Gear2D Game Engine

2012-03-01 - Too much news

Code is becoming more and more stable, with useful features already in place. Soon I hope to have an hardware-accelerated blitter, using OpenGL. A friend of mine is helping me (the one who is developing the path-finder component :).

I've been creating a manual for the game engine and I hope to have it completed very shortly - I am stil settling down on how the engine should be installed - currently I've succefully created an instalator program (thanks to CPack and NSIS) for Windows. Linux and Mac should handle themselves pretty well without an instaler. That being said, I feel we are very near of a round, official release.

gear2d.com

We got ourselves a new, shiny gear2d.com domain. This will come in handy if we ever decide to reseat our website (currently it is hosted at sourceforge).

Foundations of Digital Games - 2012

Our paper, presenting Gear2D and reports on the Path finder component and the Lua Proxy component, just got accepted at FDG-2012.

It will happen at Raleigh, North Carolina, starting at 29th May 2012. I sincerely hope to make new friends there for Gear2D :D

Thats it for today. See you folks.

Leonardo.

2012-01-09 - Bye bye Boost

I am happy to announce that Gear2D just got rid of boost, and now we virtually depend only on SDL (and its addons) as an external library! Hopefully that will make installing on Windows easier and will lower compile times for each component.

Speaking of components, they got their own git repository. This will come in handy when making a better release system, which is planned for the short-term.

You can access all of them here: http://github.com/Gear2D

See you :)

2011-12-24 - Ongoing things

Big time without any update, but there's big things going on. The API have the same looks but a lot of code has changed and there are new interfaces. For instance, a wrapper class that can ease access and sharing of parameters was created and can be used at setup time of every component. Hopefully that will ease component creation. Instead of writing write("x", 10.0f); or float x = read("x"); one would do

link x("x");
x = 10.0f;
cout << "x=" << x; /* would print "10.0" */

There's also two very important new components done, almost in release state: A path finder component that can find a path between two points and a lua proxy component, that can load components made in lua. Yes, thats right, now you can use lua to create components for Gear2D!

Along with those components, next release will also contain more detailed documentation, examples and a skeleton project to help starters. Also, a new game is almost ready too, and will be released soon.

You can follow development in our Git repository, at github.

One last thing, SBGames 2011 was a success to Gear2D, our article won the best short paper prize and we're writing again for another academic conference to happen in the next year.

Speaking of next year, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone :D
See you!
Leonardo.

2011-09-08 - Ain't dead

Hello folks. I've been busy these days working on another project and writing a paper for this year's brazilian's game simposium, SBGames; My article is, of course, about Gear2D. It will be on Salvador, Bahia, lovely city! Meet me there :D

Meanwhile, I had some progress on that bullet component I was talking about. Collision response and detection now can be handled by Bullet. I still have to add support for custom shapes for objects and a lot of other stuff like joints.

Hope to see you soon :)

2011-07-27 - Moving Sourcecode to GitHub

git seems to be better than svn to manage collaboration. As it is one of our goals, we're moving our source code to GitHub, here. Refer to there when getting new versions of source code. We'll still be using sourceforge for releases.

Leonardo

2011-07-20 - Not so easy

After some nights spent in doing and undoing the bullet integration I had come to the conclusion it is not as easy, because some design choices has to be made, like where to put what, how to split Bullet in many components and such, and I haven't found a good enough solution yet.

On the other hand, I had found that boost has a method for working with directories and I am using it to solve problems mentioned before. Now component loading is easier. Checkout using our subversion repository.

Leonardo

2011-07-08 - Bullet physics and directory traversing

Alright, before going into docs, I figured I want to get rids of some flaws. First, I plan o using a cross platform library (looking for it...) to access and traverse files on the system in a cross-platform manner. That is going to be needed when a component to load is specified only with a family. The engine will pick the first component available on that directory when family and type doesn't match (like collider/collider2d - family doesn't match type). If there's any component that its type match the family, it will be loaded as default (if not loaded). Well, this component loading dynamics will be explained better in the docs.

Second I will be working on integrating it with Bullet library so we can have some great suppor for physics, that will boost Gear2D quality alot, and stability (my physics is sloppy). I am already working on it, I expect to have it finished by the end of the next week. See ya :)