December 21, 2011

2011 progress report

Hi folks! With the year coming to an end its time to do one of those infamous 2011-in-review posts :) We're happy to see, we were indeed able to complete a sh!tload of work and even managed to follow the roadmap (most of the time) - Although we're software developers and naturally tend to promise unrealistic bullsh!t :p December 2010 was a point, when things really got in motion. The team was highly motivated and began to focus on the hard stuff: 3D collision detection and physics - yikes! We tried out many approaches until we managed to find a solution that felt realistic enough for an oldschool engine. As its often while hacking together complicated stuff, things get clearer and clearer the longer you think about it. Most features in REVERT3D grow like this which makes it a neverending construction site in some way :) We released our first demo after finishing the basic physics stuff, which was big step because R3D hasn't gone public ever since then. We got some nice feedback from people around the world. Most of them came from the System Shock community and were happy to see another approach on recreating "Shock related stuff" - Quite impressive with this game being about 17 years old!
At this point my former teammate, getting troubled with his school works, had to leave the team (He will hopefully rejoin in the future) Being on my own things slowed a bit down since then, but I was happy to find some other people who would help me every now and then.
Next milestone on the roadmap was the huge scripting part, which was planned to feature a Lua interface accessing a completely mapped engine function library. This really helped to get R3D on the "becoming a useful tool" path and so I even started to write down some basic tutorials to give an impression how things would work when all this stuff will be released someday. Since september, we focus on the standard game implementation which will be the core of functionality around which you will implement your game someday. This also includes a basic AI, which features a fast pathfinder for now - Basic enemy AI is something we're also working on at the moment. All this will be shown in the next demo, which will feature a simple demo game including stuff like inventory, enemies, useable objects and even more! All in all we got pretty far, although we will not be able to finish milestone v1.0 until the end of year - But hey, we're software developers and tend to promise unrealistic bullsh!it :)
Thanks for your attention on our little insignificant project. We wish you a happy christmas and a prosperous new year!