AIGE/PWLib Casemaker Developer
Gender: Male
Location: Brazil
Rank: Ace Attorney
Joined: Sun Mar 09, 2008 3:38 am
Posts: 2731
The hardest part of making a casemaker isn't making the casemaker itself, but make the background engine itself. Once you get the core working, making the casemaker turns into something trivial to make (It work me 5+ tries and ~10 years to get AIGE, PWLib's core, to what it is today).
And considering the nature of how a casemaker works, it is mandatory that the flow is controlled by at least a simple scripting system. Every casemaker uses that principle (thus keeping it simpler to the user, instead of forcing him to use a lower level language and end up hitting the intestines of the underlying engine itself).
In PWLib for example, the approach taken is totally different from other solutions. First, the underlying engine is AIGE (made in pure c++). It exposes a programming language named AHLSL. PWLib is entirely written on AHLSL, thus leaving the complex work to the base engine (and hiding a lot of the render system complex stuff out of the way). So the programmer just uses PWLib as a library while making their code in AHLSL.
Other approaches took the "pw engine" as the core, thus leaving a simpler scripting system.
AHLSL being a more complete language adds to the difficulty, but it is needed because AIGE is not limited to PW development. Unless you target to make something else out of it, then a simpler scripting solution is fine (probably just a single flow system with at most an if/jump system and minimal flags/vars that's easy to make).
Also gifs are a pain, bad solution. I recommend sheets, way better to managed, thus harder to work with (considering the gif loaded directly).
I could help you with something considering I worked on AIGE in C++.