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Woah, time for some funky-mama-jama news. I was taking a car-ride, which was the most fun ever. While in there, I started thinking about how I have really stopped programming as of late, though I have been kinda wanting to again. Mostly drawing, as you see below. Well then I started thinking about Xion, and how some of that code was really some fine code. Then I got to wondering...
See, I knew I could never finish Xion because, well, RTSs are a lot of work, especially without the help (if you remember, my inability to find good work is what killed the project). Besides, I was having trouble getting excited about the RTS... so then I thought, hmm, I wonder if I flipped that camera forward... how Xion would pass an FPS engine? Well, guess what? It was somewhat passable. So then I started tweaking the code, and now... well, it isn't all bad. I still want to get this thing to render 13k polygons of terrain with absolutely no hit to my fps, but that will be difficult. I added an end to the viewing plane (masked by fog, of course), but it isnt very close, so don't sweat it.
Here are the things I need to do:
- Make the terrain engine run smooth as honey. I mean, molasses. Shit.
- Redesign the UI system to allow multiple concurrently open UIs, giving me many more possibilities (as in, like, a windows system) and freedom
- Rewrite ExEs, the script powering the particle system, to make good use of a really good expression evaluator I wrote in my recent days, seeing as ExEs is pretty much just an expression evaluator, and the one in place just blows
- Replace the network engine with a version that spawned from it and was developed in another project of mine. I still have problems to fix, but the new version is, like, a hundred times better (manually builds packets, but so much cleaner it isn't even funny)
- Go from there
So I have much ahead of me, but that is all good, since I am excited once again. I originally thought about making Zombies! (an old mod of mine) on the engine, but later decided maybe not, so I am just going to concentrate on making the engine, and then worry about the actual game.
I don't know if the engine will remain open source or not. It isn't exactly like that many people know about it as it is. I won't release any new source until I know for sure :).
Laters.
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