Em 19/6/2013 11:14, Tamas Rudnai escreveu: > On 19 June 2013 05:43, Peter Johansson wrote: > >> On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 5:29 AM, Justin Richards >> wrote: >> >>> It is a tall order but my son (12) has asked me several times to teach >> him >>> how to write games. This seems like it would be so much easier on a >>> commodore 64 >> Have you clarified what he meant by this? Video games today are a >> completely different beast than when many of us were young and playing >> them on 8-bit micros. Back then it was not uncommon for for a single >> person to develop an entire game. Today's PC and console games (those >> that your son will be familiar with) are developed by dozens if not >> hundreds of team members. Furthermore, many of today's most popular >> games are more "interactive movies" than what many of us may think of >> as video games. >> > I would like to add to this that C64 had a sprite function that made game > development easy on that device. With that you did not have to write the > code that displays and moves the sprites on the screen. Think a game engi= ne > as a modern version of "C64 sprite". Actually writing a 3D game with a > development environment with Unity 3D is much easier than writing a 2D on= e > on C64 -- simply because the whole thing was designed to make these thing= s > easier. Plus while C64 sprite was locked down to C64, Unity 3D allows you > to export your game to Windows, Linux, Mac, iPhone and Android. Imagine i= f > your code with C64 Basic and sprites was running also on Apple ][, Atari > and Spectrum. > > Tamas I remember how it was hard to code games in the early era of PC, around the eighties and nineties, before good game engines were available (if available at all). Then the hardware were slow, the video boards were unstandardized (and slow) and lots of other problems. Programming games needed a lot of tweaking, optimizing and tricks to allow for the game to run acceptably fast. Some used a lot of assembly too. I'm not up to date with modern game development but I think the modern game engines are much more straightforward programmed. Isaac --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .