Thursday, February 5, 2009

Future Plans

First thing I'm going to do is take a short break for a few days; work on this engine has been fairly intensive for the past two months and I feel that I need to step back a little. It's a good time to do so as 1.4 has reached a level of stability that I feel reasonably happy with (only one crash bug left in general use so far, and that's rare enough).

Right now I consider it about 95% "feature complete" so far as porting the renderer to Direct3D is concerned (which was the initial objective). There's still some minor things I need to fix and finish, but the only major new thing that will go into the render is a particle system. The default for that will remain as "classic particles", but I think some form of "enhanced particles" is pretty much essential in any modern port. Nothing OTT, just smoke and blood sprites, stuff like that. Existing functionality may be tweaked and/or tuned, of course (especially in cases where something might turn out to be broken).

The engine has evolved quite a bit beyond just a straight port; some of it being essential bugfixes, some being highly desirable features (not necessarily always render-related) that every engine should have, and some being just me going off and doing something that seemed cool.

I think that the next major inclusion will be game changing. This is a straightforward thing to add, shouldn't take much longer than a couple of days (besides, I've already written the code 3 times in the past). I also want to add more menus for interacting with content - maps and demos specifically, although a screenshot viewer sounds like it might be a nice idea.

I'm planning for a pick up of this early next week, but knowing me it could end up being a day or two on either side of that.

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