I am still working on my highly-open highly-creative software environment. It's going to be a kind of jack-of-all-trades so it's really hard to pin it down to describing what it can be used for. It's an environment in which you edit and create software as well as use that software, sort of like an operating system. The type of software can range from games to graphics apps to gui systems to editors to presentations to animation to whatever. The engine itself is mostly a low-level virtual machine sort of thing providing libraries of basic functionality, and then everything else will be built on top of it with scripting and advanced high-level editors. Since mostly everything of interest to the user will be script-based it will be easy to modify almost every aspect of what goes on. Since I'm quite focussed on graphics, it'll be mainly for me a platform to make games on plus also a few graphics apps that I want to do. The engine will be kind of a cross-platform virtual machine jobby to run on Mac Windows and Linux, like a little runtime module. I think I will sell the runtime module at a low price and then sell the games/apps that I make with it as the main focus.
At the moment I'm working mainly on the script engine which I managed to get to actually execute some instructions yesterday. It does some fake multitasking with something like processes and priorities, scheduling, task switching, virtual CPU that kind of stuff. It's partly along the lines of writing a programming language but also writing the `compilation` and handling of variables and all that to make it run. I think it should turn out to be very fast at running scripts. I'm using lots of function-pointer stuff in BlitzMax.
Partly I've been wishing that I didn't have to make all of this engine and code all the features myself, and have been kind of wishing to switch to some kind of pre-made engine or system that can already do all the stuff I want it to do, so that I can just focus on making the games and doing the art, but I know there isn't any system out there that does it the way I want it to work so I have to keep going with it.
As a distraction I've recently been looking at a bunch of videos of old games online, particularly old Amiga games, and some other favorites like Sonic the Hedgehog. I think I'd like to do a really fun and wild platform game sometime. It's good research to see how these popular games formulated their success.
I am also slightly distracted playing with my new iMac... but have been getting back to coding a lot more in the past few days.
At the moment I'm working mainly on the script engine which I managed to get to actually execute some instructions yesterday. It does some fake multitasking with something like processes and priorities, scheduling, task switching, virtual CPU that kind of stuff. It's partly along the lines of writing a programming language but also writing the `compilation` and handling of variables and all that to make it run. I think it should turn out to be very fast at running scripts. I'm using lots of function-pointer stuff in BlitzMax.
Partly I've been wishing that I didn't have to make all of this engine and code all the features myself, and have been kind of wishing to switch to some kind of pre-made engine or system that can already do all the stuff I want it to do, so that I can just focus on making the games and doing the art, but I know there isn't any system out there that does it the way I want it to work so I have to keep going with it.
As a distraction I've recently been looking at a bunch of videos of old games online, particularly old Amiga games, and some other favorites like Sonic the Hedgehog. I think I'd like to do a really fun and wild platform game sometime. It's good research to see how these popular games formulated their success.
I am also slightly distracted playing with my new iMac... but have been getting back to coding a lot more in the past few days.