No Torque for me :(

So about a month ago I found Garage Games, and became interested in buying an Indie liscence for Torque. But My wallet doesn't agree. It sucks being so broke I can't afford $100.

But instead of moping around and drooling over Torque, I downloaded the DirectX 9 SDK and made a little game prototype.

You can Download it here (right click save as)

BRIEF INSTRUCTIONS

Quote:
You'll need DirectX 9 To play. Extract the folder and go. There is one texture and the app. Keep them in the same folder.

Its nothing new, just a clone of some other dice games. You move with the keyboard Arrow keys. The object is to combine like die together to score points. You can chain Die while they are dropping to get exponential points.

You can push the die, or climb on top of them and roll them.

If you chain 'Ones' together with dropping die you get more time.

The game is over if the grid gets filled or you run out of time. You can restart by pressing Spacebar, and exit by pressing esc.

IF you have any problems I'd be interested in hearing them, as I could probably learn alot from them.

This is the first app I've ever made with DirectX, and it was made from scratch.
It took approx one month to make a little render engine and the game prototype. Thats one month of about 4 hours a day, so around 120 man hours.

The main objective was to learn DirectX, not make the greatest game ever.

The next step is to port it all over to OpenGl becuase I'd like to learn that, and Add sound, currently there is no sound.

DirectX is pretty easy, and I think its main power is that it includes everything, Graphics, Sound, Input.

I know that there is OpenGL for graphics and OpenAL for audio, but I'm not sure about an Open standard Input library, to replace DirectInput.

IF anyone knows of one let me know.

Anyway, the little render engine is pretty basic. IT does all the basic basic stuff:

Handles all primitve geometery.
Loads and displays meshes (no animation).
Lighting.
Alpha blending (material, vertex and texture)
Does one texture stage with alpha OP.
Fog (vertex Only)
Text Strings.
Camera stuff. etc...


Some of the more glaring imperfections is that it doesn't do any anti-aliasing or Depth biasing. I'll probably try to add that during the OpenGL port. And probably model animations.

It will load and display meshes but the xFile exporters I had at hand were poor, so all the models and animation in the game currently are entered by hand, vertex by vertex, normal by normal, color by color, texture coordinate by coordinate, all typed in. Not too bad since there is only three models and they are all very simple (two cubes and an arrow).

So I'll probably try to get a standard model format with OpenGl.

Anyway, hopefully by the time I'm done with openGL I can afford Torque and I'll play around with it.

Any comments you can put in this thread.

I learned a quite a bit from this little project and expect to learn more with OpenGL. The one main feature that kicked my arse was Alpha blending. Simply becuase I didn't initialy understand it correctly. I had to go to both ATI and nVidia's sites and read driver details to see how the stages were actually handled until I understood it.

For those interested the tools used were:
DirectX 9 SDK.
VC++ 6.0.
CVSNT.
PHOTOSHOP CS (trial).
Notepad.

All free except Visual C.++ 6.0. Which is older than dirt.