From the Start!

So why a game?

Well, I have spent a large number of hours playimg with DirectX, or more specific, DirectX 9.0c. It can be very satisfying seeing a model created with somethig like gmax in your own world and not using a comercial graphics engine.

Many graphics engines are either expensive or buggy or not open enough to allow you to really do stuff, so I have decided to write my own. It is a very large and long project, but sadly I am still out of a job and I really need to keep my hand in with coding. You know what they say... "Use it or loose it", so this is my way of using it.

The engine, called Viper is very open, but is also very complex. With open structures allowing complete configuration, one is going to need an intelligent Editor to allow not just the management of models but also the construction of structures/ header files etc that can be pulled in via the main game and then used by Viper for rendering etc.

So, the project mainly has 5 sub projects:
a) The Game Client
b) The Rendering Engine
c) The Scripting Engine
d) The Game Manager
e) The Server

All of these sub projects are immense, and it is a job to know really where to start.

I am currently working on the Manager and Rendering Engine in tandom, as both interact with each other. The Manager allows a user to design the game objects using an easy interface which hopefully will be intuitive.

I am using Visual Studio 2008 as the main development tool. I have been using this for many years now and like it a lot. The code is C/C++ where appropriate although Viper does include a Lua scripting interface so that scripters can do lots of funky stuff without the need to know the real guts of the system.

So what is the game?

In the past I have really enjoyed crafting in MMOs aswell in-depth strategy and good flight sims, with awesome graphics. The closest I have come to this is Eve-Online. But as Eve-Online is pretty hard core it is not for me. So my game is similar in places but vastly different in others. Will this be an MMO? Well it depends on server availabilty as there is nothing worse than server lag. But these are early days yet and anything is possible.

Watch this space!