I recently stumbled over ShiVa, a 3d game engine. In fact, I am so impressed, that I’ll also include it in the rapid prototyping tool part of my thesis, although I actually have finished that chapter. For only around 200€, you get the full package: webplayer publishing, mobile devices (iphone and Android) and of course cross-platform PCs (Win,Linux,OSX).
I’ve ported a small 2D game we did for Android in about three days. Since I also had to get the hang of ShiVa, I think that is quite a small amount of time. I am going to wrap up the experience I made the next few weeks (hopefully more frequently than the last two months), so stay tuned!
A colleague of mine is writing his thesis about Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) and also covers the topic of rapid game prototyping. He’s (at least in my opinion ) up to some really crazy stuff…although I must admit I don’t understand everything he talks about.
Recently, he also started blogging about this, so if you’re interested in some alternative programming thoughts and styles, check out his blog every once and a while: http://lambdor.net/
I also linked him in my blogroll in case you can’t remember his URL .
Time flies. I know I promised some more info about the trigger class used in the Racing Demo. The bad new is: I haven’t written this down yet. The good news is: I made a user interface prototype for the template editor:
Level Master 2000: Template Editor Preview
It’s thought that one works himself through from left to right: first pick you components (left), name them (middle) and finally, set default properties and check those which should be visible in the editor when creating an entity from a template. Of course there’ll be a “professional mode”, which shows all the properties if one wants.
Improvement/thoughts are always welcome! I won’t start implementing it until around mid of August anyway.
As some people requested a video of the racing demo, here it is! The main purpose is to show off the custom event trigger with arbitrary event arguments, and how it integrates with Level Master 2000. I now a simple line edit for all event arguments is not very user friendly, but currently, time didn’t allow me to create a custom property grid type for it. Anyway, here’s the video:
I’ll post some more detailed info about this trigger class soon (hopefully this week)!
) up to some really crazy stuff…although I must admit I don’t understand everything he talks about.
