The Dragon Blog

I have been quite busy lately, and almost forgot about this blog. I’m not dead if anyone wondered.
Recently a friend asked me about a good 3D graphics API for beginners. I have tried lots of them before, and gave him some info. I like making them myself, but my friend sent me something he made in short time with Irrlicht. I was impressed, cause when I tried Irrlicht some time ago, it was not that great. So I immediatly got interested in it again. So I downloaded the newest version, and were amazed at how good it had become. So now I’m currently in progress of setting up a basic framework, which I will use for some of my future & current projects. I will be utilizing Irrlicht for graphics & input(might use another input API later), FMOD for sound & RakNet for networking. I might even use this for the OgtraX Game Engine. But that would require a huge rewrite, but the benefits are great. Since OGE at the moment is DirectX9 only I’m limited to Windows. With Irrlicht I can use DX9,DX8 & OpenGL, and Irrlicht is linux ready, meaning OGE will reach out to a larger userbase.

I have done some work and created a menu system. This is for the main menu at the moment but I will make it appliable to a ingame menu too. Also I have never seen a menu system in a engine before so it’s quite unique. To all you programmers out there who wonder how it works I will post the prototype functions and how to use them here:

void CreateMenu(int colR, int colG ,int ColB,int cellSizeX,int cellSizeY,int screenPosX,int screenPosY);

int CreateMenuCell(char* cellCaption,FONT cellFont);

CreateMenu(128,128,128,152,32.472,196);
CreateMenuCell(”NEW GAME”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”LOAD GAME”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”SAVE”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”OPTIONS”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”INTRO”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”EXIT GAME”,menufont);
CreateMenuCell(”UPDATE”,menufont);

This should all be pretty self explanatory. And to the result. This is the menu for a game in progress which I’m making alongside the Ogtrax engine.

You can probably see that the image is resized which is why the image doesn’t fit the code above. If you double the size of the image you will see it. Link to bigger image