[DEVELOPMENT: Galaxy vs Archetype]
It's a bit of a bad habit of mine. I'll work on a project for about a month or two, then I want to try something else. Actually, this only happens with my own personal projects, thankfully, and not those I do for work, but still, it's annoying.
In terms of the Archetype engine, my VBOs have kicked my butt and now my camera... which I had thought was rather stable... turns out to be far from. Having spent a solid week trying to get it to work right, I'd decided to put Archetype on hold for a little while and switch over to a new project that, in time, should easily be mergible with the Archetype project. Ok, so I'm legitimizing the switch by thinking to myself that I'm just working on another aspect, but whatever...
To anyone that reads this journal, you may have remembered one of my last posts saying how I was looking at playing some 4X games, but couldn't find one to satisfy me. To that end, I have started working on a project called "Ships"... weak title, I know... which will serve as part one of my 4X development. What Ships will be, is the "ship designer" portion of the 4X game. When the game starts, players will be presented with a ship designer and a starting sum of Production Points in which to assemble a fleet. The player will be allowed to design as many ships as they want, but their fleet would be limited to the number of production points available. Once the player as designed their ships and/or assembled their fleet, they then choose another player's fleet to compete against. At this point, the game will switch to the tactical portion of the 4X game, in which the two fleets do battle.
At the moment, I've been poking at the game for about a week. I have written a custom config loader and a language string loader (for internationalization of the application). I'm currently working out in my head how I want to handle error handling and logging. I'm pretty sure I'm going to use Python's logging module, just not sure exactly how I want to integrate it.
Oh... silly me... Ships is the name of the demo/game that is the first part of my 4X project... Galaxy is the name of the library I'm writing for the 4X game(s). Galaxy contains the currently developed config loader, language loader, and component manager currently developed. I'll be uploading the git repo of the game(s) to gitorious soon.
[BUT WHY?!:]
Like I said, I had a powerful hankering to play a 4X game, and there's so few for linux. Ok, to be fair, I wanted to play a 4X SPACE game, and there are so few of those. I looked into FreeOrion, but, sadly, the forums almost seem dead. The game runs fine, but seems empty of any actual life. More like a tech demo at the moment. Again, to be fair, this tends to be the case for a lot of unfunded open source games... and mine may even end up that way itself... but still. I tried playing some 4X games from Windows through wine, but, between incompatibilities with wine and a current dislike of microsoft at the moment, I couldn't play any of those.
And so... I try to write my own. Still hard because I really want to PLAY the game. Eventually, I hope that'll be the case.
[Personal Side:]
Development on any of my projects has also taken a bit of a hit recently because as of mid February my part time job as database developer turned into a full time job as a database developer. I'm very happy about that, but the new hours are tiring me out by the end of the day. Once I'm home I usually just want to veg on the couch and watch TV or play XBox (yes, I know that's a little hypocritical after my previous statement about not liking Microsoft, but sue me, I'm human). Even on the weekends, once I've finished the errands I need to do, I'm ready to just relax and let my mind drift.
I'm sure I'll adjust to the new schedule eventually and be able to get a little more personal project development in as time goes by, but still... things are a little slow at the moment.
Holy moley! You're still reading this? Ha! Thank you.
I hope to have more interesting news as time goes by. Catch everyone next time!
