So I did not write this update on Saturday. What happened?

The InnoGames Game Jam happened. I joined a group of artists and spent Saturday morning to Sunday noon coding nonstop. 3.3KLOC later we had a simple platformer.

It only came together in the last hours and still lacked the enemies and collectibles. Why? Because I still haven't really looked into premade engines, instead resorting to coding everything myself. I either need a personal codebase that I can reuse or get into some engine.

But on the bright side I finally got to write a component based entity system, something I had wanted to do for quite a while. Worked out okay, but I'm wondering if something like Haskell's Typeclasses might be better. With C++14 and Concepts something similar may be possible, but I'm not sure what to think about template-based entities... Either way gamejams are a great place to do these weird experiments.

So I got to use some C++11, especially Lambdas and std::function for callbacks and unique_ptr and shared_ptr - although I probably overused the latter to "fix" my order-of-destruction problems. And I already made extensive use of another C++11 feature last week: Variadic templates.

How so? I wrote a small library for function call serialization/deserialization, which I dubbed SimpleRPC. It doesn't care about endianness because it's meant for local inter-process communication.

Why would I need that? Because the GPL is impractical. I see its point and kind of support it - in a perfect world it would be the ideal license. But we don't live in a perfect world and some functionality is only available in proprietary, GPL-incompatible libraries. In order to be able to use those inter-process communication is necessary. It's still against the spirit of the GPL I suppose... Oh well. For the most part I was just interested in coding the library, I don't know if I'll actually use it.

So what's next? I still have some Uni work to finish this week, and next week I'll go to A MAZE in Berlin. If I have time for anything else I'll probably continue my work on OpenJK cleanup.

So long,

Willi

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