IDEA-ALTER Game Framework Acronym
Jan 3rd, 2009 by William Jones
For the game developers out there…I have recently been playing around with Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio 3.0 and have been looking at a lot of game related resources. I came across a really cool acronym for a game framework overview while I was looking through a book in the library. The book is titles “Game Programming: The L Line, the Express Line to Learning” by Andy Harris. Andy gives a great acronym called “IDEA-ALTER” for remembering the sequence in the game framework overview. IDEA represents the overall game framework while ALTER represents the action inside the gaming loop. Each section of IDEA-ALTER is as follows:
I – Import and initialize
D – Display configuration
E – Entities
A – Action (broken into ALTER steps)
A – Assign values to key variables
L – Loop (setup main Loop)
T – Timer to set frame rate
E – Event handling
R – Refresh the display
You can look through the book at Google Book Search
Hello, William.
I am not interested in game programming (well, not for my job, maybe yes just for fun), but I am going to use Python for programming some numerical algorithms.
I think Andy’s IDEA-ALTER proposal is very interesting, as it covers all the possible “states” and “tasks” to be taken into account when programming a game.
In fact, I think it could be a good idea to adapt that framework to a more general programming situation.
If I want to build a project, with some authored classes (and maybe modules) and a main routine, how would the IDEA-ALTER match/fit each part of the project? How could/should it be adapted? I don’t know if my question is clear enough… How would an IDEA-ALTER framework for a general program look like?
For example, there would be an IDEA-ALTER structure for each module, or would it only fit the main procedure? Would/should class and function definitions be outside the IDEA-ALTER framework?
Thank you in advance for your answer.