Just Another...

...Web Site.

This is the game I am working on. It also serves as a prototype and a testing ground as I am writing my game engine simultaneously.

I have the renderer working using OpenGL. Only using sprites and orthographic projection at the moment but it would be simple to switch to 3D.

I tried to use ODE for physics but it fought me at every step. The dynamics, rigid body as ODE calls them, kept "exploding" and giving internal errors. The collision detection also didn't work for some stupid reason. I gave up and just wrote my own which is probably for the best as my control over dynamic objects is much better. I can let my simulator handle movements intertwined with commands to manually place or move objects, which is something ODE doen't like because it messes up the joints it uses. I'm still in the process of writing the collision detection. It's complicated and I'm taking it slow so I can digest all the math thats involved and maybe learn something instead of just "black box"-ing it.

None of the systems are advanced but they work. Once everything is working together I'll add to each system as needed. I haven't even started AI yet but that requires the other systems to be in place first. If it works out as planned I think the AI will be fun to work on although I have no experience with AI or any of the buzzwords associated with it (neural nets, genetic algorithms, etc.).

The screen shot is supremely unimpressive as it is programmer art and textures from Gimp but as I stated above it's the systems behind the game that are important at this point.