Hello blog readers,

I'm being productive again. I still play games (recently started Mini Ninjas again - I lost my savegames earlier) and stuff but I'm also coding some more.

What am I coding? My ultimate goal is recoding Jedi Academy. By now it seems pretty unlikely Raven/Activision are ever going to release all the sourcecode and even if they did I'd try a rewrite, since I prefer a C++/Lua combination over C.

Lua? What's my goal? Having started my coding career as a mapper/modder I keep modders in mind. I want the game to be highly extendible. At the moment Jedi Academy MP mods can modify a dll, and since only one dll is loaded only one such mod can be active at any moment. With Lua many mods could be active simultaneously.

Besides making it more moddable I'd also like to improve the engine, adding a physics engine (possibly DMM2 once it's released for free) and stuff like pixel shaders and all that next gen stuff, but those are long-term goals and first I'd like to have aa game capable of using (most of) Jedi Academy's assets with a similar gameplay. (Luckily the mp gameplay parts of the code are released.)

I've started working on that recode. It's a massive project and I'm not going to code the whole thing at once. Instead I'll write many increasingly complex applications, keeping the same framework and extending it.

Since I also want to look into OpenCL I'll start with a 2-dimensional gravity simulation, i.e. having a couple of (or many) planets with gravity. I'm going to implement it both in C++ and in OpenCL so I can measure the difference - so while I'm at it I might want to code a profiler, too.

For that simulation I need some more features though. This is what I've got so far:

• Keyboard input (Windows) / Event-System
• PhysFS-based filesystem that can handle mods
• Lua support
• CVars (Console Variables)
• Logging - there aren't many kinds of loggers so far, but I'll add more later.

I'll need some more for the simulation:

• Commands, i.e. the actions that happen when a key is pressed (or its name is entered in the console)
• a window (will use SFML)
• OpenCL integration of some kind
• (console)
• (profiler)

Now that I've listed them - it's not that much actually! I probably forgot something, but still... May have this done by the end of this week? Probably not...

In other news, I've managed to fill my 1.25TB of HDD space, only have about 50GB free space in total left. Instead of doing some cleanup I bought an additional 2TB and a pc case because the self-built case I currently use has no space for additional hard disks, or additional anything really. Will this be my comeback as a casemodder? Time will tell...

And there's another sale at Steam. I just bought Sam & Max: Season 3, now I only need Season 2 since I'd like to play them in the right order.

So long,

Willi

Comments

Write a comment