In the future

I can’t believe it’s been nearly 3 weeks since my last post, time just seems to fly by these days.

Anyway I’ve decided to try my hand at writing my own game engine and I predict it will be complete no later than 2015.  Before you gasp and ask yourself why it will take so long bear in mind it took nearly 6 years for Blizzard to develop World of Warcraft. Not that I have any intentions of writing an engine of that magnitude, it’s just I only have an hour a day or so to do any work on it (if I’m lucky). 

Wish me luck and I’ll see you in 2015 when it’s done.

Developing a game engine

I’ve been toying with the idea of developing my own game engine. As I mentioned before there are several projects I would like to work on but would like a solid framework to build them on.

This is by no means a small undertaking and is at the very least a couple years of work going at it myself. I have looked at some commercial and free engines already out there but have not been convinced I would want to spend the money on license fees. Besides it’s a great way to gain more experience.

I will do some more reading on engine design/development and see where I go after that.

To program or not to program

I’ve been battling with this for the last couple of weeks but I have finally made a decision. I want to get back into game programming again. My issue has been time really, I don’t have enough to get to all of the things I would like.

I got a little distracted with being so busy at work but now that I have my own vehicle, I have a little more flexibility getting to and from work. First things first I plan to finish updating my portfolio with some of my student projects then I plan to move on to a game I have been designing for a while.

I’m going to try to give at least a couple hours a week dedicated to spending some time with my code as I don’t want to get completely out of practice.

DirectX 11 announced

So Microsoft has revealed that DirectX 11 is on the way with the new version of Windows which is all fine and dandy but my question is where are all the DirectX 10 games?

Vista has been on the market for a while and there are just a handful of games that are available with DX10 support. So all those people who upgraded their systems (like me) have been left wanting and waiting for the games to come out.

While the new version of Windows won’t launch for quite some time yet I don’t know if developers have had enough time to harness DX10 properly yet. Even a game like Age of Conan who claimed it had DX10 support dropped its features just before launch. What does that say about the current state of DX10?

One bit of good news is that current DX10 cards will support DX11 plus the rumours of the new ‘compute shader‘ which will allow developers to harness the power of GPUs. This sounds great but I remember hearing about all the features of DX10 before it was released and what it meant for gaming. I will be keeping my eye on things to come.

Mobile entertainment

Over the last few days I’ve been spending a lot of time with my PDA since I was moving house and didn’t have my PC. I have a HP Ipaq 214 Enterprise edition and I have to say it’s nice bit of kit and actually kept me relatively entertained. Before I moved out, I tried to cram as much stuff as I could onto the thing to help me ride out the week or two of no PC access.

I noticed even after I got back my PC the other day that I kept going back to it whether it be to quickly check my mail, sign into messenger or even play a game. I downloaded the trial of Age of Empires for pocket pc and it’s actually really good. This got me thinking that this would be a great platform to develop a game for once I had finished working on other projects. I found it so convenient to pop on a quick game when I felt the urge and to be able to pause and come back to it if I needed to. I know the DS and PSP already have this kind of functionality but I am not lucky enough to have a development kit for either. So I have been playing around with a few ideas today to see what could work on the platform.

It’s a shame the market for PDAs is shrinking seeing as it has the functionality for movies, music, web access and all the rest. One reason is down to most people desiring to have their PDA combined with their phone which I can understand. Personally I like having mine separate, I might not always need or want to travel with both so at least I have that option. I also accept it for what it is, a pocket pc and multimedia device. I’m not one of those people who has to have a phone which can do 100 different things, I’m quite content to be able to make calls and send the occasional text message.

Some time in the future I will start work on a small project and see how it goes as I reckon it would be quite fun, plus I would have something I actually wanted to play and not another card game since they come a dime a dozen.