Hi,

I am still in my learning stages of programming & game design, and had a few questions that i couldnt find answers to while reading the FAQ's & forums. This may be my lack of experience or understanding some of the concepts around Gamestudio, and of course programming in general...but I would appreciate any advise given.

I am trying to develop a sports management game...essentially a database-driven game which uses function formulas to generate, track, and present results. I expect the GUI to be the primary user interaction, and the actual "graphical game" to be "non-interactive"...or possibly "minimally" interactive. I do not "need" fancy graphics, or even 3d for that matter, but based upon the way I'd like to present the "field view"(isometric, but with perspective...i.e. 45 degree view), I assume 3d might be the only choice I have, coupled with some basic 2d sprites perhaps. But if I find that too difficult, I'd settle for 2d top view style.

As of right now, I am still designing the db schema to "try" and encapsulate enough data to make these results a little bit more than just a simple "points tally" per play. I "think"(again...consider the source...me) this should allow me the flexibility to eventually include graphical playouts of these "results"...and the idea of scripting sounds like it works perfectly for me to do this. However, I could not find any info on whether GS would be an appropriate tool for something like this, does this sound reasonable to do?

My next question is...if it sounds like a concept GS would work well with...would I need to develop the entire game in GS...or would I somehow integrate it into my "master" application(the beginnings have been started in VB.Net)?

If it does support everything to be done in GS...can somebody link me to some information on integrating data-driven components into GS? Or, if the answer is vice-versa, link to some information on integrating GS into another app?

Thanks to any who try to help in advance. And by all means, if I've missed something with the Search tool that has been discussed before, a link works well for me too.

Regards,
Steve

Hello Steve!

I will try to answer your questions partially. I had a similar problem, I wanted to organise some rather complicated data structures for my game. In the past I solved this by simply writing a DLL with C++ and then I used this as a plugin. Worked for me, but you need the SDK for it - I am not sure if it is included in any edition (I have the Pro, therefore I have the SDK).

For my new project I tried to do eversything in Lite-C based on the fact that you can define your own data structures there. However I found it a little lacking for my needs - you can have an array of pointers to a self-defined data structure, but you cant initialize them properly. You can only initialise a global instance of the structure.

So, if you only need one or two instances of the struct (which can be arbitrarily complicated), Lite-C can do it. For other purposes I recommend plugging in a DLL in order to organise your data.

I hope this helped a little. Of course once you have the data and know what you want to do, creating the scene in 3D together with sounds etc. should be relatively easy with 3DGS.

Gnometech

EDIT: Although I have to admit that my C is a little rusted - I have not tried to just allocate some memory with "new". Maybe that works and that would solve all your problems - go for Lite-C. ;-)

Thank you very much Gnometech for your advice. I think the dll suggestion works well with what i was going to try & do.

I think i need to spend some more time getting familiar with Lite-C to see how I can best try & use it for what I'm doing.

Just a followup question. I might not fully understand everything I need to, but I am assuming I could add a database functionality(read/write,BLOB,etc.) using Lite-C? I think I can...but I'm not completely confident in my own analysis yet, due to my experience level.

Regards,
Steve

In case it helps anybody else...nevermind on that last question. The db functions will be embedded methods in the dll...:)