What's in the pipes, what's next, what to expect..

It would be great, in general, to know what you're working on, what to expect next, and what do you think the next version or patch of ORX will bring and when it may be there :).

kinda like a blog or a WiP of what you're doing once a week or when it's relevant to gives some news about it :).

might be interesting for others too to write here what they really would like next to see or be developed eventually.

Comments

  • edited November 2008
    You're totally right! At least, on the principle. ;)

    Well, at first I had the blog/news section of this site where I thought I would write this kind of information.

    But so far, everytime I tried to communicate on some game-dev related forums, I had few or even no answer at all, so I spent less and less time communicating and gave less and less information, investing my time in dev instead.

    It's probably not the best approach ever, but as I had nearly no feedback at all from other people, I thought no one had interests in it, so I just continued to develop according to my needs (except for a couple of changes I made according to feedback M1SF17 gave me).

    So right now, to sum it up, I'm currently working on a generic interaction layer (to allow easy control scheme update, even on-the-fly). Next in the pipe will be a Mac OS X/iPhone version of the engine/plugins. As soon as I gain access to an iMac. :unsure:

    Apple doesn't really want to open mac dev to PC owners, unfortunately... :S

    After all this, the big milestones will be scripting integration, easy serialization (package module), post-processing (visual FXs), PSP and DS versions.

    But it's kind of blurry as I'll adapt this to my current needs, being orx's main customer so far! :laugh:

    Of course, any feedback/comment/feature request is *very* welcomed!
  • edited November 2008
    Cool, thx for the updates !!!
    I personnally thinks it's enought to know what is going on and what to expect next in general.

    About the Mac version, can't you found one of your friend close by (don't tell me nobody's moving to Mac in Montreal, even me I went to the dark side :)... or i guess buying a small mac mini even a used or older one for cheap to take care of your needs ?

    I know that I could let you drive mine throught the net but it's probably not the easiest way to go :P.

    What about Network feats by the way?
    Not that I would need it right now but just to ask the question, does it fit into any of your schedules or did I missed it from your previous post? Can you call an already done library (if yes, wich one) or do you want to take care of that on your owne ?

    have fun!
  • edited November 2008
    With pleasure! =)

    About the mac version, I know only one person with a mac here, and he didn't propose to help me have access to it knowing my needs, so I don't want to impose myself! :)

    I'm considering investing in a mac, but as silly as it may sounds, I need to find money and room for it here! ^^ If I develop games for iPhone on a regular basis anyway, it's an investment I'll have to do. =)

    Using yours over the net might help at first, you know! :P

    About network, it's on the todo list, but it's not something I know when I'll work on. I'll be using existing librairies, open source if possible, of course. I only write piece of codes if there are no suitable alternatives, otherwise it's a complete waste of time. :)

    I already had some look at librairies such as HawkNL and others. I might begin with a low level interface based on SFML though. I'll see when it'll be something I'm working on, but it's not a high priority task for now. ;)
  • edited December 2008
    Hey there!

    Here's a quick update for what happened last week.

    First, I bought a macbook. I began porting orx on it. It's going pretty fine so far, but I already talked about it in the Mac OS X port topic.

    Secondly, I took a day off to implement a real, nice and slick text support. Now texts can be used like objects. Actually, to be more precise, an object can now use, for a visual, texts!!!

    You don't have to write code for this, just to fiddle around with your config file and voila! So basically you can apply FX to texts, physics, etc... You can have a look at this here if you want to see it live!

    Enjoy!
  • edited February 2009
    Ok, here's a small update:

    - Mac OS X port is almost over (100% working on 10.5 and still have some SFML issues for sound on 10.4). Things look fine on both intel x86 and powerPC so far!

    - Added support for convex free-form mesh as physics body shapes

    - Added generix input module + updated all the tutorials. This allows easy and fast mapping of mouse, keyboard and joystick to actions. It also allows easy on-the-fly remapping of controls, with user interaction or not and button/key names easy display. Several sets can be defined to allow easy management (one set for menu, one for ingame, for example).

    I plan on releasing orx v.1.0 based on this and I will add new features at a slower pace, focusing my free time on personal projects based on orx.

    Any person wanting to help to add new features or finish some that are on hold (package and scripting support, for example) are welcome to contact me at: iarwain -at- this-site.org

    Anyone can contribute, not only programmers! The web site needs to be improved in many ways, for example. Having a wiki might help a lot newcomers, having translations of tutorials would be great, ... :)

    In the same order of idea, telling your friends about this engine or writing on some forums about your experience using it will help a lot! Orx really needs a community! :)

    Thanks to all in advance!

    - iarwain
  • edited March 2009
    Hey orx is looking great! I've been playing around with it. I've written the beginning of a game with physics in which you play a pentagon.

    Some ideas I've had for additions:
    - automatic recognition of the convex hull of a shape from the bitmap - I have an idea how to implement this, and if you think it's a good idea I'll try it out. Basically anything with alpha value of 1 should be in the hull. I also hope to do something similar for platforms.
    - music - it would be great to have mod music support. Milky tracker is a cross platform open source tracker so I've had a look to see if we can take the player code from there. As far as I can see there's no library specifically for this, but it may still not be too much work.
    - scripting - I know this is still in very early stages. I've been looking at llvm a lot, which seems like an exciting project. The great thing is that it does just in time compilation to machine code, which should make it fast. I know the language currently used is lua, which can be compiled using llvm - see http://code.google.com/p/llvm-lua/.

    Take care, and thanks for all the hard work on orx!
  • edited March 2009
    Hi daved, nice to hear from you!

    I'm glad you're enjoying orx for now and thank you for your comments
    Some ideas I've had for additions:
    - automatic recognition of the convex hull of a shape from the bitmap - I have an idea how to implement this, and if you think it's a good idea I'll try it out. Basically anything with alpha value of 1 should be in the hull. I also hope to do something similar for platforms.
    That would be a nice thing to do! Right now orx don't give direct access to the pixel array of texture, but I can add this feature in the display plugin.
    - music - it would be great to have mod music support. Milky tracker is a cross platform open source tracker so I've had a look to see if we can take the player code from there. As far as I can see there's no library specifically for this, but it may still not be too much work.
    Yes, having mod support would be neat. Right now orx soundsystem plugin (which is based on SFML) allows you to read fasttracker 2 .xl format. Seems like it's the only mod format supported.
    I presume a soundsystem plugin directly based an OpenAL + milkmod, for example, could be done and loaded instead of the SFML one for those who need mod support. If you feel like writing this, I'll give you support, but I'm afraid that I don't have the time to write it myself right now.
    - scripting - I know this is still in very early stages. I've been looking at llvm a lot, which seems like an exciting project. The great thing is that it does just in time compilation to machine code, which should make it fast. I know the language currently used is lua, which can be compiled using llvm - see http://code.google.com/p/llvm-lua/.
    Yes, scripting was in a good way for orx, but the guy who coded it at the first place isn't there anymore. I wanted to have some kind of generic scripting support so that you could use any scripting plugin (lua, python or any other) without having to run a script to create binding from C to the scripting language.
    I'll have a look at llvm, but anyway scripting will be supported through the plugin system so as to keep orx core independent from other libraries.

    If you have any other idea or suggestion, I'll be happy to hear them! :)

    One question: which version of orx are you currently using? The latest svn one?
    And another one: do you know how I could package orx as a framework for MacOS X? This will be cleaner for this OS than the .dylib mess I have right now. I'd like to do it before releasing the 1.0 version and it's my only real big issue preventing me from releasing.

    Thanks again for your comments! :)

    By the way, tell me when we can see your game in action! I'd love to see how orx is used by other than myself, and I can of course create a section on the site for displaying projects based on orx! ;)
  • edited May 2009
    congrats for the new version with Shadders and Embeded features.
    I sent back the link of the site to several friends so they spread the news and take a look to all those new features, hopping some of them will give you feedback or help.

    so, what might be next now that those two features are in?
  • edited May 2009
    Thanks!

    As for now, next steps are:
    - update the xcode project to add the embedded targets for MacOS X
    - write some documentation so as to make an official v1.0 release (I've been delaying this doc for too long now...)

    Post v1.0:
    - Work on the iPhone version (and possibly the PSP one if I get some help, I don't have time to do all this by myself)
    - Integrate the GUI plugin on which MrGreen is working
    - Maintain everything but no new big features planned: I've dropped the network and scripting support as I prefer to focus on 2 game prototypes than on the engine itself till I get requests from users.

    I'm looking forward to any feedback as usual! :)
  • edited May 2009
    krousty_bat wrote:
    I sent back the link of the site to several friends so they spread the news and take a look to all those new features, hopping some of them will give you feedback or help.

    Thanks a lot for the comm! Hope you told them to use the svn version and not the latest release from the download section, the 0.9.1 which is 6 months old. ;)
  • edited November 2009
    What's up guys?

    Just saying hello, hopefully i'll spend more time on my projects, so i'll have to come and bug you two guys!

    Just to precise, this is the islander :)
  • edited November 2009
    I hope you do, some ideas you have are simple and cool... I hope Romain and me will suceed in finishing our little projects too. :)
  • edited November 2009
    Hey, nice to see you here, Iggy! =)

    I'm sure Nico and I will soon be back on track on our project too, lately I've been able to have more free time to code again.

    I have family here for 2 weeks, but after that I'll mainly focus on orx and side projects. =)
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