I've just posted a call for title/story ideas on [SAS], in the hopes of moving foreward with the TacFPSGame project and my toolkit for working on the Starfighter game.


Today I was reading an arcticle off /. and started to think.... gee, wouldn't it be an interesting game idea: it started me to thinkin' and combined with all the Quake Live I've been playing lately, get's me back in the mood to work on game development lol. I really want the FPS to reflect my style of things: it should be fairly realistic in nature, but still a fun action game. Perhaps the original Rainbow Six or SWAT 3 are my strongest inspirations for the tactical elements, while Quake III and Urban Terror remind me of how much fun "Crazy off the wall" can get ;).

When it comes to the general game design and architecture, I know what I want both inside and out. It's just the issue of having time to work on it. My primary loops at the moment, are working on EPI and some stuff for [SAS], but once that's done, I'll have plenty of time, in so far as my available coding time goes that is lol.


I've also elected, to start testing a conversion from C++ to Python. I originally elected C++ because it was the lowest common denominator for getting the best tools, and well, I can care less about having to deal with manual memory management. My reasons for contemplating the switch over, is because Python has largely become my standard utility language for cross platform stuff—and I would like to be able to play my games on my FreeBSD laptop!!! 90% of all heartaches have been due to differences between GNU Compiler Collection and Microsoft Visual C++. The most pissy problems being how they implement templates >_>. Ah, sweet, sweet C++, all your best features are also your biggest liabilities.

Most of what I'm interested in, is doing the game logic and stuff, I'm not willing to spend 6 months to 2 years writing a fourth rate rendering system when there is plenty of good open source code to draw upon. Yet, I'm not interested in being limited by most existing engines, like updated Id Tech 3 (Quake III: Arena), Blender-stuff, or the snazzy Unreal Engine 3 that was recently released. You could say, I don't want an engine, I want a frame work :-/.

I was originally planning to integrate python for AI and level scripting tasks anyway, so big deal... it would become less problem to do it if everythings in Python anyway hehe.