Progress on pre-alpha part 2

I was mainly working on Opengl renderer,the SDL blit speed is simply not good enough for 32bit color tiles,with 800x600/32x32 tiles and 256 Guichan image buttons,an optimized windows/linux release build linked against release version of SDL(provided by SDL site/distro,assuming they are O2) runs at approximately 10fps,while a debug one runs at about 5fps on windows/3fps on linux.
Now Opengl renderer is working and it has much better performance than SDL,but it will require a 3D card that supports 1.1 version of opengl.
Data loading via GM is sorta working,I can load info of different ship parts from .gm files.Current goal is to make a working ship sprite with 8 directions(45 degree per frame),so I could test the mobile object class I wrote earlier.Another goal is keeping both texture size and texture amount as low as possible,my goal is keeping total amount under 32MB.

32MB = 32 * 1024 * 1024 B = 32 * 512 * 512 * 4 B = roughly 32 512x512 32bit bitmap's

Wow that's a lot,now I should really stop talking to myself on this lifeless blog and get back to coding. =)

Progress on pre-alpha

I registered and created a project on sourceforge.net(and they approved my project,thanks sourceforge.net).I will import local svn repository on my harddisk into sourceforge.net as soon as test data is relatively complete and compile-able on both windows and linux.
Actually I have been working on this project for more than half a year now,but due to other projects draining most of my spare time,it did not progress very well =(

Renderer:
I wrote a simple tile drawer using SDL_Blit functions,but it's more 3d orientated than 2d orientated,so the performance is a bit unacceptable with 32bit per pixel.I might consider using OGL to do the pixel fill instead.

Current renderer features:

• Draw background layer(draw an image before anything else)
• Draw grids(a hack to draw 4 (1*TileWidth) rect to resemble grids around a tile)
• Draw tiles
• Per pixel scrolling

Despite all the crappyness,I still considered my renderer an improvement compare to the original game's render,because the old one was 1994 and it did not even support per pixel scrolling if memory serves me right.

Input:
Current Input system uses SDL input events,I added some basic features such as doubleclick and hold.

Features:

• SDL input based input
• double-click handling
• hold handling with duration

GUI:
GUI uses guichan library,which is probably the best and the most versatile GUI library available,its forums and its author are also very helpful,for a list of features it supports please refer to guichan's site: http://guichan.sourceforge.net

Scripting:
I use gamemonkey(GM) script,which is an underrated/unpopular scripting language designed specifically for games.GM supports universal table(any element in any table can be any data type) like LUA but GM is more powerful than LUA for games.

Currently GM is only used for data loading and storage.

Sound and Network:
No time has been spent on them yet,they have the least priority in my todo list. =)

That's all for now.

Magick Panda' FAQ

Q:What is your hobby game project?
A:It's an open-source clone of old school SNES game named Uncharted Waters: New Horizons Also known as Daikoukai Jidai II in Japanese,firstly released in 1994,with a superb graphics which is utterly unacceptable for you modern peeps who are accustomed to state-of-art 3D graphics.

Q:What is your game's goals?
A:
*Top-down plain 2D game 32bit graphics(this roughly quadruples the amount of pixels to fill compare to 8bit(256),so 3D acceleration might be needed)
*All functionalities from original game
*Small scale MP support 2-8 players

Q:Ah you mentioned open-source,License?
A:code and contents I created will be released under GNU GPL V3

Will add more later

Magick Panda's blog test

I am never a fan of blog hype nor am I like writing articles and shytz online like most others do,but I would like to open a blog for my hobby game project.

This is a test post.