Hmm, as a game developer, you shouldnt limit yourself to such low system requirements. Most games on store shelves right now have higher mininum system requirements. And considering if your starting to make a game right now and it will take on average a year and half to finish a game, so the game will be done in about Jan 2003 (rough ballpark), 200Mhz w/ 32 of ram and 2mb video card would seem extremely rediculous then. The lowest system requirements I could find for a game comming out in a few months is 266Mhz with 64megs ram and 3d accelerator.

I just dont understand why some people insist on using old peices of crap, especially when they are game developers. If you want to be making games, you should own fairly decent system, or how else can you write a game that pushes the limits? There are many people with powerfull computers, and they want the games they buy to push the limit of their computers. After you write a game with latest graphical bells and whistles, then optimize it and put in reduced graphical options for people stuck in the stone age.

Possibility

Since this is a project including me and my artist the game has to be well designed. Every game being released focuses on fancy graphics, but do you see any of them with a new AI engine?

If I write the game with a lower graphics version I can make the game faster and concentrate on all my levels, AI, and design. After doing that I can add all the bell and whistles for all the people who can support it. Games should be available to everybody not just power gamers and you would be suprised the kind of systems people have(know your market).

-Just call me old school

Right now I programmed all in Win32asm
Level Editor
Graphics Package(for artist)

Now Im working on the engine to play my map format.

AI takes the most dev time which is why most games don''t bother too much with it. It''s not because computers can''t handle it.

Doing low end tiles on my system actually resulted in a performance decress. Hardware Acceleration is essential if you really want to free the CPU up for AI. HA is only available if you do 3D. DirectDraw Acceleration hasn''t been improved upon much if at all in the last few years.

It''ll cost you a few users but gamers tend to have gamer machines. If they see a game they like but don''t have the graphics card (or whatever) for, they''ll upgrade. They know it''s about time anyway, they just need a good excuse to spend the money.

Ben
http://therabbithole.redback.inficad.com

KalvinB, I think you didn''t understand me correctly. When I meant make the game faster, I was talking about develop time not fps .I feel more comfortable with 2d, thus getting some graphics on the screen to see results faster. I also said I''m making two versions (The other one would be 32 bit Direct3D).My graphics engine is going to be put in a DLL so I can easily modify it.

I got to start working before my artist gets restless, so would anybody know about precompiling sprites and tiles(I would think it would be fast because they would be loaded in the cache if the functions were called often and the jumps colorkeying causes would slow down the blting process)?

I wouldn''t worry about precompiling. It would only speed up load time possibly. Render time wouldn''t be affected.

It would be faster dev time to just leave them out in the open so they can be easily modified and updated as needed.

Ben
http://therabbithole.redback.inficad.com