Thus began the quest to satiate my hunger for a complex 2d space/ground game. Starting out with languages I ran the gauntlet of C#, C++, and python trying to find what I wanted to use. Those were easy enough, yet then I found out that graphics coding is god damned hard. Much harder than actually writing the game code itself! So I went through a few things, but they were either too error-prone and/or difficult, or couldn't meet requirements. OpenGL, DirectX, SDL, Pygame, Pyglet, PyopenGL. I came across XNA later, and fell in love with how it was powerful, yet did a good majority of the work for you, especialy with its built in 2D fucntions.
But then I met Construct, and I looked upon awesome. My mind reeled and came to three quick thoughts: one, that th15 would likely be interested in this for reasons to be stated later; two, that this was EXACTLY what I wanted in functionality and even more; and three, it sounded too good to be true.
One was filed away in my excitement. Two was loudly proclaimed to anyone who cared (and quite a few who didn't). And three was thoroughly investigated; so far I am impressed. Allow me to quote them for the low-down.
It's hardware accelerated 2D with full pixel shading and lighting effects, built in physics and collision (both Bounding box and MMX accelerated pixel-perfect bitmask), built-in debugging and profiling. I've been palying around with it since yesterday, and after reading, about 5 mintues of work has a tank with seperate turret running about the screen, and working mouse-selection/deselection, with turret. I'm going to continue working on it, but I wanted to show you guys this as soemthing useful. It is also of special importance to th15 as its basicly gamemaker without such a slow back-engine.Construct is a free powerful and easy to use development software for both DirectX 9-based games and applications. It includes an event based system for defining how the game or application will behave, in a visual, human-readable way - easy enough for complete beginners to get results quickly. Optionally, advanced users can also use Python scripting to code your creations.
Sorry for the wall of text, and I guess I might be sticking around a bit more
Edit:Also of possible note, my old computer (8 years, 4-5 of them spent in hell) finally died. I'm posting this on an emachines (which is still faster than my old computer by a factor of 5 at least) and should, if all goes as planned, have a new gaming computer this coming month! Looking at a phenom 9600 with a SAPPHIRE Radeon HD4830
I'll also be truthful, that I'll likely end up trying to use XNA anyways, as my mind isn't very well geared for GM/Construct style stuff, but I understand code fairly well. Another edit: Sorry Anna. Didn't know it was that old: was only a few posts down
forgot that the forums are bit slower here.