So ein Paar Neuigkeiten von der Coldstee Engine. Die Engine wird beim Release 40 € kosten. Eine Preiserhöung nach den ersten Wochen ist allerdings nicht ausgeschlossen. Wäre dann so etwas wie ein "Early Adopters" Angebot schätze ich.
Zu den News, die die Engine an sich betreffen hier der Originaltext von Jedive:
About the news: I finished my exams a few days ago. In that's time, I have been working a lot on ColdSteel. And things are
evolving a lot. In fact, I am moving from IrrLicht and using my own OpenGL based renderer, written in plain C. I am making
this because I was rewriting a lot of parts from IrrLicht to give it the material system I needed for ColdSteel, and from
making that to write my whole own renderer there was not much distance. Things are going nicely, and this won't mean a big
delay for ColdSteel. The biggest advance of this is that the engine is now 100% cross-platform. It only depends on the
standard C API, with my own file system and dynamic array library. It is even independent from the endian format of the
machine. Porting to Linux, MacOSX, or anything else is now really easy, so I am serious now about releasing also for these
platforms.
I currently have a rendering layer to draw a buffer of triangles using euler angles and a left-hand coordinate system,
which abstracts all the calls to OpenGL, and over that, I have a material system really similar to the one in Blitz3D
(which is much better designed than IrrLicht materials), with the addition of support for GLSL shaders and a feature called
"techniques" (basically, you can define several ways to render a material, and the engine will choose the first one which
is completely supported by your hardware; for example, you may have a water material whith 3 techniques, one which uses
shaders, another which uses cube-mapping, and a last one with a simple animating texture, and the engine will choose the
most appropiate one on each platform). I am currently implementing support for a custom mesh format (with the .msh
extension), with an .ase to .msh conversor (I am doing thins in the same way as the Cipher Engine here, as the artists in
my team have found it to be perfect), with support for both vertex and bone-based animations.
Ich freu mich auf die Engine, endlich 3D Spiele in PureBasic programmieren. Wer wissen will, wie das mit Coldsteel funktioniert:
It works in the following way. You have the engine in two versions: "game.exe", and "coldsteel.dll".
When using the "game.exe" version, you can code your game in ColdSteel script, compile it to binary code using the included compiler, and the engine will run the generated ".cso" file. An alternative way is to code a .dll with your game code (using, for example, Dev-C++ or PureBasic), and the engine can run that (this is the way many engines work: Quake3, Cipher, 3Impact, C4...).
When using the "coldsteel.dll" version, the engine is simply a set of functions which you can import and use from the dll. Currently, I am making tests using the engine in BlitzPlus, and of course I'll also write a module for BlitzMax (there are more languages directly supported, like C++, PureBasic, PlayBasic, IBasic... and you can add any language that supports loading dlls).