Nobody said I had class.
So I have one final exam to go and then I'm free for the non-denominational winter holiday break.I got second place in the graphics class for my ray-tracer, and would probably have gotten higher if I had bothered making my demo scene nicer.
Novarunner
I'm planning on actually getting Novarunner properly built so I can compile it again, and then spending a lot of time making a decent demo. Expect one very early in the new year.Right now, it's broken because a lot of functions are missing (initialization, game main loop, etc). But once I get a chance to stub those out and connect them back together again, the game should start running properly and I'll be on my way to producing a proper game as opposed to the 1000+ line, single-file monster I was using to prototype things.
One of the things I'm really glad about is the immediate-mode GUI; it's based almost entirely on variable watchers so you don't have to explicitly write any HUD code in your game, just tell the HUD to "watch" a variable and it will figure out the best display method for it. This is probably better than Glow, in which I was setting flags all over to control the HUD code from the game code.
Propane Injector
I want to do a "proper" Propane Injector 1.0 release in the new year, so I've planned to release v1.0 near the end of January. Check out my roadmap here -- it'll become a much more fully featured game API as opposed to a bunch of semi-useful code thrown together because it looks like it's useful.It'll have a bunch of examples (subdivision, mega demo, materials and shaders, and possibly an example game or two) and much better documentation on using the code under Windows and OS X. Right now I'm working on the materials demo, because I don't think the dot3 bump mapping code in Propane::Material::DOT3BumpMapTexture is working 100%.
Mono.Xna
I joined up with the Mono.Xna project under Rob Loach, and have already submitted a few patches here and there to help out with the stubbing process. Please follow our Todo page to see how far our class stubbing has proceeded, and how close we are to properly implementing the "Simple Example" from the XNA framework.I'm learning a lot of C# during this project, and also quite a bit of knowledge about how XNA works to develop games with, which is almost definitely going into PI later on. Plus, I get more games for the Mac. Can't lose.
Stick Soldiers 3
Yes, it's still going on. We're making good advancements: Andrew has committed a new version of the level editor, and Cow is almost done with XML classes.I'm going to be working on getting players running around, jumping, and shooting each other. The fun shit.
Thanks for reading this (unbelievably long, screenshot devoid) entry. I promise the next one will carry much more interesting news for YOU.
