Re: How to do complex graphics output efficiently?

Hi Peter

If you want to learn the basics, the traditional way of running a game
is with a game loop, an endless loop where you check input, update the
internal game logic, and render the screen in that order. For 2d games,
first you render the background, and then you render sprites on top of
that, in order. For 2d games with animated sprites you simply draw a
different frame at the position of each object each time you render the
screen. The individual frames can be stored as any format, e.g. PNG.
Forget about (animated) GIF, it's outdated.

Historically, games are mostly written in C/C++, although Java probably
is used on Android these days and I'm pretty sure Python has excellent
support as well. When developing for a PC, I wouldn't do it in Java,
although there's nothing wrong with the language per se, it's just not
so much used for making 'simple' games so it will be hard to find help.
So I'd probably go with Python so I don't have to wait for things to
recompile as is the case with C/C++. Python is a fun and easy language
to try things out with.

For 2d games, the bare minimum you need is a language and a graphics
library that allows you to draw sprites on the screen (so you don't have
to manually update every pixel ;), and to get input from e.g. keyboard
and mouse. For C/C++, SDL is a good choice although it's a bit old, but
it will be quite efficient. (It probably won't use much of your GPU,
instead, efficient CPU instructions are used, which is fine because the
overhead involved with using a GPU will be larger than the speed gain
for 2d. Even slow CPUs can handle 2d graphics perfectly well.)

Also, be prepared to get better at programming as you go, the best
school is to try things out, to look at other people's code and learn
from that.

For 3d games, if you don't want to use a framework, you'll have to learn
plain OpenGL so your graphics card is used to render stuff, but most
tutorials found on the web are incredibly outdated so the best way to go
is read an experts book, but those are hard for a beginner. Also the way
to set up an OpenGL context is platform dependent so you have to do the
work again for each platform. And you can't just call OpenGL from your
game objects because that will lead to a lot of code duplication and
unnecessary coupling. So you'll have to write your own engine, which is
a lot of work and so far from one's initial motive to make a fun and
interesting game that it's really better to just use a decent engine. In
the community, C++ is the most popular choice, you'll get the best
performance but it's also a pain in the ass to wait for things to
compile each time you change something, and you have to manually write
header files which is unnessary work IMO, a machine should do this for
you. Java is better in this regard but there aren't a lot of people
using it for 3d games (unless maybe Android).

Anyway it's been such a long time I did anything gamedev-related so
don't take my word on what languages & library to use. But I'm pretty
confident about what I said about the 'basics' of 2d & 3d development.

Good luck
Joeri


On 01/29/2016 08:31 AM, Peter Nabbefeld wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I've never developed a game before, and I wonder how to do complex graphics
> output efficiently. Currently, I dont't want to use a framework, just want
> to learn some basics.
> 
> So far, it's about these two issues:
> 
> 1. In 2D games, You often have objects behaving equally, e.g. a swarm of
> birds, all flapping with their wings - sometimes even asynchronous. From my
> point of view there seem to be two possible solutions: (a) Using animated
> GIFs (b) Using one object with several image layers, which could be drawn
> individually using Flyweight objects with timers/counters.
> 
> 2. How to make a 3D view with e.g. animated animals, fog, etc.? I want to
> use Java, Ogre4J seems to be inactice since 2009, JOGL seems rather basic,
> so is there any good framework to draw animated 3D objects?
> 
> Kind regards
> Peter
> 
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