Snowball now using SharpDX

For a little while, I was thinking about giving up on Snowball. When you’re one guy working on a project that gets to a certain size, it can start to feel a little daunting. You find a bug, and you feel like you need to fix it asap. I don’t know if anyone reading this has actually tried Snowball, but if you have, please comment to let me know. It would encourage me.

I decided to switch Snowball over to SharpDX. It’s not that I was unhappy with SlimDX, it just seems like there is a lot more innovation happening on the SharpDX side. I also like the fact that I can include the DLLs in the repository so end users don’t have to download another dependency in order to compile it. The Win8 stuff is also quite interesting, although the SlimDX guys say they are working on that.

I plan to set a road map soon for what I want to include the first release of Snowball. Music and Pixel Shaders are high the list. I’ve experimented with implementing a UI library but I think I want to push that back for a later release.

Jeremie Mangue

I just found your blog. I was looking for sharp dx game engine and I found this. I only did develop a game engine on Xna but I wanted to switch to sharpdx for couple of months now. I did tried anx framework but there was so much of what I didn’t want I didn’t use it. Just found you engine and it’s kind of easy to use and understand. I just tried it really quick. I plan to experiment a little bit more over the week end. I’m still planning to create my game engine but I would really benefit from using your game engine a little bit. I’m doing 2.5d so I won’t be able to do my game with snowball but it is really cool, I’m pretty sure that many people would be very interested.
This is a great example for me. If I may, you should upate your codeplex. Your blog is kind hard to find.

Are you planning to make a game with this game engine?

Anyway I hope you’d continue this project.
smack0007

Hi, thanks for replying.

I do have “plans” but whether or not those will actually ever turn into anything is up in the air. I’m just one guy and have a day job as a programmer so my free time programming amounts to an hour or so a night.

I appreciate the feedback and will try and make my blog easier to find from Codeplex, etc.