I’m interested in learning a bit about game programming. So I decided to pick up a book and work through it in either C or C++ as necessary to get the concepts down. I may have picked a lemon. I browsed the books today, and I think I chose wrong. I picked up Game Programming All In One. I never trust book titles, they’re unreliable because they’re usually determined by marketing jerks. Unfortunately publishers can’t be trusted either. I’ve only seen one publisher (pragmatic programmers) that consistently aims for quality, knowing that quality sells better than quantity. The others are all hit and miss, but mostly miss.
Anyway, this book uses the Allegro library. I knew it would either be that or SDL, and I’m now thinking I might have to ditch this thing and get a book that uses SDL. Why?
SDL is mature and well documented, and I’ve already installed it. Allegro’s docs and their downloads are a mess. I mean world war 3 mess! The download links are correct, but the files you find when it decompresses are wrong!
Solution! (?) I tried the SVN route. Looked better. All the expected directories were there…
Open the docs directory… nada. Placeholder txt files and nothing else!! WTF?! This is an exercise in the reasons why open source (closed source too but less often) can suck. The maintainers are not maintaining! Proponents would say that that is a job to fill and I should join the project, but if I can’t even get started exploring the project without ridiculous difficulties and obstacles, why would I support it?!!
I was holding my verdict until I could get some time with the library itself, but I can’t get that far, so it’s a guilty verdict. Guilty of sucking.
Yes folks, Allegro sucks. Make returns a FATAL ERROR with the most uninformative “unknown”!! WTF?!?!
Trying to sudo make install looks like it might work but returns the same lame error.
Cross-platform??? OH YEAH, BABY! ALLEGRO IS CROSS-PLATFORM SUCKY!
Stay away from it. FAR AWAY.
**EDIT**
Luckily, through no easy or well documented path, I found the docs on the CD that came with the book. SO maybe I will get a chance to give the software a fair verdict. Still, the fact that the SVN stable version doesn’t contain docs at all is a joke. Not even a README!
All my bitching and moaning aside. The HTML docs (on the CD with the book but mysteriously missing from the SVN version) are good enough. The XCode template works, though its buttons on the window pane don’t work. (CARBON?!)
Now we get to find out if this stuff is worth further complaining or is worth changing my mind about…!
1 comment so far ↓
JJ- I gave Allegro a try on Ubuntu and it all installed and ran very easily from apt-get. The problem I has from the game programming AIO is that Jon Harbour uses some very wierd and obscure C programming conventions which means you will probably always want to run the programs from the command line instead of using his suggested IDEs. Its amazing, there are almost no books out there that cover game programming with SDL or Allegro, they are almost all for DirectX or OpenGL. There is finally a new book coming out next month on Pygame, Python´s SDL wrapper, called:
Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame: From Novice to Professional
You might want to check that out. BTW, the people on the Allegro forum all seem to say that Allegro has really good documentation inside its source install files, I dont know, I didnt get that far.
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