Saturday, January 22, 2011

Status Report

Thought still far from completion, rev-0.7 keeps growing. This is basically the current status, where you can see that many important subsystems are running, and that some developer tools have been added or improved from older versions:
-Multi-platform support:Being able to compile your projects both for wii and windows allows you to use a lot of powerful tools to debug your code and inspect your game's internals. This makes a faster, more comfortable and more reliable development process.
-Log system:A good log system is always a good friend.
-Improved time system:Allows for precise and safe timing, which will help creating better physics, profiling and more.
-Memory:Memory management is being redisgned to help debugging pointer bugs and avoid some crashes like trying to delete a block more than once, warning you when that happens so you can track the problem and fix it.
-Script system: lua based script system that will allow faster and more flexible development for your games.
-Model loading: RMD models can now be loaded into the engine and rendered correctly. RMD format is fast to load and optimized for Revolution Engine.
-Camera: Cameras are working on this version also. This is a basic featured that has been present in all versions of the engine but one that will see many improvements in the near future.

And that's most of it right now, as always you can checkout the SVN for a more precise look into the engine.

Enjoy!

Monday, January 10, 2011

Going Multi-platform

If you checkout the SVN repository for version 0.7 you can see the latest changes talk about multi-platform. This is an idea I've been thinking about for long.
Should Revolution Engine become a multi-platform engine?
Initially, Revolution Engine was concieved to show that Wii had more graphical power than showed in it's first games. Given Wii is not a complex platform, developing an Engine froms scratch might not be as hard as for more advanced platforms. Also I wanted to take advantage of Wii controllers, unavailable in other platforms. And at last, I wanted to develop on a console, that I had never done, and wii homebrew was starting off.
But now there is the PS3, completely hacked, and so tempting...and I don't have one.

Well, I don't have a PS3 so I can't port REV to PS3, but still I can prepare the software to be easier to port. And the best way to do this is to port it for another, moreless generic, platform. So I'm writting the Engine itself platform independent, except for some pieces of code, isolated in well defined parts of the engine (the drivers) so if ever me (or someone else) wants to port it, it will be easy.

But there are other advantages. At the same time I'm writting a Windows openGL driver for the engine, so everything compiling on your wii, you can compile it for windows, where you can debug your code easily with visual studio or whatever. I really like this, because I don't have any USB/SD Gekko, so I've never been able to debug code on my Wii, and I really missed it.