In the previous post I mentioned that we found out that it wasn’t a very hot idea to try coding our GUI using the .NET Framework. Now, this is not necessarily because the framework isn’t any good, but it was because we were not really using it in the way it was really intended. At that time, .NET was fairly new (it was just after the release of VS.NET 2003 I think) and what we were trying to do was tie our C++ based engine to a C# GUI. Sounds simple, right? Well, no.
In late April/early May I had a bunch of spare time on my hands. Naturally, I did what anyone would do, and started working on a cool GUI for creating and editing demos and intros and whatnot. This wasn’t a particularly new idea.
The first GUI we created was to do all the meshes and animation for our 64k intro Pure. John-Pierre made this really elaborate tool (in DOS, even!) that was basically a combination of hard-coding C code and data combined with some form of interactive GUI. From what I remember, it wasn’t the most easy to use piece of software ever invented, but it worked quite well. I can remember I was especially proud of the perspective correct w-buffered texture mapped triangle rasterizer. Too bad we placed 4th in the 64k competition, though. Looking back I think it would’ve helped if the intro had looked slightly less ugly :). (more…)