Im going through the book Game programming all in one, and i was just wondering, for the peole who have read it, if the Mirus engine that you develop throughout the book is anything like game engines that are used today, i have seen a few repeated lines of code in the book but was meaning the way that all the components are broken up, e.g. one for windows, directx, one for textures, surfaces, a template class, animation class etc is this the sort of way that game engines are developed today? when im finished the book im going to do a few simple 2d games using the engine, then im going to create my own engine from scratch and do some more 2d games in it, then finally upgrade the engine to 3d, this should be no problem as its written in DX8 do you think this is a bad or a good way for me to learn, the extra 2d engine thing, its because i want my own engine from scratch, i know it will use a lot of the same stuff. Anyway thanks in advance for replys.

I definitely think its a good idea to write your own engine from scratch. Some people might argue... "why reinvent the wheel?" but I think its good practice to see how things work yourself, instead of always using a library. Actually, it depends on why you''re programming: do you enjoy the programming side or just the design side? If you''re more into design than coding, than I wouldn''t bother writing your own engine. But if you''re like me and just have to know why things work, write your own

Hey,

Yeah well i bought the same book and read it, and love it... It taught it me a lot... About creating your own engine i would suggest you do it, after you use the mirus engine to create a few easy games... For example after building the breaking out game, i built a tetris clone, and then tried to do some small strategy games....

Well that is what i suggest... Use the Mirus engine, until u understand game programming, then program a better one...

Good luck

One thing to be aware of if you intend to use the Mirus engine is that it has a memory leak, I believe in the mrAnimation class. When I was going through the book, I could not find any errata, so I''m not sure if this is well-known or not.

If you''re typing in the code rather than just copying files from the CD (something I find to be a very useful learning tool), then at some point you''ll find that you get some odd error messages upon closing the game''s window. I think this is caused by an attempt to delete some dynamically allocated memory that was already deleted. You don''t see this error if you use the code from the CD because the other has commented out the delete call causing the problem rather than fixing the actual problem (thus creating the memory leak).

I''ll go back through my notes and code from the book and post the solution I came up with to fix the memory leak. I''m not certain how big a deal it was (or even if that particular type of memory leak could cause other problems), but I''ve alwasy been told that memory leaks of any kind are BAD, so I was happier to have it fixed.

--Roderick Smith

Thanks for all the replys, ill do my own engine after using the mirus one for a few easy games.

The memory leak your talking about wouldnt even that me run my program, so i compared mine with the source, noticed the comments and so changed mine, it runs ok now except for one thing. When i try to shut down the program it shows an error message about assert. I dont know how to fix this because everywhere i have an assert call looks okay.
Any help to fix this would be appreciated, thanks!