What's Going On

So, last time around I talked about how I was working on some of these "micro addons" as I called them, and today, I've got one released, one "almost" done, and another that's being "announced" per-say. So, I'll get those out of the way first before I go on to some more interesting stuff.

So, earlier today, I launched the micro addon, Waypoint Overlay, which is an addon to your GUI that renders locations and distances of waypoint objects on your screen, similar to the good old Tribes 2 days, and because I'm not being silly and learning from my mistakes, here's some eye candy first, and tech stuff afterwards:


Essentially, most of my micro work has been part stuff I wanted to add with my spare time, and other part stuff one of my co-devs needed for a project and has contracted me to do, so moving along. This little addon piggy-backs the little source addons I implemented with the Radar GUI, namely the shape icons and internal team numbers (why is this not in the engine already?) and then with some crafty C++ code, renders the elements to the screen in a fashion you see above, and I should also mention, this system is extremely "clever", because each client stores colors for team on it's side, so a crafty developer could sneak in a few serverCmd/clientCmd relations with this addon and voila, a colorful waypoint entourage, so there you have it, no wait, there I made it, and you can have it for $6.99.

So, that little addon is out the door, and feel free to take a little peek at the other micro-addon pages there too, I'm filling them all in as we go along, but there's plenty of fun stuff for everyone there.

The next micro-addon that will be released is something I've been "trying" to fix for the past few weeks in the form of my BeamProjectile class, which will be a one-size-fits all projectile type to mimic the Tribes 2 ELF and Repair Pack projectiles. And with this release will complete the "Projectile Pack", which will contain all four of my micro-pack projectile types for obviously a discounted price from buying all 4 separately.

And I'm also "announcing" a ForceField addon, which will bring back the Tribes 2 Force Field object. Obviously, we killed .DIF (thank the lord), but that doesn't mean that the ForceField had to die, so I'm going to re-invent this classic object and "modernize" it to fit in with everything else, and obviously we'll have some nifty parameters and features on it for you guys to use.

So that's all I've got in terms of the "Micro-Addons" stuff, and by the way, thanks for the positive notes on it, I definitely agree that doing these micro packs are much more beneficial to everyone since you can simply pick-and-choose what you need and go with it.

Next up on my list of stuff to talk about is my own little "engine project" which I have named Galactic 2D. Obviously a 2D game engine, and I'm going this route because 2D engines, while challenging, are slightly easier to accomplish than their feature-heavy 3D counterparts. So, I started working on some of the core stuff and design on the engine over these past few weeks, and I've got some good stuff done, such as getting everything "started", getting ENet loaded into the engine, and a few other goodies, and then I started thinking about how I wanted to make my engine "different", IE: how can I make it something that people might actually want to use for their own projects, and I've got two "big" things.

First off, is that my engine runs on sort of a module oriented system, and a very clever one too. Essentially, the engine itself provides a "barebones" template for everything ANY game would need, such as threads, networking, data types, etc. And basically loads it all into one binary. What makes this engine very nifty however, is that you the developer, simply grabs a toolkit of the engine, and basing your entire game from that core "set", can craft individual objects and behaviors from the initial set and built it into a .DLL/.SO/.app and then load that into the engine. Effectively, this makes the engine very modular in style, and allows you to basically plug-in what you need for your project and run with it.

Secondly, is I wanted an engine that the end-user could very easily grab a hold of, and customize to their heart's content, so allowing mod support on G2D games was a "big" thing, so big, that I'm working on implementing a server -> client transmission feed, so that mod developers can take a G2D game, and develop full game conversions using their own custom content, and then not have to worry about sending everything via .zip with "installation" instructions, the engine will handle everything, and the nice part is that I'm going to be using LUA as the primary scripting language with it's powerful JIT module for lightning fast script compilation.

These two key features provide tons upon tons of customization opportunities to the end user, and the fact that the engine is extremely "light-weight" in nature, will allow individual developers to pick up a package that is ready for development to commence, without needing to worry about loads upon loads of unnecessary features to weed out and remove from their engine.

I'm hoping to be able to get most of the key stuff finished in about 2 - 3 months time, at which point I'll get a tech demo out so you guys can play around with what I've worked on, and I'll have something special for everyone who has been here over my wonderful 4+ year run here on GG.

So, that's out of the way. My last bit for today's blog is something I'm sure many of you guys out there have wanted to hear from me for quite some time now, and it's this: I'm opening up my programming knowledge with Torque for your use. So, if at any time, anyone here has programming work (Engine or TorqueScript related) you'd like me to tackle, simply shoot me an email with the details and I'll get back to you.

Over the next few weeks, keep an eye on my website (http://www.phantomdev.net) for some deals on my existing Torque 3D packs. I'm likely going to update the PGD Super Bundle special first later on this week, but I'll save that info for my website.

Until next Time!