Supersonic Game Engine Week 2!

Supersonic! That's just what I have temporarily titled my game engine. In other news: I broke everything - then fixed it, it's fine. Also, Calc-based Physics 1, Chemistry II and Calculus III, but that shouldn't be a problem. Also, in case you weren't aware, "45% Of Students Don't Learn Much In College" and that is quite a problem. Don't worry about me though, I'll be one of the students that learns a lot.

Anyways, as far as my game engine goes, I feel like it's been a good week. I haven't put in a ridiculous amount of hours into this project, but I did come up with a name, and I consider that to be a pretty significant amount of work. The name, by the way, if you didn't get it already, is Supersonic. One of the games I kind of wanted to model was the Sonic games of late, as they are platformers obviously. Another game I am looking at is Super Mario Galaxy (great game, haven't played the sequel yet but I hear it's even better).

Oh, don't worry, I did a lot more than just come up with a name. I also broke my python-ogre build by doing something.. not sure what. Well to cut the story short I reinstalled it and it's all good. And then Andy Miller (who apparently does most of the work on the OGRE Python wrapper) updated the SVN trunk with the latest version, 1.7.2 which probably supports Python 2.7, but I'll stick with 1.7.1 and Python 2.6 for now.

Anyways, on to the real details of my Supersonic 3D game engine project. Last week I vaguely talked about what my plans were for this project, now I will vaguely talk about what my plans are. For the most part, my number one goal for this semester is to get something that works and that I can show off. In order to do this, I am probably going to use a mix of different libraries. First and foremost, and most obviously will be OGRE, but along with that I'll be using OIS, and I would like to use CEGUI but that depends on whether or not I figure out how to make it work again (because I also broke it? or it just refuses to reinstall; I needed to change the install options so I was reinstalling it, and suddenly it absolutely refused to install claiming some version discrepancy of libtool, of which the script was written in 2.2.6b and supposedly I have 2.2.6... but in truth I actually have 2.2.6b so I don't know what's going on there). Anyways, I am planning on using some kind of physics engine to start with; a couple of possibilities are ODE and Bullet, both of which integrate well into OGRE which is nice.

In the near future I might be adding an AI library, and I'll have to do something about sound, but I haven't looked into possibilities for either of those. I certainly have the resources to test and therefore develop networking capabilities as well which I might also find some library to handle for me. As I get further into the development process, I would overall like the project to have it's own physics engine and AI library and such, but I wouldn't bet on that just yet. One thing that will definitely help in the long run is to make the project extensible by plugins, in case one of the libraries I use by default is discontinued.

Well as for what I'll be working on this week: I would like to make my own working InputManager (which relies on OIS for the moment), and I'd like to be able to create a scene with a controllable, animated character. For the most part I'll simply be using the resources that come with OGRE like the robot mesh and animation, and the terrain, etc. If anyone reading this would like to check out what I have, and help me make models and other art, that would be greatly appreciated. The art would mostly be used to demonstrate the capabilities, and for testing purposes, obviously. I can survive with the resources OGRE comes with by default though, so this isn't urgent.

Well, have a good week, and tune in next week for another exciting and epic tale of Supersonic Game Engine development!