My Thoughts on Reinventing the Wheel
- by Matt Christian
For awhile now I've known that XNA Game Studio contains built-in scene management however I still built my own for each engine. Obviously it was redundant and probably inefficient due to the amount of searching and such I was required to do. And even though I knew this, why did I continue to do it?
I've always been very detail oriented, probably part of my mild OCD. But when it comes to technology I believe in both reinventing the wheel and not reinventing it all at the same time. Here's what I imagine most programmers doing. When they pick up XNA, they're typically focused on 'I want to make a game with as little code as possible'. This is great and XNA GS is a great tool, but what will it do for programmers that want to make games with XNA? If they don't have any prior experience with other tools they will probably not ever learn scene management.
So is it better to leverage code and risk not learning valuable techniques, or write it all yourself and fight through the headaches and hours of time you may spend on something already built?
