Monday, February 15, 2010

No news is good news?

Nope, not in this case.

So in my last week of holidays I decided to add RTS controls to the game. But when I went to look at the existing codebase to add the new systems, I found a horrible "complexity bomb" waiting to go off (marginal improvements took exponenially more time to implement due to a design and construction of systems that dont scale up well). Which, if memory serves is why I stopped working on this a while back and started studying code design and construction properly.

With my new found knowledge, I decided that I could fix it, and so I started to with gusto, but as the days rolled on, I decided it might be better to start from scratch with a new clean engine designed to handle the complexity I want to throw at the game (no offence to myself, but its a terribly designed and constructed game engine for the amount of complexity I've added in. Not bad for a first attempt at programming though and a very good learning experience :P ).

So I started investigating Panda3D and BlenderGame (designed and constructed by teams of people who knew what they were doing), and thats when I ran out of holidays.

Right now I'm in the middle of a transition from happily employed in NZ to unemployed (hopefully short term) in the UK (hopefully long term). This happened right at the end of my holidays which is why there hasnt been an update since my last until now (haha). The transition of course doesnt leave a lot of time for other things, and so work on Plague is on hold, indefinitely. I might next get a chance to look at it in June. But even thats massively unlikely.

In the meantime, Plague is of course openSource, so if anyone wants to go and gut the beast and recode a new shiny engine, or better yet take the parts you like and put into an existing shiny engine, feel free. I've already got a sourceforge etc setup, so if anyone wants access, shout out. I'd just like to be able to contribute again in the future, as time permits.

5 comments:

Brian Jeffears said...

Yep, life often intervenes as they say. Still, no train to catch---just keep at it as you can, when you can, even if it'll be awhile. Some of the established Roguelike entities out there won't be seeing another release until somewhere in another year or so---thus you can take it at your pace and all the best for it.

Best of luck getting the employment situated, as it is tough times the world over nowadays.

Unknown said...

Hi Bededict

Great looking game, enjoyed playing through it. I'll be reading through the code for some ideas for a few things I'm trying out myself, especially the map generation section.

Just a quick bug fix for when you have time. Occurs when a survivor dies at edge of screen and the randomly selected position to drop item is an invalid grid location.

http://codepad.org/tWuvNjTB

Not extensivly tested, but should be ok!

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Benedict Carter said...

hi jeremy,

thanks, glad you enjoyed it. would you like to leave a link to what you are working on, I'd be keen to see it?

cheers for the bug fix. i'd kinda love to keep working on plague, if i do I'll obviously fix that issue.

cheers, ben.

Nicole said...

While you're dealing with some serious technical stuff.