Marks Universe

Well,
I used DirectX and managed to achieve more than I expected - a beautiful, rotating planet, and a moving ship (a 2D sprite).

DirectX is powerful, I’ll grant that. Extremely powerful! But, some things they’ve made more tedious than necessary, and as I was writing my engine, wrapping up all the intricacies of DirectX API calls, I decided that there simply had to be something more flexible out there - why reinvent the wheel for the thousandth time … So, I had a bit of a search, and discovered Irrlicht; an open-source CROSS-PLATFORM (Nice!) DirectX/OpenGL wrapper. Amazingly, it usually works with OpenGL about the same (if not better, particularly framerates!) than DirectX. Win-Win!

So far, I’ve got a 3D ship loaded, a chase-camera following it, boosters that emit blobs of fire (quite nice, actually!) and basic keyboard control. Not bad for a days work learning the engine!

Onwards!