engine comments

gordallott on 2008/09/10 10:32 of Cine-Science Logic

At this point on wednesday i think i have made the engine we have feature complete so its worth talking about a bit;

It started off as being a generic world engine based on the open dynamics engine (using a 2d plane to clamp all the objects to 2d) and the early builds had nice ODE simulated boxes that you could push over as a stick man type person, the further we got into development the less important the physical dynamics were though, at this point in time the only thing thats physically simulated is our actor object, everything else just uses ODE to perform collision detection (ODE is smashingly good at that!)

the graphics engine is a custom built one that basically uses sprites to draw the most basic of things, quad polygons. i aimed the engine to be able to be playable on pretty much all machines, the most advanced thing it uses is GLSL fragment shaders but those are auto-deactivated for machines that can't handle it.

the actual engine uses three distinct object types, actors, props and geometries, actors 'do stuff', props are dumb objects that are physically simulated and geometries mearly provide collision detection most of the time. the only real problem we had was making it able to pass certain geometries (platforms when climbing up a rope) but that was solved pretty easly in the end, the whole thing has been really easy to code. its great! woo python.

oh and of course heres an obligitory screenshot, this ones from a way early alpha!

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Comments

richard on 2008/09/10 11:39:

Looking forward to this one - in particular the way you've used Inkscape to design levels. That's fascinating.

Tee on 2008/09/10 11:48:

I'm curious about that too.