Casual Game Ports?

[Alpha2]

Programing is difficult, I know this because if it werent we;d ALL be doing it.

I;m only saying the complexity of the task, cloning a casual game, would probably less problematic for someone with actual coding ability in comparison to an emulator.

To think I implied anything other than that is ridiculous. Look when I first got my GP32 I had my pick of like a dozen Tetris clones, I never made one myself though because coding isn't easy, you dont just jump into it and make a zelda game, but there are people here who do know how to program and those people might find it well with in their skill set to be able to do something similar if they so desire.

(this post was being written before the one above and posted after so this is jut for clairifcation that I;m not suggesting anyone here has the ability to make world of goo or any of the game mentioned in his post.)

 

[ruckage]

ruckage, I guess.
Alpha2 was just saying that casual games are easier, he didn't say they weren't a lot of effort.

Maybe I just felt like yelling at someone. Sorry.

Until you've actually attemted any kind of programming a game,emulator, or anything else it's ignorant to try and guess how much work goes into it, even then often what seems simple can require lots of code to actually work. I get a little annoyed sometimes because people seem to assume that making homebrew games must be so much easier than writing emulators, in fact it's just totally different and depends a lot on whether the game/emulator is written from scratch or is a port (port meaning the source code is available). It just isn't fair to compare them imo.
You also have to remember with games it's more than just coding, and if you want it to be good you have to go the extra mile to polish it up. Even my Bejeweled clone (Zookeeper really) had months of work put into it to make it as good as I possibly can. Of course if all you want is the most basic form of pong I can get you that in an hour or less if you want, though I think you'd get bored quickly.

 

[Mithrildor]

Yup , I think a normal game requires at least liek 1500 lines of code.

 

[Alex.]

Yes, surprise-surprise: nothing happens overnight, not even the simplest puzzle game. Even a program that looks simple on the surface can have hidden quirks underneath, which you can only discover while actually working on it. Then, as Ruckage said there's the polish that makes the difference between a quick demo you play once and then delete, and a game you want to keep around. The amount of effort that's involved in this last part isn't entirely proportional to the program's size and complexity.

Pentominos for example was suggested as an afternoon effort ( <_< ), but it actually took considerably longer than that, and about 2000 lines of C.

Remember to say thanks when you'll get your "5 bejewelled-alikes on the first day for free".

 

[dflemstr]

Yes, surprise-surprise: nothing happens overnight, not even the simplest puzzle game. Even a program that looks simple on the surface can have hidden quirks underneath, which you can only discover while actually working on it.

Heh, there's an incredible amount of truth to that. I'm working on a basic physics game with a ball rolling around in a simple blocky world. Lines Of Code so far: 64204 (if I can trust wc). Granted, it's 3D, but still.

 

[Mithrildor]

Yep, the problem is people really think 2D games require just a bit code and 3D require really alot. And that is wrong (ok its a bit true because 2d games require 2 integers to store the location of a character and in 3d 3 integers are required for the same thing), but (I tell this as someone who just leanred to cod a bit in C++ btw) there is really something beyond that. Its mostly the complexity in gameplay what makes the game bigger or smaller. Games like tetris look very very simple , but they actually require more coding than you think. All the locations of the tetrimos need to be stored, a function must be included to spawn new blocks , a function must be made to make those spawning blocks random, player input must be recieved and translated into output etc. , But even thinks you would not think of must be made, like a function to determine the dropping speed of a block or a whole function to turn a block to the left.

But , indeed you can say a simple game like Tetris requires less code than a RTS.

 

[Alpha2]

that;s all I was saying.


Sometimes it's also the skill of the person doing it of course, Back when I was working on my website (something I really need to do more of) I could do many things relativly easy in HTML, a friend's site that he did with a generic HTML editor was bloated to a ludicrous size with lots of useless bits of information and such. I went in and re-wrote his website and took it from like 40 lines of HTML to 10. Not to say I'm great at web coding, I know nothng of jave, Flash script, or PHP, but I just knew more efficient methods of making a simple site than someone who knew so little as to use a program to generate it, so ultimately it's a question of what you know how to do but I'd be surprised of something complex (as in requiring numerous animations of graphics elements, hit detection, AI routines, navigations paths and such) took fewer lines of code than making blocks dissapear. Obviously not as simple as I made it sound but a different animal that some people might have an easier time with.

 

[God Ginrai]

that's all I was saying.

But that's the problem. Less code doesn't mean anything. What really matters is the amount of hours the dev puts into perfecting it. You can code an inefficient algorithm that takes you a whole lot of code but gets the job done, or you can spend more time working to make a more efficient algorithm that does the same thing in less code and less time. More code doesn't always mean more work. You have to compare and contrast the volume of code to the amount of hours put into it, at the very least.

-God Ginrai

 

[Raz]

Id love to see a port of iPhysics

It is open-source according to this topic: CODE
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=15911

 

[dflemstr]

Id love to see a port of iPhysics

It is open-source according to this topic: CODE
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=15911


Newton is closed-source and won't be ported most probably. It would also kill the Pandora before it could even load all the ram it requires, because it uses float operations to death. But look at OGRE + ODE, might be faisible.
I hope that jBullet will be usable on the Pandora (that's what I'm using for my project as I said in another thread somewhere, and yes I'm programming in Scala, which might be a performance bottleneck too) because I rely heavily upon it, and it's the most light-weight physics engine I know of, so if it doesn't work I'd have to roll my own, something I don't fancy doing.

I'm almost exclusively using static objects anyways, and I get 2000 FPS on my Intel cpu, so it shouldn't be a problem I hope.