It’s been a while since I’ve last worked on Asylum, a pity, but I’ve had a lot of work to do and pulled long nights and some weekend work, and I have my PS2 which keeps me entertained as well. I also have a predilection for buying DVD box sets, the latest being a british comedy called Chef, which I loved way back when watching WNED on saturday nights.
Anyway, I had bought a new book and read through most of it. Called Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0 by Frank D. Luna (got to love snappy, concise book titles, eh?). Anyway, I wanted more of a background in Direct3D since I’m still porting elements over from the old DirectDraw style. I also need a new videocard, but that’s another story.
The book was alright, didn’t go into too much detail (but given my project’s requirements, I don’t need blazing poly-pushing just yet) but has some nice examples I might be able to learn from. It has to be better than that last book I got, not that it was a bad book, but the example code was in the form of a single massive project that demonstrated everything at the same time, and plain doesn’t compile. And not just for me, for others as well. I still managed to isolate bits of code and play with them enough to understand them, but usually when I think of example code, I think of … well, an example,.. not an entire project which happens to have a million other things going on. Which in turn is why I seriously dislike the DirectX samples MS ships with, the test framework does too much, it’s hard to figure out what is absolutely required, and what is just cruft.
Hopefully I’ll be able to devote more time to this project soon. Though a lot of it will still need to be in the planning stages, since a Mysty like game is one where a mistake can cost hours and hours of wasted effort. Course, not everyone likes Myst like games anymore, a slew of them came out in the past few years, mostly awful, but nice looking. Maybe by the time my game is ready, everyone will be so sick of senso-feely fully-immersive 4D games that mine will seem shockingly retro, heh.
I’d also like to note that lots of people seem to find the asylum subsite due to google image searches for the terms “castle sketch”, funny, my brother drew that, and is basically the only real inspiration I ever had for asylum. If only I could draw.
