good, but its Win32 compatibility is lacking.