Where do we stand?

Hello all, sorry for the lack of news lately.

People following the project are probally asking, what is happening, is it still alive? The answer for the second question is yes, and for the first one, a long one.

First of all, I need to tell how the porting to C++ is going. Most of the basic engine code (colision, players, npcs, sound, graphics) is already ported and working, but as this code is the oldest one, there are lots of room for improvement, even the already ported code have parts that will need to be rewritten in the future, as the code is ugly, full of hacks and hardcoded parts. It is important to remember that the project was started with a much smaller scope than the current one, so, having a code that was well written for future support was not an important matter – sorry for that. So, because of that, some parts as jump and gravity – that now uses acceleration and speed meaning a much better behavior – were completely redone, and with that, a lot of old and new bugs appeared.

This moves us to where we are now. I am dividing my time between fixing bugs and porting code such as the weapons menu, that by being much newer, are better modularized, and can be ported without any drastic chances, and much faster. I have no idea when the porting will be completed to get the same level of maturity and functionality from version 0.1 RC1, but I hope to create a beta release by the end of this month (november/2011).

Talking about released, another improvement we want, and need to make, is how we build the project for different platforms. Sadly, out prefered development IDE (Qt Creator) still have a very limited support for multiple toolkits, so we are probably going to use Code Blocks IDE for that. This is a must, as compiling in C++ uses much more objects and a single script or makefile is not enough in most cases.

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