Well that's all folks! I thouroughly hoped you enjoyed this little tour of the Data Generator application and the underlying 2D engine. Save your work and close the program. If you ever want to view or edit it again just fire up the Data Generator and open your project file. Again, the full documentation of the Data Generator can be found here. The full documentation takes every control in every window and tells you precisely what it does and how to use it. This Tutorial was created to give you an idea of how it all works when put together. If you're interested in the Data Generator or the underlying 2D engine, feel free to contact me at gaiiden@blade-edge.com with any questions. Thanks again and you programmers may want to stick around for the next section!

The Code

if you're a programmer, you may be intersted in the code I had to write to create this application. of course, it depends on what I mean by "this application". If I meant everything that goes into making this application function, from the renderer to the error logger, we're talking a few thousand lines of code easily. All told the engine must wiegh in at around...15,000 lines, counting comments and whitespace. I'd take about 2/3 of that number for actual code. So yea - that's a lot.

Fortunately however that's all pretty generic stuff, and certainly not something I have to rewrite every time I want to create a new application (phew). In the context of "this application" meaning the functionality of the program you just ran, then we're only talking a few dozen lines of code. If that. Click here to see the full listing of the main source file. I could spend a few paragraphs explaining how it all works but if you're really interested you can dig through the docs. I don't keep em up to date for nothing.

In a general overview though, there are three functions called in main(). The Start and End routines startup and cleanup the application respectively, with parameters to point to a custom startup and shutdown function so you can perform any program-specific tasks. The Run function is called once and when that exits the program is over. The Run routine can call two user functions (if they are defined) so you can perform game updates in between render passes and handle user input from the mouse and/or keyboard. Joysticks are not yet supported. Pretty much your standard program interface.

So there you have it

I've said my peice, now I must bow out before I pass out. It's been fun people.