The developers have been scarce around here lately. Honestly, there's been way too much Real Life
TM happening for most of us, and the forums just haven't been high enough on our priority list to make the cut; I'm hoping that will change in the coming months.
There have been a lot of developments in the GNE universe since
the last time I gave any sort of update here.
ProjectsFirst, we moved all of our development pages from
Trac to
Redmine, a similar project management system. It was an improvement, but we still weren't quite happy with it, so we
wrote our own, called EPIC. We haven't fully switched over to using EPIC in place of Redmine yet, but that should be coming in the next month or two.
Second, there have of course been huge developments in Precursors. Around the beginning of 2009, we switched engines from
Crystal Space to
Panda3D, mostly because of its superior Python support, and the fact that we got back to the furthest point we had been at under CS within about 2 months with Panda, coding
everything from scratch. (compare to the years it took us to get to where we had been when we were actually making "releases" with CS-based code) We've continued hacking at Precursors, and right now we have full physics-based movement, shiny graphics, a fully themeable HUD system, a rather epic input system with support for multiple game controllers, and full network support, among other things. Our approach to coding the game has also changed; now we're using more
rapid prototyping techniques, and since all of our code is now in Python, it's infinitely simpler to maintain and incrementally develop with.
On the side, we've also started a couple other projects: EPIC, mentioned above;
Coconut, our own WebKit-based browser; and
Q'niform, a PyQt-based writing tool aimed at novel writers and anyone else who wants a more organized way to write than the standard word processor.
PeopleAside from the strictly GNE-related things, there have been a lot of changes in the developers' personal lives. I recently moved to Lubbock, TX, where Morgul, Caenus, and Burstaholic (as well as several other forum members) are from, and got my first actual programming job. (it's fun to get paid to do stuff you love!) Chris (Morgul) has also since gotten a job at the same place I work.
ForumsI'd also like to encourage all the forum members to start
throwing their game ideas at us again; I miss the days where we'd have in-depth discussions about game mechanics, ideas for ships, and questions about the universe Chris has created. Let's see some more talk about the games!
Insert Catchy Closing Title HereThere's currently much more in the works for GNE, so keep your eyes peeled! We'll be announcing some big changes pretty soon that have us really psyched for the months ahead.
