Haven’t had much time for anything else but work on the SurgePlayer, lately. In case I haven’t mentioned it yet, the SurgePlayer is the “game” counterpart of SurgeEd. It’s to SurgeEd as FlashPlayer is to Adobe Flash.
Basically, SurgePlayer is the runtime that takes content created in SurgeEd (and loads of scripts) and actually implements the game rules, etc.
It has been a challenge developing it because I really want to create an open framework, in terms of usability… I want to be able to use the same executable file to drive all my games from now on (which is a big challenge).
Most of the work lately was trying to integrate the changes brought on by the additional capabilities of LuaJIT, but I finally have the system up and running again, with spawning “creatures” that use the underlying navigation mesh to adjust their “random” position, that gets requested by the helper object that actually spawns them. It’s very cool!
Not impressive looking, I know, but the underlying code is very nice and elegant (for my taste, of course).
The framerate is low because there are about 1200 distinct objects in this scene (the ground is made of very small tiles), and because of the shadows and no primitive clustering (yet), the frame rate takes a dive…
Anyway, there’s a new post on Spellcaster Studios, showing off the first model built for “Grey”, check it out!