Hello, I am a hobbyist computer game developer. I have been programming a game in the platform jumping genre in the PureBASIC engine. I am working on making a more serious-looking game rather than a Mario-like game that has been done many times before. I am an experienced BASIC programmer though QBASIC and VisualBASIC and VB.NET and the PureBASIC engine has been easy to learn and have quite a powerful syntax. However I am new to game development and require assistance. I have a few question, mostly regarding general game development.

1) My framerate is quite low on reasonable hardware, what tasks usually cause this?

2) How can I make animations look smooth without an enormous framerate?

3) Diagonal motion looks terrible, how can I improve it?

4) I am not accustom to debugging real-time full-screen applications, break points don't seem to help, what will?

5) Double buffering is really confusing, I have to have multiple set of coordinents for the position of moving objects on each buffer and draw everything twice, is there an easier way to do double buffering?

6) Any tips and tricks that would help me in game development.

I will appreciate any help that you can provide me with on any of these questions. Thanks!

Hi. These aren't really design questions, so I expect that this thread will be moved.

1. This can vary greatly. You will need to profile your game (record timing information) in order to find your bottlenecks.

2. You don't need more than 30 fps for smooth animation. Make sure that animation frames are tied to real time elapsed, rather than the number of frames you have drawn

3. Don't know - it depends on how you have implemented it

4. Breakpoints should help. You may need to play in a window if fullscreen is getting in the way of your IDE window

5. I think you're misunderstanding double buffering, and suggest you read up on the concept. You shouldn't need two sets of coordinates - it's just about which buffer you draw to/display