Just a thought

Gulli

I can understand how it is easy to get lost in the thread - it has got rather technical. What I will say is that if you don't understand something then ask. I'm always willing to explain things (and I'm sure others are too) - the problem with having a certain level of knowledge is that I tend to forget that not everyone else does

If you don't want to ask on the board then feel free to drop me a mail.

Having browsed around on programming pages for PCs recently I've noticed that there is a substancial difference on how a game is designed and developed compared to a desktop application and can therefore warrant a special forum. PC gamers have full websites dedicated to games development and I think we could use a forum for it. Acorn Arcade came to mind being the no. 1 gaming site for RISC OS, a new forum on Iconbar would probably be just as good.

Since I'm interested in writing a game for RISC OS (I'm still only trying to settle on a good idea and get up to the programming skill needed ) I've been looking around and have found very little information about games design and development for the platform. This really makes the learning curve steep and not very friendly to newcomers. Discussions about frame rate, A* (formula for pathfinding) etc. are somewhat game specific and would get less attention in a generic programming forum. Also I think that just having the forum could spark off some ideas and get people together that are really interested in games development.

I'm quite certain that there are some people that read the forums here and have little or no interest in games programming, only in getting some good games and playing them so why not have the General forum for general games discussion and provide a specific forum for the ones interested in developing these games? After all most of the currently running threads in the General forum is about games development, asking for ideas, programming etc.

Acorn Arcade/IconBar staff: I'm not trying to tell you how to run your excellent sites, you may well have different ideas but if I don't speak mine out, no one will know them and therefor not be able to consider them.

Lee, thanks for offering to explain but the things that are going over my head are mostly OpenGL discussions which I know nothing about and the math discussions and I'm not going to ask you to teach me math by e-mail

[Edited by Gulli at 13:49, 20/1/2001]

Just make sure you get the programming related posts copied in there or there might not be any proper posts in there for a while, since they're all in the general forum.