Ideas

Of course, before I can blog about writing a game, I need to have a game to be writing. Ideas are a dime a dozen, and I've got a few that I'll detail over the course of the next few posts.

In the meantime, I've been fiddling around with Microsoft's Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition and the Irrlicht 3D library. I'm rather chuffed that I managed to get them working without too many problems, and have gone through the Irrlicht tutorials at a reasonable pace.

VC2008EE is the free version of Microsoft's Visual C++ 2008 compiler. Most of the functionality is there, although it's not designed for commercial use (in fact, the terms-of-use forbid using the express editions for commercial use). I know it's fashionable in geekdom to sledge a product simply because it's from Microsoft, but I like VC2008, and now that I'm getting used to it, I think I'll finally bid a fond farewell to Visual C++ 6.0.


Irrlicht is a very nice 3D engine, that runs very fast, and has loads of features that I'm dying to use. The website has a number of tutorials that go through the various features of Irrlicht (the name is German for will-o'-the-wisp), and give a good overview over how the library is organised.