Alright, my job has recently cost a lot of my attention, which is mainly why there's been barely any progress. I know for a fact that things aren't really different for Roland, so the Das Humankapital team experiences a stale in development as a whole.
This is not necessarily a bad thing (it's not as if we're on a deadline here), because it gives us time to look at our framework/engine with a bit more distance. This, hopefully, allows us to throw out parts we don't need, or revise our approach from a totally new angle. I realize that my requirement list changes over time. Today, I'm absolutely in favour of the framework/engine providing as much of the tedious tasks as possible, even for simple experimental prototypes (of which, I think, we'll be doing a lot).
I'm planning a profile management layer, which should allow games to just register their bits and have savegames, settings, ... managed automatically, even in multi-user environments, probably even with basic versioning support. The goal is that it's super-easy for any game/prototype to load and save things without caring about anything.
Next will probably come an abstraction layer for all kinds of data (as of now, the loading bits are heavily XML-dependent; for every other data source, there has to be a dedicated loading procedure, which isn't really what this is about. I don't want to load XML files, I want to load a model [or a part thereof] within our game world). I've been looking for a library that already does that, but so far, I failed ignominiously at finding one. If you know anything, I'd really appreciate if you dropped me a note!



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