I had a fresh reminder of the exact reason why I love XNA so much. I figured that I wanted to brush up on my "1337 5k!llz" and that it was about time to get back into C++ stuff. Well, I love game development, so why not brush up by developing a game, right? Well, that was my thinking behind this whole story.
I've been a DirectX kind of guy ever since I started in game development. So, what the heck, I figured I would stir up the pot and try some OpenGL development in C++. Not a problem, there's a metric crap-ton of OpenGL tutorials over on NeHe that I can follow. Here I come "Creating a Window", YEE HAW! Visual C++ Express installed? CHECK. Windows SDK installed? CHECK. Visual C++ Settings pointing to new Windows SDK directories? CHECK. I'm ready to roll, all y'all. Let's get on with it homeboys.
So, open up the first tutorial, type in all the code for creating a window and clearing the screen....
....
DAMN, that was a LOT of typing. Holy moley, I could have developed a bad case of arthritis from the tutorial alone. Geez, how many lines of code is this? 400?!?!?!?!?!? 400 lines of code to get a BLANK WINDOW on the screen? WTF?!?!? Okay, forget getting my "1337 5k!llz" back in shape, I'm just going to spend that time continuing to work with XNA.
Perhaps to make it more "1337," I'll play around with the Lex/Yacc-type stuff in the Visual Studio SDK to write my own language that I can use as a custom scripting language in a game. Yummy.
TIMMMMMEH!!! TIMMMMMEH!!!