Time for a quick update regarding the development of ORE. Whilst my plan is to stream as much of the development as possible, there’s not been much in the way of streaming activity of late so I think it only fair to explain the reasoning behind this.
The unfortunate thing with any project is there are going to be times when what you’re doing is just plain boring. Right now, much of what I’ve been doing falls squarely into that category because it’s heavy on thinking and light on visible progress.
The texture atlas component is, at least at this stage, largely complete. There have been two iterations with the first being highly inefficient as it allocated 50mil pixels to store 7mil due largely to the fact it was placing images on the canvas during loading. The second loads the images first, sorting them by height and width. Then when requested, they are placed. This iteration managed an allocation of 16mil pixels to store the same 7mil. Still sounds a lot, but the final atlas image was only 16384 x 1024 (the height of the largest image), so it was as small as it could be. There is some scope for the texture to be cropped after placing which may be a good move to reduce memory usage but for now I’m happy it’s working.
At this point, the thinking phase started in earnest.
I want the engine to allow modding and for the majority of content to be provided through Lua scripting, so there is a lot to consider. Not least, the API the scripts will use to interface with the game objects which will be Delphi, and likewise the way Delphi will be able to access the information provided by the Lua scripts. There’s also the whole start-up process to consider and how this will be handled when the engine is fired up with a blank canvas so to speak, because ultimately I’d like there to be a version of the EXE that allows the creation of brand new content and one that allows modding. Thus if someone wants to develop a new game with the engine, they have to licence it, but if they simply want to mod, they use the EXE supplied with their game.
Since there wasn’t much going on, I’ve done most of this off-stream, but thankfully I’m getting to the point where I might actually be writing some code again đŸ™‚
