Hi everyone,

I've just released a first demonstration version of my 2D game engine and game creation toolset Duality. Both engine and toolset are written in C# and based on .Net 4.0 and OpenTK. Long story short: There is a demo video on youtube showing what you can do with the current toolset version, and how to do it and I'm collecting feedback.

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If you want to test it yourself, you will need .Net 4.0 and Visual C# Express 2010 (or Visual Studio 2010). Here's the download. If you want more information on development or internals of Duality, you might want to check out my blog.

Any feedback is appreciated - comments, bug reports, feature requests, anything will help me improve future versions.

Here's another videoblog concerning Duality, covering current development regarding Sprite Animation, Text Rendering and Postprocessing.[media][/media]

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[font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"]This time it comes with a new Duality demo release, including a simple Asteroids game. You can download it here.[/font]

Well, that's actually just a demo release - although it slowly goes near "actually usable", Duality is still in development!

That said, there is no documentation yet. The Asteroids demo makes a simple usage example but that's about it. Right now I want to focus on developing engine and editor, but whoever wants to give it a go and set up a small project in Duality on his own - I'll support you where I can! If you have questions, simply ask, if you need a specific example on how to do X or Y, it might help to have a look a Duality's source code. Especially for writing your own Renderers, this will surely prove helpful.

I'm currently not sure what task to approach next, but I've been thinking about built-in 2D physics support (or at least collision detection), probably by using some open source library. Another possibility would be an ingame GUI system. Or I could simply develop some default Components for typical 2D game stuff like Tilemaps. The engine's and editor's basics are mostly done so far, but however, the most important task is to assure stability and usability of both. Since I'm my only tester, there might be a lot of ground uncovered - the usual problem when testing your own project.

This is already a huge project for only one person and platform independence isn't something small to do, especially concerning testing, documentation and support. While running Duality on Linux and / or Mac is an achievable goal in theory, I'm not going to approach it. There is so much else still to do and I want to focus on actual functionality, documentation and testing right now.

Oh and yes, that's OpenGL, powered by OpenTK which provides DotNet bindings and some pretty neat utility code.

[font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif][size=2][font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"]Videoblog #4:[/font]
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[/font][font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif][size=2]API Documentation and editor-integrated help system, anyone? ;) It was about time. The documentation might not be the best one ever written but it is a first iteration. You can try the new help system yourself in the current Release and view the API reference online, if you wish. As always, thoughts and opinions are welcome [/font]

Impressive work! Has a very clean and professional feel to it.
Do you want to release Duality as freeware/open source or do you hope to make some money with it?

Impressive work! Has a very clean and professional feel to it.
Do you want to release Duality as freeware/open source or do you hope to make some money with it?

Duality is OpenSource! Although I might choose to change the license later on, I have no plans of making it a commercial project.

The most obvious reason is that there are already a lot of commercial engines around, most of them beating Duality in terms of official support and feature range. Being a hobbyist on my own and not leading a whole professional team, I can't compete with their momentum and manpower in any way. Besides that, developing Duality is fun, I'm gaining a lot of experience and maybe someday seeing some people use what I've created is - in its own way - a great payment by itsself.