IndieZen Dev Blog, Nov 2007

For the past few weeks I've been spread out, doing so many things at once. It's been quite hectic but overall I'm really having a whole lot of fun.

IMGDC 2.0

I'm still preparing for IMGDC 2.0... it's nearly four months away and I still have tons to do.

My booth is on order but I need to have two of the panels custom printed.

I'm not quite ready to order the computer I'm bringing with me... you know, those little things called money and budgets gets in the way sometimes. :-D I'm boot strapping this and funding it with my day job so I have to wait for another couple of paychecks, but I should have it ordered before Christmas.

I have the basic outline finished for my presentation and tons of the content already thought through. I'm still working on the title but it will be something like The Pragmatic Indie Game Developer. The presentation is about exploring Indie game development with a more philosophical approach.

"You know what you know, but make sure you realize that there is a lot that you do not know."

That is the first rule in learning and I exercise that rule every day of my life. As a result, I learn something new every day.

I am hoping that my presentation will not only teach something, but open up a few minds and viewpoints.

Pragmatic maxim by Charles Sanders Peirce

Quote:

---

Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry. Although it is better to be methodical in our investigations, and to consider the economics of research, yet there is no positive sin against logic in 'trying' any theory which may come into our heads, so long as it is adopted in such a sense as to permit the investigation to go on unimpeded and undiscouraged. On the other hand, to set up a philosophy which barricades the road of further advance toward the truth is the one unpardonable offence in reasoning, as it is also the one to which metaphysicians have in all ages shown themselves the most addicted.

---

IndieZen Game Studio

My most important project that is taking up most of my time is the IndieZen Game Studio. I have one more week to finish my second milestone and I have everything finished for this milestone except for a few details on the 3d modeler.

I've also started flushing out the details and design for the landscape editor, world editor and the shader editor. I don't expect to have these finished in time for IMGDC, but maybe I will have enough completed to give a tech preview of them.

Game Development Project Hosting for Indies

As part of the IndieZen philosophy in helping Indie Game Developers, we want to make sure everything required for game development is available for cheap or free. To that end I've been working diligently on creating the hosting services for hosting game development projects.

The BETA of the hosting service is free for qualifying projects. If you have a game development project that you would like to have hosted, check out this post for more information.

I am working on the software and servers to help facilitate setting up forums, Subversion, Trac Wiki and a web sites for Indie Game Development Projects.

I'm hoping to make it something like SourceForge, except there's no open source requirements. It's free for the first year (or at least until Feb 2009) while we test it out.

Mind you, it is still under construction, but for the basics I'm using off the shelf software so it's workable as it stands right now.

More IndieZen coding and planning

A few months ago when I started working on IndieZen, although I have mostly been concentrating on a Game Development IDE I also started creating a Game Engine Framework.

I really wanted to have a great game engine framework with plugins and OpenGL support. For the past few years it has been a bit annoying that the only way I can make certain kinds of enhancements to TGE was through major modifications to the source code. Plugins, if done correctly, would solve this problem. I was an early adopter of TGEA for those basic reasons. But... we all know how that ended up. TGEA = TGE + some enhancements but the basic architecture and design remained the same. No plugins and no OpenGL. Oh well, such is life.

After getting over the initial disappointment of not getting a what I wanted out of TGEA, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard about Torque 2.

I was so excited that I even stopped developing my own game engine framework.

Well, "paused" might be a better word than "stopped."

After seeing Stephen Zepp's post, I was ecstatic.... slowly over the past month the excitement has worn off, but I think that's a good thing for me.

I've resumed coding the IndieZen Game Engine Framework, I've checked a lot of it into SVN and I've even open sourced what I have completed with the ZLib license.

This past week I finished the first iteration for the plugin framework, and network framework.

The plugin framework provides the basics for extension points and extensions as defined by the Eclipse Equinox project, except it's implemented in C++.

I'm almost finished with the BasicNetworking plugin. This plugin implements the Network Service extension point and provides a basic two-threaded (one read, one write thread) TCP / UDP networking extension. This combined with the BasicProtocol plugin that I'll be finishing next week should provide enough basic networking to get started. Eventually I'll create some specialized plugins for handling enhanced networking for Linux to include epoll support and other protocol plugins to provide support for reliable UDP, reliable multicast UDP, etc.

I also have quite a bit of the Threading library complete (for multi-threading classes like threads, mutexes, condition variables, etc). This library is based on some research done by my mentor, John Givler, Ph. D. and is shaping up to be an excellent library even if you're not making a game engine.

After I finish Milestone 2 for the IndieZen Game Studio I will resume moving more of it into the Game Engine Framework, which should provide the basics for an OpenGL Rendering Plugin...

Even if that sounds like a lot completed, it's still not anywhere near being finished enough for anyone to consider using it in a game. That won't happen until sometime 2009, and if Torque 2 is finished on time then that will probably be a better choice for you.

But, I'm going to continue developing this framework, just in case something happens with Torque 2... you know that old saying about having all of your eggs in one basket? It's got something to do with that. ;-)

If you're interested in creating a game engine framework, game engines or general game development technology, drop me an e-mail (see my profile for the address).

Please note, though: this is hardcore object oriented design and development in C++ and it's not for the beginner or the feint of heart. :-D

Happy Holidays!