>A tightly packaged bundle of analogies. Pick up? (Y/N)

So I've offically selected Teeside as my Uni next year for a computer games programming masters.

Today I worked on a C# DirectX Form that's a basic tile engine. With only a DirectX enabled form (clearing a panel to a blue colour) I get around 60fps - though there do seem to be sudden dips now and again, not sure why...

I create a "naive tile render" which fills the panel up with around 750 tiles. Each tile renders itself, setting the stream, transforming the world, setting the texture and drawing it's own quad. It's still runs at 60fps.

public class Map
{
    public void Render(Device device)
    {
        foreach(Tile t in tiles) t.Render(device);
    }
}

Okay so I make it render the same thing 3 times each frame so around 2250 tiles, not unthinkable in a game with many different layers items and npcs. Frame rate goes down to about 15fps. So now I've got the base mark. I'll try to improve it by playing with batching. Also I'm running on a portable so speeds are never going to be blistering :D

That actually took nearly all my free time at school, I'm embarrased to say, I was having trouble getting the entire texture to render on the tile ... but then I realized I was putting it on upside down :D

The program also shows the "working memory" though I'm not quite sure what this specifically is. (I found this in System.Environment.WorkingMemory or something, I haven't looked it up yet.)

I also finished reading about Ultima Onlines resource system plans:
Part1
Part2
Part3

I found it interesting as I use to play UO. No recent mmorpgs interests me at all, they are just cooperative, single player style, games in a vast chat room. In UO the game and game goals were more emergent from interaction with the players, especially pre-trammel. One thing unique to UO in my eye was the stories it generated, players told each other story after story of happenings on messages boards, they made websites telling stories of things that happened to them. The modern morpgs are more "I did pre-set quest X", "We attacked guild Y, as per usual". They're more streamlined, plasticy.