I'm not sure if it would be better to post this in the Game Dev topic area, but they don't list any "PALM" subcatergories, so I'm assuming most of the Palm experts look here. [MODERATOR: feel free to move this to the best place - thanks]
I consider myself a beginner programer in terms of experience and expertise, but I'm definately more advanced as far as being able to understand the theory of things. I'm using OOP approaches in all but the simplest programs. I mostly program in VBA and VB .NET designing multi-media database solutions, but picked up a few books on c++ that don't seem to hard to understand - same OOP concepts, different syntax.
Anyway, I have some game ideas I'd like to program for the PALM. I picked up a copy of Palm OS Bible, which I think gives me a solid grasp on how to get my program to communicate to the device and get user input etc. I'm still a little intimated by all the memory handles and pointers and what not, but I'll get used to it.
What I don't have a solid grasp on, is how to store game information. And I suppose I need a general primer for storing character, world, and game state for games in general. Based on my experience with database design, I figured I would store all the info for objects that persisted as xml or some other database like structure, that pretty much mimics the OOP game objects' structures. However, I'm not sure if this is even a good place to start, nor if the limitations of the PalmOS lends itself to such a storage strategy.
Another general game design question I have is about coding for easy use by a modding community. I was thinking I could use an ini file for creating the classes and methods externally (xml lends itself nicely to object oriented program structure i'd think) and then users good simply tell the game about other ini files to load in extra locations, quests, items, etc. I don't know if this makes any sense, or if I'm way off base, nor do I know what kind of performance issues I would find if the game had to initialize all the objects from ini files and writing functions for the game tokens that are so generic they have to load info from an ini file to know what to do. Perhaps I'd need to write a compiler that compiles the ini files into c++ header files or something? Anyway, this is just something I'm thinking about and if anyone has any ideas i'd love to hear them, but the main point of my question is to get some basic game development pointers for the Palm OS.
So, if people could kindly point me toward some good PalmOS centered OOP game design resources, I would be most grateful. I will share the points among the people who share good leads.
Thank you!
Start Free Trial
