Some Basic Questions

#1 Re: a main game loop, you can use your scenegraph's onUpdateScene method. This gets called every render frame, so make sure you're not packing too much stuff in there for each call.

Re: "client", no, as the tutorial states, it's not magical at all. Good question, I can see how people might think that. But this is just a holdover from TGE. You can rename all instances of "client" to anything you want. When we get full-on real-time networking up and running, we'll likely restructure the way things are laid out a bit (not making it any more complicated though).

Re: frame-rate control... you can enable or disable vsync. You could also set a blocking schedule if you want. But in general, the idea of controlling the framerate explicitly isn't usually a good idea. You can set the dynamics "frame rate", but T2D does rendering for you. If I were you, I'd probably leave this area of code / functionality alone until you get further into a game. If you really need to touch this stuff for some reason, go ahead. But know that we'll be doing updates to some of this code in the future, as we bring full networking online, and the way physics "ticking" and render rate are handled will change slightly. So, might end up with conflicts if you change stuff in these areas yourself too.

Sorry this reply is a little short, it's very late and I'm tired! Hope this was somewhat helpful though. And many thanks to Robert for answering questions too.

#2 Thanks for the help, very much appreciated.

But I still have a question regarding windowed apps versus full screen. Any commercial game is going to be a full screen game, not windowed. How can I do this in T2D? Also, what is the typical resolution used, 800x600?

Thanks

#3 I'll try to look it up if no one else jumps in, but it's a very basic setting that gets stored in one of the prefs.cs files to have the application start up in full screen.

And just as an observation, actually many 2D games, especially casual ones, do get used in windowed mode :)

#4 Actually I have tried looking in common/client/prefs.cs and changing
$pref::Video::fullScreen = "0";
to
$pref::Video::fullScreen = "1";

That doesn't work - running the code actually changes this line in this file back to
$pref::Video::fullScreen = "0";

I also tried doing the same thing in T2D/client/prefs.cs, and that didn't work either.

So I'm not so sure it is quite that simple.

Also, you should take a look at the casual games on realarcade.com. Every single one of the games that actually sells is done in full screen mode. The only casual games that are done in windowed mode are the free web games that someone can throw together in a couple weeks. The need for full screen for commercial games is also mentioned in a number of game development books, eg the Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus book by A LaMothe. Anyway, I would never consider commercially releasing any game that did not operate in full screen mode.

Please let me know if you find any info on how to do this. Thanks.

#5 A very quick "find in files" shows that $pref::Video::fullScreen is in all of the pref.cs files (there are 4 I think), and can be overridden with the -fullscreen command line argument to the executable.

main.cs, function parseArgs in the Common module:

//--------------------
         case "-fullscreen":
            $pref::Video::fullScreen = 1;
            $argUsed[%i]++;

         //--------------------
         case "-windowed":
            $pref::Video::fullScreen = 0;
            $argUsed[%i]++;

Find in files is your friend for sure!

#6 Marc, Stephen is right, you'll want to either use the -fullscreen commandline option, or change the appropriate prefs.cs files for your mod / game.