To libnds or not to libnds

headkaze · 5848

Offline headkaze

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on: August 18, 2009, 01:35:55 am
As development for The Detective Game has started and the fact we are using libnds I thought I would make a post about my first impressions of it (although I have used it several years ago it has changed alot since then). At the moment I'm finding it rather easy to get lost in it's abstraction. You would think that writing a game in asm would make it easy to move to using libnds. Well yes and no. I think that Flash may find it quite hard to get to grips with as I find myself constantly searching through examples, headers and libnds source files to figure out how things work. I want to do things the proper "libnds" way rather than hit the registers directly and ignore the helpful abstractions. At least when Flash begins to code I have some of the groundwork in place which will hopefully help make sense of it all.

For a moment I was thinking about removing libnds from TDG and to just use the header files similar to what we did for Warhawk. In some ways I think that libnds has perhaps become a little too much like PALib which can obfuscate the hardware. After writing a pure asm game it does feel a bit strange to use the abstrations. That being said much of libnds is very helpful and makes alot of sense. So I'm just going to warn you (Flash) than very little will seem familiar to you and not just the fact were using a different language!

So without further ado a link you will find very helpful indeed and that is the Libnds Documentation. Bookmark it now!
« Last Edit: August 18, 2009, 01:36:46 am by headkaze »



Offline flash

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Reply #1 on: August 18, 2009, 09:25:03 am
Have bookmarked and am browsing now..

I can see what you mean with just a cursory flick through. Oh, it was so much simpler I'm my day  ;D

Coding for the love of it!