First Post!

Simon Waite

July 2, 2011

Post date: Jul 02, 2011 1:37:10 PM

So where am I ?

Well ignoring the collections of little tech demos that have disappeared into the mists of time, not really that far…

A very crusty galaxy generator that was converted and heavily modified from Carl Burkes java applet (yes, it used to be on a Geocities site, so here’s another backup link to the same page).
A whole heap of spaceship models that may or may not be used in the game.
A developing C# game framework that sits on top of a renderer such as:

Unity 3D

Unity 3D is a fantastic game engine with lots of middleware built in. It sure beats building your own game engine + physics etc. It targets out of the box, for free, Mac and Windows (and a web-player for both), supports iOS, and Android, and even Consoles like the Wii, 360, and the PS3 - though I expect licenses for the consoles to be prohibitive!

XNA

This targets PC, Windows (7) Phone, and XBox 360.

Web

I’m not terribly interested in implementing this, but theoretically I should be able to make a ASP.NET target. This is opposed to the Web player that unity targets, of course :)

Terminal output

This is what I’m concentrating on right now – as playing around with models and shaders is too much of a distraction to share engine development with targeting unity.

What can the engine do as of now?

It has the following types of state:

SplashScreen: Everyone has to have one of those, right?
Menu: The most common UI element
Quit Game: You’ll have to quit at some point, right?
Star System Map: Displays a subset of the 100LY cube box, and allows you to select the system
File System Abstraction: So you can save games, cache things, etc without worrying what is located where

So, really not very much, though that’s a lot of code to write :-)

What am I developing right now?

I’m generating star systems. The crusty system generator works incredibly well but needs work to bring it up to date, and make it maintainable in some form.