[isugamedev-devel] commonalities in our games

[Ben S. <bs...@vr...>]

hi all-

i've been thinking about the games we are all working on and how similar 
they are in terms of their low-level requirements. as far as i can tell, 
we all need:
  - a 3d graphics engine
  - a cross-platform framework for application basecode
  - a scripting engine
  - a 2D UI graphics subsystem for menus and such
  - a sound engine
  - perhaps a physics simulation engine for our 3d games
  - a pluggable AI engine
  - a virtual file system to simplify loading a file regardless of its 
    location (be it an archive, the network or on the disk)

that was just a small list off the top of my head of reusable components 
we could create as a club to reuse in all of our games. among other 
things, developing these components together would reduce the amount of 
duplicate work we do as a club as well as make it much easier to read each 
others code and learn from it.

so here's what i'm proposing: we should develop this components as a club 
to speed up the development of our games rather than each write them 
individually. this will also allow future games to be built more quickly 
since we won't have to write all the low-level code again.

i think this will also give us smaller bites to take rather than trying to 
swallow an entire game at one time. at the same time we can expand further 
on the game and architectural designs of our respective games assuming the 
modules exist. once these modules have been created we can then focus all 
of our attention on the construction of the gameplay in the games which is 
where the fun is!

if you think this would be useful and you're interested in taking command 
of the construction of some component, please by all means do so! start 
emailing this list with design ideas and we can begin to check code into 
CVS in the lib module. this is where you can get experience with small 
areas of programming that are required IN EVERY GAME!

if anybody's interested, i'm looking into the cross-platform framework 
for application basecode so we can write applications that will 
automagically work on any system without having to think about it from an 
application standpoint. ( yay to us linux freaks! ) ^_^

cheers,
-----
Ben Scott
President ISU Game Developers Club
Treasurer ISU Ballroom Dance Company
bs...@ia...