Jeremy has taken the initiative on the Resurrect Crixa drive by mostly porting the current codebase to Simple DirectMedia Layer. This is cool because this will eventually allow Crixa to run on non-Windows platforms such as MacOS and Linux.

Inspired by Jeremy’s progress, I got my Visual Studio .NET environment up. After muddling through the project settings, I eventually got the old DirectX based codebase to run and compile. There’s a lot of stuff that is starting to come back, so I can see that I have my work cut out for me. I then downloaded and installed SDL into the Visual Studio environment. You download the ZIP package, compile the libraries and DLLs, and then you’re done. There are several articles that describe how to set it up in a particular environment (in my case, Visual C++ 7).

So far the most irking thing has been, again, not knowing what all the damn project compiler / linker options are when setting up a blank Win32 app. I have some knowledge here about what needs to be linked where, but how to do it in the GUI for VS.NET is maddening. There is quite a bit of interdepency between various compiler switches, debugging support, and code generation options.

I haven’t actually spent much time looking at C++ or game graphics libraries, but I was impressed at the lack of fiddly Windows things one normally would have to do (WinMain, for example). In the past, I would have studied all the ins and outs of this and got nothing done. In today’s era of tools built on tools, I’ve given up and have decided that I don’t really have to worry about this now. Eventually, though, it would be nice to have a decent architectural understanding of the Win32 programming environment, since I can think of a number of interesting utilities that I’d like to write.

Anyway, seeing Crixa run again is pretty damn cool, and I had to write about it :-)